What You Need to Know About The Beef You Eat

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Less Nutritious Too

Mad cow disease, hormone implants and the excessive use of antibiotics may dominate the headlines, but there’s another problem caused by taking cattle off grass and fattening them on grain and byproducts: The meat loses nutritional value. Grass is a richer source of healthy fats and antioxidants than grain, and as a direct result, meat from grazing animals has more of these nutrients than meat from grain-fed cattle. In a study published in the journal Meat Science in 2005, a team of Argentinean researchers determined that grass-fed meat is higher in vitamin C, vitamin E and beta carotene.

Omega-3 fatty acids are another vital nutrient that’s diminished by a feedlot diet. Calves start losing their stores of omega-3s as soon as they start eating grain. By the time they’re ready for market, very little of this heart-healthy fat remains. Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) is a fat that appears to be a potent cancer fighter. CLA is higher in grazing animals than in feedlot animals. The longer the animals graze, according to a study published by the Journal of Animal Science, the higher the CLA content of their meat.

While we know some of the nutritional effects of feeding grain to cattle, no one has studied how byproduct feedstuffs affect the meat. But it is reasonable to assume that a steak from a cow that got 30 percent of its calories from chewing gum will be lower in a number of vitamins and healthy fat. Garbage in; garbage out.

Make My Beef Truly Fresh and Truly Natural

The beef industry and government regulators go to great lengths to assure the public of the safety of the U.S. beef supply. We are told that the meat is inexpensive, safe and abundant. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the public policy center for the beef industry, denies that grain-fed meat is less nutritious than grass-fed meat, and dismisses organic grass-fed beef as a mere “niche market.”

Meanwhile, dozens of countries around the world and millions of American consumers are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. beef industry and of the ability of the government to regulate it in the best interests of the consumer. In record numbers, people are buying beef from small-scale producers who raise cattle on pasture and choose not to supplement with grain, byproduct feed, hormones or antibiotics. These savvy consumers are placing their vote of confidence in beef made the old-fashioned way — cows grazing green grass and growing at their natural pace. Learning more about beef and its alternatives is the key to being able to choose healthy, natural beef.

So You Want Better Beef?

Finding an alternative to industrial beef takes effort. The cattle industry is highly consolidated, with the largest 25 feedlot companies now supplying 40 percent of all U.S. beef. The packing industry is even more concentrated. The top four beef packers (IBP/Tyson, Excel/Cargill, Swift/ConAgra and U.S. Premium/National Beef) harvest more than 80 percent of the meat. By contrast, in the 1960s the top four packers slaughtered less than 30 percent of all cattle. The trend is likely to continue, partly due to the fact that food giants, such as Wal-Mart and Safeway, cut costs by reducing their number of suppliers. Except for a small section of the meat case devoted to “natural meats,” all the remaining beef you see in the stores comes from animals that were fed high-grain diets and treated with hormones, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print