About 36% of all meat produced in the world is pork, which is the most popular meat in the world. It’s especially popular in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania.
No matter how you think about it, pigs are rather dirty animals. They’re considered the garbage and waste eliminators of the farm, often eating literally anything they can find. This includes not only bugs, insects, and any food scraps they find lying around, but also their own waste and the dead bodies of sick animals, even their own young.
Being aware of what a pig eats can help you understand why its meat might not taste very good. Being “grossed out” might or might not be a good reason not to eat something, but you should learn more about pork before making up your own mind.
For some people, eating pork products can cause digestive issues or allergic reactions. If you’ve indulged in bacon, ham or pork chops and are now feeling the effects, you may be wondering how to flush the pork out of your system quickly.
The good news is that there are simple, natural methods to help eliminate pork from your body and get you feeling better fast. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explain how pork is processed in your digestive tract, look at the best foods and techniques to flush pork out of your system, and answer common questions.
How is Pork Processed in the Body?
First, it helps to understand how your body metabolizes and eliminates pork after you eat it. Once consumed, pork is broken down through digestion into components that are either absorbed or excreted.
Proteins are broken down into amino acids that enter the bloodstream to be used by the body. Fats are emulsified by bile and digested by enzymes into fatty acids and glycerol. Water and minerals are absorbed while insoluble fiber passes through the digestive tract.
Any parts of pork not digested and absorbed, such as insoluble proteins and fiber, continue moving through the intestines and are excreted as waste. The entire digestive process typically takes 24 to 72 hours depending on the person.
Tips for Flushing Pork Out of Your System
Here are some of the most effective ways to help eliminate pork from your body more quickly:
Drink plenty of fluids – Staying hydrated helps flush toxins out through urine and healthy bowel movements Aim for 8-10 glasses of water daily
Eat high fiber foods – Fiber adds bulk to stools and speeds up intestinal transit time. Try fruits, vegetables, beans lentils and whole grains.
Include probiotics – Probiotic foods like yogurt, kimchi and kefir support healthy gut bacteria and regularity.
Choose cleansing foods – Some fruits and vegetables have a diuretic effect to promote flushing. Examples are watermelon, cranberries, lemons, artichokes and asparagus.
Exercise – Any physical activity helps move food waste through the body faster Go for a walk after meals to optimize digestion
Take digestive enzymes – Supplements like papaya enzymes can help break down food particles and ease elimination. Check with your doctor first.
Consider activated charcoal – This supplement binds to some toxins in the gut. Use occasionally, not daily.
Foods to Help Clear Pork From Your System
Along with increasing fluid, fiber and probiotic intake, focus on eating the following cleansing foods after consuming pork to help your body flush it out faster:
Citrus Fruits – Oranges, grapefruit, lemons and limes contain antioxidants and vitamin C. They alkalize the body and promote healthy urination.
Leafy Greens – Spinach, kale, lettuce and other greens provide fiber and also increase bile production to remove fats.
Asparagus – A natural diuretic that makes you urinate more, asparagus clears waste from the body efficiently.
Apples – The pectin fiber in apples helps eliminate toxins and sweeps waste out with it.
Cruciferous Vegetables – Broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower aid liver function and glutathione production for natural detoxification.
Lifestyle Tips for Cleansing After Eating Pork
In addition to diet, there are several lifestyle strategies that can accelerate the removal of pork from your body:
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Exercise for 30 minutes daily to energize the circulatory system and lymphatic drainage.
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Dry brush your skin pre-shower to activate lymph flow and detoxification.
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Sauna sessions make you sweat out impurities through your skin pores.
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Body massage helps manually push fluids through the lymphatic system.
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Gua sha is an ancient scraping technique to flush tissues and increase blood flow.
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Yoga twists and poses aid circulation and organ drainage.
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Drink lemon water upon rising to stimulate digestion and hydration.
How Long Does it Take to Clear Pork from Your Body?
Most of the pork should be digested and out of your system within 24 to 48 hours of eating it. However, traces of pork protein or fat can linger for up to 3 to 5 days before being fully eliminated.
