How much heme is in cooked pork and beef; why is cooked pork ("the other white meat") not red? The new video See how Impossible Pork will make you forget about pig meat includes a very short discussion of 1. the addition of heme to the product to make it taste like beef 2. the deep red color of a heme solution 3. that pork is not nearly as red as beef, (after cooking it's essentially off-white) Does pork (pig/swine muscle tissue) have substantially less heme content than beef (steer/bovine muscle tissue)? If heme is contributing to the flavor of _cooked_ meats (rather than raw) such as pork and beef, why do they no longer have a red color after cooking? ![heme is dark red, screen shot from See how Impossible Pork will make you forget about pig meat](

### Yes.

Pork has substantially less heme than beef (Cross et al. 2013).

![Graphic Pork Beef heme quantity](

As to why the red colour is lost, it is due to the Maillard reaction, by which the iron in the myglobin is oxidized from Fe(II) to Fe(III). This results in a colour change in the meat (Tamanna & Mahmood 2015).

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## Sources:

* Cross AJ, Harnly JM, Ferrucci LM, Risch A, Mayne ST, Sinha R. 2013. Developing a heme iron database for meats according to meat type, cooking method and doneness level. Food Nutr Sci 3(7): 905–913.

* Tamanna N, Mahmood N. 2015. Food Processing and Maillard Reaction Products: Effect on Human Health and Nutrition. International journal of food science 2015: 526762. doi:10.1155/2015/526762