WHY?!?!?!
Here are some of the more legitimate-seeming reasons natural bloggers are boasting about lard:
1. High in oleic acid.
But olive oil, has almost twice as much as lard
2. High in Vitamin D, offering about 1000 IU per tablespoon.
According to a link in this interesting site, I need to spend an hour per day outside to get the same. You can calculate your own with the same link and the info in the site I linked up is helpful to do so. However, to get the full daily allowance of Vitamin D, one would need to consume 1/2 cup of lard daily. For therapeutic vitamin D, I prefer this D3 with 10,000 IU per capsule. If you really do want to supplement with foods, try wild salmon, while still somewhat acidic, it is far healthier than lard and offers about the same amount of D, depending on what kind you eat.
3. Lard is extremely high in cholesterol, and that is good for you.
In New Biology(TM), we do view cholesterol as your friend because it protects your delicate blood vessels from over-acidic blood. Just the slightest drop in blood pH will kill you, but within the survivable range, anything lower than 7.365 is dangerous and will harm your vessels. Cholesterol protects your blood vessels from harmful, acidic blood. When your body has to make cholesterol, it will rob other parts of your body from what it needs. It is interesting that there is some buzz about cholesterol rich foods being good for you so that your body does not have to manufacture it, but not needing it would be best. Keep your blood and tissues at the perfect pH by eating from the guidelines on this food chart and you won't need cholesterol rich foods at all. Having the ideal blood pH through an alkaline lifestyle and diet is far healthier than coating your vessels with cholesterol in order to protect them from acidic foods - such as lard (and butter and all other animal products).
The other reasons to eat lard were not compelling at all as far as health benefits - taste, heat stable, traditional (partially true, but even if some cultures have eaten for a long time in no way makes it healthy...there are a lot of "traditional" practices that I'm really glad we've gotten far away from), I even read that we should eat lard because it is similar to breast-milk, God's perfect food. While that is true for infants, adults should not be consuming breast-milk and if we are going to bring God into the discussion, He traditionally told His people not to eat it. Our permission to eat whatever we want now doesn't mean it is healthy for the body, it means that we are no longer condemned spiritually for doing so.
Besides the fact that I have shown we don't need lard whatsoever to improve or enhance our health, I also need to point out that meat, especially that coming from pigs, is one of the most acidic and pathogenic filled foods we could possibly consume. All meat is acidic and contains extremely high levels of pathogens, but the fat from animals even more so because many of the acids gets stored in the fat as a protective mechanism for the animal. Pig fat is toxic and acidic. If you eat it because you just love the taste and can not possibly get yourself to stop putting it into your mouth, know that it is NOT good for you. It will contribute to the acidification of your body and thus the breakdown. There is so much bacteria in it that if you could see your live blood after consuming lard you would see the millions of bacteria jumping around your blood that are breaking down your cells and tissues.
Do you eat lard to improve your health?