Boar taint compound levels in back fat versus meat products: do they correlate?

Surgical castration of male pigs will soon be abandoned, turning one of the best-acknowledged advantages of this practice (the elimination of boar taint) into the biggest challenge for pig industry when raising intact males becomes common practice. The occasional occurrence of boar taint in consumable pig products may lead to disapproval of the affected end products by consumers, possibly permanently altering their meat preferences. In an attempt to contribute to map the (economical) consequences in relation to consumer acceptance of boar tainted meat, as well as, offer a strategy to the stockholders, the current study investigated not only carcass (back fat) boar taint levels, but additionally generated information on the levels of boar taint compounds recovered after the production of several commercially relevant meat products (cutlets, blade loin, tenderloin, minced meat, cooked ham, uncooked ham and salami sausage) using highly specific UHPLC-HRMS laboratory analysis. For nine selected carcasses, back fat levels of androstenone, skatole and indole varied from 131 to 3131 µg/kg, 15 to 521 µg/kg and 49 to 340 µg/kg. In general, correlation between back fat and the fat fraction of the meat product strongly correlated for androstenone, with r > 0.90 (p 0.90 (p 0.90 (p 0.90 (p < 0.05) for salami and minced meat (both represented by a mixture of fat and meat), blade loin, cutlet and bacon for three or two compounds. This can probably be explained by the high intrinsic fat fraction of these particular meat products. A rather strong correlation is also observed in leaner meat products such as ham and tenderloin. The remarkably low and non-significant correlation for androstenone in cooked ham may be attributed to the production process for which cooking under sealed conditions is expected to result in the redistribution of androstenone (and to a lesser degree also of skatole and indole) from intermuscular fat towards subcutaneous (or intramuscular) fat tissue. Since no heating is applied in the manufacturing of uncooked ham, this resulted in correlation coefficients exceeding 0.80.An additional finding of this study concerns the successful retrieval of boar taint in the respective fat fraction of the meat products, but the obvious reduction of the boar taint compounds levels in the (edible) meat tissue of the meat products. This reduction may be related to the intrinsic fat percentage of each respective meat product, as boar taint compounds are lipophilic compounds.C