Meat

💡 Net carbs: total carbs minus fiber. Almost every meat sits close to zero carbs.

🥓 Cured meats: merguez, sausage, lardons, salami, chorizo, dry-cured ham and blood sausage are processed products (salt, nitrites, sometimes added sugar), and their values vary widely from maker to maker. Worth more moderation than fresh meat.

🩸 Heme iron: the iron in red meat and organ meat is absorbed better than the iron in plants (non-heme iron). Liver and blood sausage are especially rich in it.

Soft fat, hard fat
🐖 Pork: in French charcuterie, two kinds of fat, sorted by the cut they come from.
• Hard fat, firm, comes from the back (back fat) and the jowl: it holds up to cooking and goes into country pâtés and sausages.
• Soft fat comes from the belly and from belly and ham trimmings: more tender, it gives liver pâtés and mousses their smoothness. Seeing it on their label is nothing to worry about.
• Firmness also depends on what the pig ate: fed on corn or soy, rich in omega-6, it lays down oilier fat, which the trade treats as a defect; Iberian pork raised on acorns has supple fat rich in oleic acid, the fat of olive oil.

🐄 Beef and lamb: their fat is firm whatever they eat, rib-eye fat and suet alike. Their rumen turns the unsaturated fats in grass into saturated ones, which set at room temperature (see Saturated fat).

🥚 Cholesterol: liver holds the most of any meat; eggs, richer still, sit in the Dairy & eggs table. Recent guidelines qualify its effect on blood cholesterol, but the figure is kept here for comparison.

ℹ️ Sources: generic values from the CIQUAL table (ANSES) and from the USDA FoodData Central.