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‘Healthier than butter’ lard is back as Hong Kong chefs celebrate rendered pork fat

After years of people believing that lard is an unhealthy fat, Hong Kong chefs are championing the use of rendered pork fat on their menus

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Tor dei char siu with lard rice at the Man Ho Chinese Restaurant in Hong Kong. Lard, or pork fat, has a bad reputation but it is making a comeback on dining tables. Photo: Dickson Lee
Lisa Cam

Many Hongkongers would not think twice about the amount of butter on their toast, but would recoil at the thought of adding lard, or rendered pork fat, to a dish.

People in the city have, for years, been brought up to believe that lard is an unhealthy fat, but recent science has begun to look differently at various kinds of fat. As a result, lard is making a comeback on menus.

“It’s been proven by science that lard is not worse than any other animal fat,” says Jayson Tang, executive Chinese chef of JW Marriott Hotel Hong Kong, in Admiralty. “There have since been more studies that delve into monounsaturated fats, and that trans fats are what people should be wary of.”

The historical vilification of animal fats stems from American physiologist Ancel Keys’ long-running Seven Countries Study, which began in 1958 and linked saturated fat consumption to elevated serum cholesterol and coronary mortality.

This “diet-heart hypothesis” universally condemned animal products. However, the same study revealed an anomaly in Crete, Greece, where high fat intake did not lead to heart disease because their fat came from olive oil, sparking interest in monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs).

American doctor and researcher Scott Grundy’s clinical trials in the 1980s validated this, confirming that replacing saturated fats with MUFAs successfully lowered harmful cholesterol while preserving good cholesterol.

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