Factors like your metabolism, gut health and hydration status influence exactly how long pork remains in your body. Using cleansing strategies can help speed up the removal process significantly.
Common Questions about Flushing Pork Out
If you are trying to clear pork from your body, here are answers to some frequently asked questions:
Why does pork cause problems for some people? Pork is difficult to digest, with a high potential for allergies, sensitivities and intestinal inflammation. Many cannot properly break down pork proteins and fats.
Will a detox diet help remove pork? Yes, a short detox program based on fruits, veggies, beans, nuts and seeds can accelerate eliminating pork remnants.
Can I take a laxative to flush pork out? Laxatives like senna leaf force elimination but are not recommended except for occasional constipation relief.
Does activated charcoal remove all dietary toxins? No, charcoal only binds to certain substances. It’s useful for occasional cleansing but not a cure-all.
Will a juice cleanse help flush pork? Fruit and vegetable juices provide antioxidants and nutrients but lack fiber needed for proper waste elimination.
The Takeaway – Remove Pork from Your Body Gently and Naturally
Eating pork leaves residues that need to be flushed out of the body through proper digestion and waste removal. The most effective and safest methods are natural approaches like increased hydration, high fiber foods, exercise and probiotic support.
Avoid harsh laxatives or extreme fasts that can disrupt your body’s balance. With a little patience and these gut-friendly cleansing strategies, you can efficiently flush pork out of your system and get back to feeling your best.
The Problems With Pork
There are several reasons why pig meat is more likely to contain toxins than meat from many other farm animals. The first reason has to do with the digestive system of a pig.
Animals and people both get rid of extra toxins and other parts of the food they eat that could be bad for their health during digestion. Because a pig’s digestive system works pretty simply, many of these toxins stay in its body and are stored in its plenty of fat until they are ready to be eaten.
Another issue with the pig is that it has very few functional sweat glands and can barely sweat at all. Sweat glands are a tool the body uses to be rid of toxins. This leaves more toxins in the pig’s body.
When you consume pork meat, you too get all these toxins that weren’t eliminated from the pig. For instance, there have been examples of pigs and pork products being contaminated with:
In fact, we should all do what we can to eliminate and cut down on toxin exposure. One vital way to do this is by choosing what you eat carefully.
According to the World Health Organization, processed meat like ham, bacon and sausage can cause cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer actually classifies processed meat as a carcinogen, something that causes cancer. A very large 18% increase in the risk of colorectal cancer was found in people who ate 50 grams of processed meat every day.
Processed meat is considered to be food items like ham, bacon, sausage, hot dogs and some deli meats. Noticing a theme there? Those are mainly pork-derived food products.
How much processed meat is 50 grams? That’s about four strips of bacon.
Maybe you’re thinking that you only eat two pieces of bacon regularly. According to this research, that would likely equate to a 9 percent increase of cancer likelihood.
People on the keto diet, the Paleo diet, and the Atkins diet, for example, often eat pork and processed meat, which is not good for them. Instead, they should use healthier meat, like beef, lamb, bison or chicken.
The swine flu is another virus that has made the leap from pig to human. The influenza virus can be passed directly from pigs to people, from people to pigs, and from people to people. Human infection with flu viruses from pigs are most likely when humans are physically close to infected pigs.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, H1N1 and H3N2 are swine flu viruses that are “endemic among pig populations in the United States and something that the industry deals with routinely.” Outbreaks can occur year-round. H1N1 has been observed in pig populations since at least 1930, while H3N2 began in the United States around 1998.
According to the CDC, eating properly handled and cooked pork has not been shown to spread swine flu to people. To properly prepare pork, it must be cooked to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, which is thought to kill all viruses and other pathogens that can be spread through food.
Did you know that pigs and their meat carry different kinds of parasites? Some of these parasites are hard to kill, even when the meat is cooked. This is the reason there are so many warnings out there about eating undercooked pork.
