A short podcast/video clip (James Barry) arguing that lard is an excellent natural skincare fat. The guest (Speaker A) claims pig fat is biologically closer to human skin than cow tallow, cites pH and lipid-profile alignment, and describes historical uses of pork fat/skin (medieval wound treatment). They trace lard’s decline after Crisco’s 1911 introduction and wartime rationing (1940–1944), and contrast lard with seed oils (Crisco/cottonseed oil) as inferior for skin.
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I happen to like pigs. I cook with lard quite a bit. The biology of pigs and humans is way more similar than humans and cows.
You are focusing on lard at a time when natural skin care is kind of focusing on tallow. What made you focus on lard versus tallow?
Well, I guess we could call it de swine intervention. No, I just, I happen to like pigs. I cook with lard quite a bit. I sort of ran into it. James Lard was the first natural fat sort of picked on by Big Food, Big Seeds, Oil, Procter and Gamble way back in 1911. It's fallen out of the cultural vernacular. And so, yeah, you see a lot of tallow products today. Why I use lard. I tried it first. It seems to work extremely well. The biology of pigs and humans is way more similar than humans and cows. The long and short of it is the biology is a way better match for human skin.
Actually, I love that you brought up about how pigs are kind of closest to humans. Now historically that's been an issue of eating the meat. People have said, oh, actually you shouldn't be eating pork because, because of how close it is to human meat in terms of putting on your skin. Can you talk about that?
Skincare is a fat based business. When you talk about anything that goes on your skin, you're talking about a couple of different sort of overarching themes. Ph. So anything with a, with a ph that's, that's naturally aligned to human biology, which is basically neutral. You want to say 6, 7 to 6, 9. PH is a big thing. Then you've got. It is a fat. So how are, how are the lipids? What is the balance of saturated monounsaturated polyunsaturated fats? How do those match up with our fat bacteria? The third piece is really the subcutaneous fat is a storage. What's stored in there? These are obviously with animal fat. You've got naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, and it just so happens that pigs metabolize those things the same way humans do. Those three sort of overarching big metrics make it an ideal fat for human consumption. You've got a number of different religious texts that address and forbid poor consumption. And you know, I. James, you're a chef, a very accomplished chef. Have you ever seen pork tartare on a menu? No, no, you don't see chicken tartare on a menu. And that's because these are monogastric omnivorous animals. They can eat a bunch of different stuff, but they also metabolize Those things very different than a herbivorous ruminant, most commonly a cow. And so cows and any ruminant animal have a digestive system built on fermentation and multi chambered stomachs. Let me take it back to farming in a farming setting. The pathogenetic load of pig versus a chicken versus a cow, those are all very different. When I say that, I mean like bugs and viruses and bacteria and various things. You can get trigonosis from undercooked pork if the pork was raised or out in the wild if it was. If it was not raised in the proper manner. Rewind the clock 100,000 years, even 10,000 years. You're hunting, you're gathering, you kill a pig. You know, it was very common practice to eat the organs on site and haul the meat back to your village. And if you didn't cook that pork thoroughly, then there's a chance one or more people in your tribe would get sick. And you know, it doesn't take but a couple times that happening, you're going to start telling stories about how dirty this animal is and you shouldn't eat it and various things of that nature. And so I have the utmost respect for people that for religious reasons or whatever, choose not to eat pork. But man, when you raise a healthy, happy pig, their fat and meat are not only dietarily but also from a skin care perspective, for the fat. Not. We don't put their meat on our skin.
Not yet.
Not yet. Well, you know, but I'll tell you this, if you read a bunch of medieval texts, pork skin was a very, very common treatment for skin ailments. They would skin the, the pig, take the skin which, you know, had this sort of subcutaneous fatty layer on it, and they would use that as sort of wound healing, bandaging. St. Anthony was a medieval traveling, he wasn't a farmer. There were a number of skin conditions in the 13, 14, 15, hundreds, sort of medieval times. And he was very famous for treating skin conditions. And so he's often depicted with pigs in paint, whatnot that you find on him. And I'm convinced it's because he was using parts of the pig to heal people's skin.
Wow, that's really interesting. You do bring up a really good point though. Like you really never see chicken, turkey, pork raw. I mean ever. But yet you'll see fish and beef raw.
Correct. Different diets, different pathogenic loads. Again, a lot of shellfish, shellfish, like eating mushrooms, like if you don't know what to eat, there's a chance you're going to poison yourself. This oyster is good. That mollusk over there. It's a matter of what? Viruses, bacteria, worms, various things. I mean, we all have these things. Every. Every living creature on the planet is carrying some level of microscopic organisms and various pathogens and things like that. Any omnivore, they've only got one stomach and no fermentation involved. And so there's various different pathogens that. That have figured out how to coexist with that animal. Eating raw is not a good idea.
But to your point, though, I mean, the fat has been used for a very long time. And in a sense, the leaf lard, the first Crisco is what Crisco is built off of. Right.
I would say that the golden age of the skincare industry started in 1911. And in 1910, we made everything. We cooked everything with lard, really. Tallows, used, soap making, candle making, predominantly. I'm not saying people didn't cook with tallow, but if you walked in the General Store in 1910, there is a 100% chance you walked out with a can of lard. 99.9% of the people on the planet in 1910 cooked, and they cooked every single meal. A lot of those people also hunted and gathered and securing their food. And so the males in the family were constantly in contact with visceral fat as they eviscerated the carcass and carved it up and butchered it and prepared it for salting or curing or eating right then. And the women in the family were in the kitchen most of the time, and they were constantly covered in lard. And so skin care historically has been an industry exclusively reserved for the elite, because they were the ones with enough wealth to remove themselves physically from the act of securing, cooking, and preparing food. Fast forward to 1911. Now Lard starts moving out of popularity because Crisco is introduced, by the way. It's. It's dyed white, it's bleached white, so that it looks like.
Like lard.
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And then the nail in the coffin of lard, if we want to do this historically, the nail in the coffin, certainly in the United States of America, I would say globally, was World War II, because you can't make nitroglycerin out of cottonseed oil. Lard from 1940 to 1944 was rationed because they needed it for the war effort to make explosives. But that's okay, because here's this can of Crisco. I mean, we lost all but three, I believe. Lard, pig breeds following World War II because the demand for lard dropped so drastically because everyone basically habitually replaced their can of lard with a can of Crisco stands for crystallized cottonseed oil. It's a seed oil. It's a rather nasty product, but also it's almost unrecognizable by your skin. Super high in omega 6 fatty acids. There's all sorts of stuff that are not great, but also when it goes on your skin, it's not really feeding your skin. Your skin is this semi permeable membrane. It's a two way street, albeit most of the traffic goes inward. If you've ever rolled around in poison ivy, your skin's going to soak up that oil and make you itch. But it's also semipermeable. It's also greeting sweat. That meat suits a very dynamic organ and it's your largest organ.
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