You know the expression “you are what you eat.” But have you ever stopped to think that you are also what you eat ate? In other words, when it comes to animal or marine based proteins, the quality of what you consume is directly related to what and how that animal (or fish) was fed.
Thinking about beef specifically, a few terms are becoming more prominent but are often not well understood: “grain-fed” and “grass-fed.” Add on terms like “conventional,” “organic,” and “grass-finished” and it gets pretty confusing. Let’s start by defining these terms and then we’ll look at the health implications.
First, technically speaking, all cattle are grass-fed for some period of their lives. After calves are weaned from their mother’s milk, most are put to pasture where they typically eat grass and whatever ruminants they find in that environment. However, when that calf is somewhere between seven and twelve months old, what and how they are fed changes depending on how they are being “finished.”
In the conventional method, the priority is on getting the cattle to the “finishing” weight as quickly as possible. By accelerating the time from birth to harvest, the rancher is able to maximize profits. As a result, when they are a few months old, the cows are moved into feedlots where they are usually kept in stalls with limited room to move. Here their diet is switched to a grain based diet predominantly of soy or corn and likely including other by-products or supplements. These confined environments are breeding grounds for all sorts of diseases so the cattle are often administered antibiotics to help keep them healthy. Sometimes cattle are given growth hormones or other substances to accelerate growth. In the economics of the beef industry, this allows ranchers to raise more cattle on less land and to spend less time and money on raising and feeding the animals. All of which leads to higher profits.
The alternative approach is to allow the cattle to grow at their natural rate by continuing to eat grass as they mature and without supplementing the diet with growth hormones or other products. Hence, beef from cattle raised in this manner may be referred to as grass-finished or 100% grass-fed.
Recalling our “you are what you eat” principle, just because the animal is grass-finished doesn’t mean it necessarily ate a clean, healthy diet–who’s to say how the grass and other vegetation are treated and maintained? Here, we look to the USDA Certified Organic designation. Many suppliers will say they do things “the right way” but without an independent, transparent standard there can be plenty of grey around what defines “right.” The USDA publishes their organic criteria publicly and producers who carry the Organic certification not only meet those standards at the time they are first awarded but also undergo an annual on-site USDA audit to ensure they continue to meet, or exceed, the standards.
Understanding these distinctions, it is easy to see how clever marketers can play games to murky the waters. For example, it may not be wrong to claim beef is “grass-fed” even if it comes from cattle that are grain fed in feedlots, but it sure would be misleading. It is also worth noting that not all grass-finished beef is organic and not all organic beef is grass-finished–it is not hard to find suppliers who are certified organic, but finish their cattle on grain.
So why does all of this matter when it comes to the health of you and your family?
Hopefully the USDA Certified Organic differentiation is self-evident. If the cattle are allowed to eat, or are otherwise exposed to, harmful chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics or who knows what else, then those substances are in the meat that makes it to your table.
What is perhaps less obvious, are the major health differences between grass-finished and conventional beef. Because conventionally raised cattle are typically finished in ways meant to accelerate the animal’s growth, beef from those animals has high levels of fat. Believe it or not, this is intentional.
But because grass-finished cattle are allowed to spend their lives with freedom of movement and gain weight at a natural rate, beef from these cattle tends to be much leaner. Compared to grain-fed beef, grass-finished beef:
- Is ounce for ounce, lower in calories
- Has much less monounsaturated fat (the fat that helps reduce “bad” cholesterol levels)
- Contains as much as 5 times more Omega-3s
- Has 3-5 times the CLA levels (CLA, or conjugated linoleic acid, is a fatty acid that is believed to help with building muscle mass and reducing body fat)
If you’re looking for the healthiest beef possible, then make sure you’re buying beef that is sourced from USDA Certified Organic farms where the cattle are fed 100% grass and are never administered growth hormones, GMOs, antibiotics or other unnatural substances.
References:
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/monounsaturated-fats
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/grass-fed-vs-grain-fed-beef
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/conjugated-linoleic-acid#weight-loss
