Fact or hogwash during pork month

While October is winding to a close, it’s important to recognize something before it totally slips away. October is National Pork Month. 
Pork has always been near and dear to my heart as I grew up on a hog farm in the central part of the state. I’ll admit I don’t miss the hoots and hollers I endured getting off the school bus as a young kid when the fresh aroma of hog manure filled the air. The westerly winds really brought the smell to life.
During my childhood years in 4-H, I showed hogs at the county fair. I always took great pride in doing my best with the animals. I still remember, though, one county fair in which my pig brought me to tears. My pig didn’t want to cooperate in the show ring and stubbornly tried to get under the bleachers where the audience was sitting. It proved to be a humiliating moment for me, though there was very little I could have done differently.
I also enjoyed demonstrating at the fairs about pork, letting people know about various types of meat cuts and other important information. One time I gave a demo about the significance of “ear-notching,” the system used to identify hogs. 
Nationwide more than 68,000 pork producers annually market more than 110 million hogs. These animals provided total gross receipts of $23.4 billion. The pork industry supports about a half million jobs, ranging from pork producers and meat processors to transport and Main Street businesses.
In preparation for this week’s column, I came across some interesting tidbits about pork. Many of them are going to fall under a “fact or hogwash” category. I’ll clue you in that there is no hogwash included with anything this week. 
Pork tenderloin is just as lean as a skinless chicken breast, research shows. A 3-ounce serving of pork tenderloin has only 2.98 grams of total fat and 1.02 grams of saturated fat. Pork is the world’s most widely eaten meat, topping chicken by about 10 percent.
Of the pork consumption in the U.S., ham tops of the charts at about 31 percent followed by sausage at 20 percent. Bacon is a close third at 18 percent. Other highly consumed pork cuts are lunchmeat, pork chops and fresh pork.
Women who cut calories but included more protein, including six ounces of lean pork per day, kept more muscle mass while losing weight than women who consumed the same amount of calories but less protein.
There are more than 1,700 pork recipes for consumers on the website, theotherwhitemeat.com. 
Besides the meat itself, pork is also important in pharmaceutical co-products. Simply put hogs are powerful medicine. And all told, hogs are a source of nearly 20 drugs and pharmaceuticals.
One of the unique aspects I have found is that hog heart valves are surgically implanted in humans to replace valves weakened by disease or injury. Since the first operation in 1971, thousands of hog heart values have been