Items Tagged With Nutrition

I have always been skeptical of people who say that the Western diet is killing us. Granted, as a society suffer from the afflictions of gluttony; obesity, diabetes and heart disease just to name a few, but I think it is what we are eating, not just the quantities of what we are eating that is making us fat.  The amount of meat we eat is alarming, yes, but this is only exacerbated by the TYPE of meat we are eating. Grass-fed meats, (as we know grass-fed party members!) can contain half as much fat and calories than their corn-fed counter parts. Iceland and Japan lead the world in life expectancy because they eat a diet rich in fish.  Fish is heart healthy because it is rich in Omega 3 fatty acids which have been proven to prevent heart disease. Most Americans have alarmingly low amounts of Omega 3 fatty acids in their diet, it is no wonder we lead the world in heart disease! And yet there is hope with a lot of promising research that does make a compelling case for Grass-fed meats and their positive impact on weight and heart health. Grass-fed meats are an excellent source of omega 3 fatty acids (as is fish) and they are an excellent low fat high quality protein (much like fish).

In the book Pasture Perfect by Jo Robinson she makes a compelling case for the health and weight loss benefits of grass-fed and pasture raised meats. She devotes a whole chapter to grass-fed beef, where the health benefits when compared to feed-lot beef are astounding! If every American switched to grass-fed beef they would save 16, 642 calories annually, that amounts to almost five pounds of weight loss a year! This is far more than any diet plan can offer. What I find most encouraging is how much less fat grass-fed beef has, and because of this it can have almost 60% less calories then store bought beef. Not only that, it is even leaner then store bought chicken breast! We need to rethink our wariness of red meat. It is not red meat per se we should avoid but the TYPE red meat we should avoid. In a grass-fed world you can have your beef and lose weight all the while protecting your heart!

My last recipe was a grass-fed beef liver recipe for a reason. Liver has gone out of favor with most Americans, many of my peers have never even eaten liver, and it seems that we have replaced liver and other non-prime cuts with chicken nuggets. This is something that gets me pretty upset, but in all fairness industrially-farmed livers should be avoided. In many cases they are unavailable to us because they have been stripped from our butcher and supermarket shelves due to safety issues. 60 percent of antibiotics are used on livestock in America, not to mention the amount of growth hormone and strange things that are added to feed (rendered animal byproducts, chicken manure and discarded factory food as bizarre as gum!).

If our animals are being fed antibiotics, hormones and suspicious feed, what does that say about their livers? The liver is an animal’s cleaning system; it is also one of the most nutritious, delicious and low-fat cuts of an animal. Rabbit, chicken, and pork liver are some of my favorite foods, but I prefer pasture-raised livers because I can trust that they are healthy and safe. When my family has animals butchered we ask for the liver, heart and tongue, and the processors are always skeptical, saying, “We can only give livers back if they pass inspection.” This is because so many cows’ livers are now bloated, diseased and filled with lesions because they have been eating food that damages their systems. We know we will get our livers back and that they will pass inspection because they are grass-fed. A grass-fed liver is dark red with a shiny skin; that is what a healthy liver looks like. It is also free of antibiotics, growth hormone and feed residue.

The exciting thing about pasture-raised livers is that they are available and extremely reasonable. I was raised to respect farm animals, to savor and eat the whole animal, and eating the liver is about cherishing the whole animal. With grass-fed meats, we can have it all; we can eat the whole animal, trusting that it was treated well and that it in turn will make us healthy.