Rendered pork fat as healthy cooking oil?

[Crossy]

Food or Health?

Wifey has spent some time rendering down pork fat to produce oil for shallow frying. She informs me it's lower cholesterol than other oils.

Personally I don't believe a word of it, but eggs fried in the result are delicious.

Is it going to send me to an early (earlier) grave?

EDIT I found this http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/lard-the-new-health-food maybe it is actually OK

[AyG]

There is no cholesterol whatsoever in plant oils (sunflower, soya, peanut, etc.); cholesterol only occurs in animals - not plants (except in tiny amount).

For most people there's no relationship between the amount of cholesterol consumed and the level of cholesterol in the blood. This is only an issue for people with a metabolic defect. The usual correlation is between total fat consumed and blood cholesterol.

The healthiness of pork fat is relative. It's probably better for you than any fat containing trans-fatty acids - that means better than fats which have been processed (usually by hydrogenation) to produce a mixture of cis- and trans-fatty acids and oils that have been used too many times.

It's probably better for you than other animal fats which contain lower levels of monounsaturated fat.

However, it's going to be less healthy than most plant-derived oils - particularly those which are high in mono- and polyunsaturated fats.

Unfortunately, food cooked in animal fat is going to be tastier than that cooked in vegetable oil. You can't beat chips cooked in duck fat (though beef dripping is pretty good, too).

[HeijoshinCool]

Delicious, and a far cry better for your health than canola or other chemically separated oils. I've been using it exclusively since 1995, and my BP is still 110/68.

Here's a test, leave both oils out at room temperature. The canola oil will go rancid long before the rendered fat.

But it won't be long now before a certain someone comes along and spouts off the mainline belief that animal fat is bad for you ...

[cooked]

Just try to find pig fat that isn't from a factory farm and try to get belly fat. I use it making bread and biscuits.

[samuibeachcomber]

trouble is there's too much information out there to digest everything(no pun intended)...my MIL used to eat copious amounts of dripping on bread(fat left over from the sunday roast) and lived to be 92.............biggest killer in my opinion is stress,more than alcohol or smoking fags!

My grandmother said to eat just a little bit of what you fancy...........eat too much of unhealthy foods and you will have problems later on.

As for cooking in pork fat(good or bad) i have no idea.If frying(always in shallow oil) i use virgin coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil,just my preference.