Better Beef

Image Gallery Grass-finished beef is a hallmark of the Oswald Cattle Company, based at the foot of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains in Cotopaxi, Colo. Courtesy Oswald Cattle Co.

By Nancy Smith

Beef from a cow raised on pasture is even healthier for you than a chicken breast — the white meat that health authorities are so quick to recommend.

That may be hard to believe, but it’s true, says Jo Robinson, grass-fed expert and author of the book Pasture Perfect.

The best place to start in describing the health benefits of grass-fed beef is with the meat’s leanness. Grass-fed beef is one-third to three times leaner than grain-fed beef, and as a consequence has fewer calories, too — a 6-ounce beef loin from a grass-fed cow can have 92 fewer calories than a 6-ounce loin from a grain-fed cow.

Grass-fed beef also provides two to four times more essential omega-3 fatty acids than feedlot beef. These omega-3s help protect humans from cancer, depression, obesity, diabetes, arthritis, allergies, dementia, high-blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, heart attack and stroke. Also in grass-fed products, omega-3s and omega-6 fatty acids are in balance, which provides critical protection from heart attacks and strokes.

Researchers have found grass-fed beef contains two newly discovered “good” fats: conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and trans-vaccenic acid (TVA). (Our bodies turn TVA into CLA.)

CLA shows great promise in lab animal studies of helping fight cancers and cardiovascular disease. When cattle are raised exclusively on grass, their meat and dairy products offer two to five times more CLA than cattle raised on large amounts of grain.

Grass-fed beef also provides more beta carotene, vitamin E and folic acid, important antioxidants that protect us from free radicals, boost our immunity and may lower our risk of heart disease.

Grass-fed Means Healthy Cows

“What’s not in grass-fed beef that is in grain-fed beef is important, too,” Robinson says. Grass-fed beef has “no extra hormones and no traces of antibiotics — only cleaner and more wholesome meat than ordinary beef by far,” she says. Grass-fed animals also live a low-stress life, outside grazing on pasture, in contrast to the stinking, dusty, shadeless conditions in most feedlots.

In the livestock industry, feedlot cattle may be fed all kinds of products in addition to grain, including chicken manure, chicken feathers, newsprint, cardboard and municipal garbage waste. Cattle are even fed stale pizza crust, chewing gum and candy. Some companies will “feed these cattle anything that’s cheap, keeps them growing and is within hauling distance,” she says.

Robinson’s current favorite “horror” story is that of the hired feedlot manager who was told to give his cattle frozen pizza crust and add an antibiotic called tetracycline to boost the cattle’s growth. (Tetracycline is not approved for use in cattle.) The feedlot manager could buy the crust for a penny a pound, which was yielding 4 pounds of gain a day on each animal — “a huge gain for a penny. That’s the thinking of the industry,” Robinson says. But he quit, she explains, because he didn’t want his children having to eat meat like this. Now he owns and operates a 100-percent grass-fed herd and goes to farmer’s markets to sell the meat. Last spring, when he didn’t have any more meat for sale until 2006, he started a waiting list that ended up six pages long.