by Eric Sabo, Medical Writer

Aug. 10 (CBS HealthWatch) Love pork chops but hate the fact that big juicy servings of them can clog your arteries? Now there may be a way to eat your favorite foods and protect your heart too.

By feeding swine more nutritious slop, researchers in Iowa were able to trim down a pig's natural composition of saturated fat and replace it with the healthier, polyunsaturated kind.

The result: Women treated to a special pork dinner for 8 weeks had lower cholesterol levels compared to when they stuck to their usual diet.

"People are going to eat traditional foods," explains Murray Kaplan, MD, about why his team decided to alter the diet of pigs rather than ask meat lovers to switch to vegetables and fish.

Clearly, too much pork and red meat can spell trouble for the heart. But instead of waiting for Americans to give up some of their favorite foods, Kaplan is pushing for science to come to them.

"It's very easy to change the fat composition in certain animals," boasts Kaplan, who works in the Departments of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Iowa State University.

To make healthier pork, researchers cut back on ground corn used in traditional feed and added extra soybean and soy oil to serve to a few select pigs. Although the special diets made the meat too soft to get bacon, the rest of the pork was chopped up and minced just fine, says Jeanne Stewart, a master's student at Iowa State who helped out on the study.

Twenty women volunteered to eat the special pork a couple of times a week in addition to their usual diet. Later they switched back to eating regular pork, while still consuming the same number of calories and total percentage of fat. Stewart says that the subjects couldn't tell the difference.

"We did taste tests, and they rated the pork the same," she says.

But the modified meat turned out better for the heart. When women ate the healthy pork for 8 weeks, their cholesterol levels went from 146 down to 131. LDL, or bad cholesterol, also dropped, as did unhealthy fatty acids found in their blood. In contrast, the same diet with regular pork led to a slightly higher cholesterol levels.

Stewart says that entrepreneurial farmers can use the discovery to make healthier pork now. Hamburgers, however, are not likely to be good for you anytime soon.

"It's far more difficult to change the fat composition of cows," says Kaplan. Pigs and chickens can be made healthier through diet alone, but cattle have a more complicated digestive tract, making it nearly impossible at the moment to slim them down.

But the Iowa team says there is no reason that modified pork can't be added to a heart healthy diet soon.

"This is one way for people to go ahead and lower their cholesterol while still eating meat," says Stewart.

The study was published in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

http://cbshealthwatch.medscape.com/...warticle/404295
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Hmmmmm .... scientists and health experts agree that eliminating corn & other grains, and feeding more soy protien and fat to the diets of hogs will lower the cholesterol content and improve the fatty acid profile. Yet they still blindly howl to the wind that PEOPLE should eat more cereal starch and grains. Go figure!

Doreen