One of the biggest concerns with eating pork meat is trichinosis or trichinellosis. This is an infection that humans get from eating undercooked or uncooked pork that contains the larvae of the trichinella worm. In some countries and cultures, they actually consume pork raw.
This worm parasite is very commonly found in pork. The worm usually lives in cysts in the stomach. When stomach acids break open the cysts, the worm’s larvae enter the pig’s body. These new worms make their homes in the muscles of the pig.
Next stop? The unknowing human body that consumes this infected meat flesh.
Similarly to what these worms do to the pig, they can also do to humans. If you eat raw or undercooked pork that has the parasite on it, you are also eating trichinella larvae that are enclosed in a cyst.
Your digestive juices dissolve the cyst, but that only unleashes the parasite into your insides. The larvae then penetrate your small intestine, where they mature into adult worms and mate. If you’re at this stage of trichinosis, you may experience abdominal pain, diarrhea, fatigue, nausea and vomiting.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. About a week after eating the pork that was infected, the adult female worms that are now inside you will make larvae that will enter your bloodstream and eventually burrow into muscle or other tissue. Once this tissue invasion occurs, symptoms of trichinosis include:
- Headache
- High fever
- General weakness
- Muscle pain and tenderness
- Pink eye (conjunctivitis)
- Sensitivity to light
- Swelling of the eyelids or face
People don’t want to eat worms, but trichinosis is a very dangerous disease that you should do almost anything to avoid. Symptoms in the abdomen can show up one to two days after infection, and other symptoms usually begin two to eight weeks after infection.
According to Mayo Clinic, the severity of symptoms typically depends on the number of larvae consumed in the infected meat.
The CDC says that to get rid of any worms, pork should be cooked all the way through and then frozen before cooking.
It’s actually been theorized that trichinellosis is the exact cause of Mozart’s rather sudden death at age 35. This is what an American researcher thought after looking at all the records from the days before, during, and after Mozart’s death.
This research published in Archives of Internal Medicine’s June 2001 issue found that Mozart suffered many of the above listed symptoms and that he recorded in his journal the consumption of pork just 44 days before his own death.
Pigs carry many viruses and parasites with them. Whether by coming in direct contact with them through farms or by eating their meat, we put ourselves at higher risk of getting one of these painful, often debilitating diseases (not to mention put our bodies on toxic overload).
- Taenia solium tapeworm
- Hepatitis E virus (HEV)—Some people in developed countries have gotten HEV genotype 3 after eating pork that wasn’t cooked all the way through.
- Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, aka blue-ear pig disease
- Nipah virus
- Menangle virus
- Viruses in the family Paramyxoviridae
These parasites and viruses can all make you very sick and keep you sick for years to come.
It’s also important to know about the common conditions of pork raised for consumption. Today, a vast majority of pigs in the United States are raised in factory farms. This means that these pigs never live healthy lives of fresh air and wide-open pastures.
If you’re a pork eater, you should know that it’s very likely that you’re eating the meat of a pig that spent all of its time in a crowded warehouses with no fresh air or exercise, fed a steady diet of harmful drugs to keep the pig breathing as producers make pigs grow faster and fatter. These drugs often cause the pigs to become crippled under their own excessive and unnatural weight gain.
A group called PETA says that about 70% of factory-farmed pigs have pneumonia when they get to the slaughterhouse. Unsightly factory-farm conditions of filth and extreme overcrowding lead pigs to have an extreme likelihood for serious diseases. Because of how bad things are, the only way to keep these pigs alive is to sometimes abuse and overuse antibiotics.
Similarly to humans, pigs are more commonly developing diseases that are resistant to antibiotics. You might like the taste of pork, but would you want to eat something made from pork that came from a pig that had “superbacteria”?
The bacteria-laden pork story continues. A 2013 Consumer Reports analysis of U.S. pork chops and ground pork samples found widespread (69 percent) presence of a bacteria called yersinia enterocolitica. This bacterium infects about 100,000 Americans a year, especially children, and can cause fever, diarrhea and abdominal pain in humans.