Eat raw meat
Eating raw meat is a feeding behavior that can sometimes be unhygienic or even risky.
It is therefore possible to separate the raw meat into two distinct strands: preserved raw meats and fresh raw meats. The preserved raw meat derives mainly from bovine (young and adult), pork and equidae for slaughter (the salami and dried sausages of some birds such as duck or goose are little known). Fresh raw meat, on the other hand, is obtained mainly from: young cattle (or, at the very least, bullock), slaughter horse and duck.
It should be remembered that in order to appreciate a good raw meat it is essential that it be soft and medium lean; in order to obtain a similar result it is necessary that the raw material consists of:
- Young animals
- Sedentary animals
- Skeletal muscles not interested in the walking of the animal.
Choose the meat to eat raw
The reader will ask: "... why should the muscle of origin of the raw meat belong to a young, sedentary animal and constitute a district little involved in the fundamental movements of the beast ?"
In reality the answer is simple; Skeletal muscles are made up of tissues that respond proportionally to the physical and hormonal stimuli induced by the animal's lifestyle. In the slaughtered beast or in the game, they react exactly like those of the SPORTS man; giving a trivial example: the athlete is characterized by a locomotor apparatus developed and endowed with a tonic, lean muscle tissue and covered with very thick connective tissue capsules. Conversely, a sedentary man should have an upper fat mass and a poorly toned musculature with more subtle and delicate connective structures. By the same principle, the meat of a sedentary animal is always more tender than that belonging to a more active animal (just think of the morphological difference between the species; for example between a hare or a pheasant or a wild boar, which live in the wild, and a rabbit or a chicken or a courtyard pig); the same applies to the old age of the animal and the anatomical district of origin. A very young specimen has muscles that are still underdeveloped because it moves less than an adult; at the same time, a less stressed muscle such as the "fillet" (internal muscle of the hindquarter) will always be more tender than another more frequently recruited as the "loin" (deputy to the extension of the rachis).
Risks in eating raw meat
More than from the nutritional point of view, eating raw meat differs from a diet based on cooked foods, especially for the HYGIENE of foods.
It is likely that readers have already heard someone NOT RECOMMEND to a pregnant woman to eat sausages and salted or raw meats; the reason is very simple: some beasts, especially pigs and birds (chicken, chicken, pigeon etc.), are POTENTIAL carriers of pathogens such as parasites, bacteria and viruses.
It would be advisable to make an accurate classification of all the possibilities of contagion by differentiating bacterial contamination (generally induced by an infection but more often by bad slaughter or cross-contamination), from the viral one (less widespread but not for this less dangerous; the virus acts specifically on the cells, therefore many harmful viruses towards one species could be harmless for others ... but it is not a fixed rule) and finally from that attributable to the parasites (present directly in the muscle tissue such as the toxoplasma, the tapeworm, the trichinella, the horseshoe or the pinworms, but also arrived in the butchered meat later as for the amoeba and giardia ). A separate issue concerns the contagion of prions ; in short, prions are polypeptides (chains of amino acids) which, for one reason or another, at a certain moment and apparently without reason, CHANGE their structure by altering the function of the tissue they go to make up; the most known and feared prions are those that give rise to the "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" (BSE), also called the "mad cow" disease; these are constituents of the nervous tissue and their structural modification determines "spongy" lesions (holes and trabeculae) in the animal's brain and, with very high probabilities, also in that of man. In the latter and in the other cases mentioned above (except for meat which is largely contaminated with "gram-" bacteria), cooking kills (or inactivates) the pathogen by avoiding most of the risks of eating raw meat.
NB . Interested readers will learn more about the subject by consulting more specific and detailed veterinary or food hygiene texts; furthermore, there are other similar problems related to the consumption of raw fish. These can be explored on the website in the article: "Raw fish - risks and benefits of raw fish".
Benefits in eating raw meat
To be honest, the benefits of eating raw meat are not many. These are mainly limited to:
- Preservation of a greater hydration of the dish; in this way (as for all other fresh foods) the amount of water ingested is increased, favoring the maintenance of the state of hydration (however, these are not very significant percentages)
- Conservation of electrolytes contained in muscle fibers; with cooking the mineral salts of the tissues tend to flow with the cooking water, while eating raw meat it is possible to improve the intake of iron (Fe), potassium (K), sodium (Na), magnesium (Mg - little ), chlorine (Cl) and calcium (Ca - poco).
- Conservation of the molecular integrity of numerous vitamins. Some of these, being thermolabile, tend to become inactive with cooking; we are talking about: Thiamine (vit. B1), Riboflavin (vit. B2), Pantothenic acid (vit. B5) and Retinol (or vit. A - little).
Also the digestibility of the food, if compared to that of a medium cooked meat (but with the due differences between the preparations), results sufficiently compromised. Heat facilitates protein denaturation at least as much as chewing (accentuated by grinding) and acid reaction of hydrochloric acid and pepsin secreted in the stomach; ultimately, cooked meat in a suitable manner is more digestible than raw meat.
