I always hear that pork has to be thoroughly cooked to prevent things like trichinosis and other parasitic infections. However there’s a lot of types of cured pork commonly eaten, right? Here in Spain everyone eats ham, lomo, chorizo and other stuff that is cured but essentially not cooked, and the few cases of trichinosis that happen are all from people eating game they hunt themselves. Is pork really dangerous?
In: Biology
Correct, uncooked pork products can harbor pretty nasty food pathogens. But as you alluded too curing meats is a way of getting rid of most of them.
A lot of bacteria get their water via osmosis. This is normally a passive process that doesn’t require energy because water wants to equalize or travel from the higher to lower concentrated areas. Curing meats takes advantage of this, if you salt and cure a meat product you are making that process of osmosis getting water into a pathogenic cell impossible. When a meat is salted and cured you make it more favorable for water to travel outside the cell than inside, thus dehydrating the pathogenic bacteria. This is called [lowering water activity.](https://aqualab.com/en/knowledge-base/market-insights/water-activity-and-shelf-stable-meat-products)
While you aren’t cooking the pork, you are dehydrating all of the pathogens in the pork effectively killing them or making them dormant, or safe to eat. [Nitrates are also used too](https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/whats-the-deal-with-nitrates-and-nitrates-used-in-meat-products/), they lower the pH of the pork and make it way too acidic for the pathogens to survive too and inhibit their growth too.
I eat cured meats with my family a lot too, other than some heartburn I’ve never gotten a food borne illness from them.
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