Easier to digest, really?

A relative of ours was instructed years ago by her physician to eat pork as her primary meat because it is easier to digest and therefore easier on the entire digestive system. This relative has had a lot of trouble in recent years relating to her stomach and intestines, so much so that she almost died (twice now) from having simply polyps removed.

Our family recently did a meat experiment (of which I won’t disclose exactly what we were testing in case anyone else is interested in doing the same experiment but I will tell you to look closely!). One of the results we found was that after the pork and the beef had been exposed to the water, vinegar, vodka and Coke was that the beef was consistently deteriorating much faster than the pork. Even after three days the pork had not deteriorated as much as the beef had in any of the specimen jars.

Now I feel it is safe to assume that our digestive juices (stomach acid) is stronger than vinegar, vodka or Coke. If this is the case then our 3 day experiment might be assumed to represent a much shorter period of time for the same meats to be digested in the human body. Also, our specimens were kept still in glass jars and at temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees, and they were not stirred, which the human digestive system would do. Our intent was not to test the digestion rates of these specimens, it was an after thought.

Day three results, as I am throwing out the specimens, are:

Water - Both specimens have absorbed water, beef has released blood. The water in both jars is cloudy. Pork is now a pinkish-white color, beef is a redish-pink color.

Vinegar – Both specimens have absorbed vinegar. Beef is brown and looks very soft/spongy at edges in particular while the pork is a light gray to white in color and appears very firm at the edges. Shaking the jars confirms the texture of the edges/corners of the specimens – beef soft and spongy, pork firm.

Vodka – It is difficult to tell if the beef has absorbed the fluid or not because the size of the specimen is much smaller than it was to begin with. There is much sediment at the bottom of the jar and the specimen is a pasty beige color when the jar is tipped in order to see through the murky fluid.
The pork specimen also has some sediment, though in larger pieces, and the fluid is clear enough to clearly see the specimen through. A look through the bottom of the jar reveals the original pink color of the pork while the edges and top of the specimen are now a pinkish-white color.

Coke – One of the original observations was that the Coke seemed to brown the beef within the first 5 minutes. The color of the cola went from it’s normal dark color to a slightly lighter color in the jar with the beef. There is sediment on the bottom of the jar, larger in particle size than in the vodka jars but less in volume. The beef seems to have absorbed the cola and is now a reddish-brown color with the bottom of the specimen more red in color than the rest of the specimen.
The pork jar contains sediment as well, the color of the liquid is almost a clear auburn color while the color of the specimen is a reddish shade of cream or peach. The sediment does not settle to the bottom of the jar but floats throughout the jar and is in much larger particle sizes, some particles measure 0.5 cm in width.

One of the resulting pieces of information from our experiment is this: Beef is much easier to digest than pork. The sediment from the disolving meat is smaller in each of the beef jars than in the pork jars. The rate of change was much faster in the beef jars than the pork jars. The texture/firmness of the specimens shows that the beef is much softer than the pork. Our determination is that the information that was given to our relative years ago has been proven false – pork is not easier to digest than beef.