Our Approach And The Potential Health Benefits of Grass-Fed Beef
- Pasture and Resource Management
- Lower in Fat and Calories
- REAL Beef Eat Grass -- Not Grains
- Grass-fed cows are not mad cows.
The Lazy 69 Ranch is devoted to providing a wholesome product you can trust. Our protocol is simple, the cows are allowed to eat their natural diet of grasses without introducing foreign feed, antibiotics or supplemental growth hormones.
We embarked on this endeavor after several years of providing beef to friends and family who urged us to market our natural product. We personally maintain and manage every aspect of the ranch right down to the packaging and shipping. We share a common philosophy with folks that like to know where their food comes from and are concerned about the manner in which animals are raised and fed in today's mass production beef industry. We enjoy providing this genuine service and sharing our natural, grass-fed beef with others that can appreciate it.
We believe there is a better way to raise beef, naturally and humanely. The dietary benefits beef has to offer are degraded or completely removed when cows are crowded into feedlot pens, fed bulk fillers and low level maintenance antibiotics. Many antibiotics produced in the USA are used in animal production, which raises concerns regarding bioaccumulation and the development of antibiotic resistance.
Our goal is NOT to make you eat more beef, but to provide you with an alternate source of beef that was raised responsibly and naturally. We consume our own product as our sole source of beef, but we also maintain a balanced diet.
While the USDA provides a valuable food safety service to the public, they have rewarded high fat content beef with the highest grade rating, prime, and the leanest beef with a select grading. In the grocery store, this equates to paying top dollar for fattier prime cuts, a contradiction in terms of dietary health.
We can't change this paradox, but we can help you learn more about issues related to the dietary content of beef and have provided research information below to help you make an informed, health conscious decision when feeding your family beef.
Pasture and Resource Management
Products from pastured animals can be ideal sources of protein. Similar to wild game, they contain the amounts and kinds of nutrients that your body "expects" to be fed. Switching to grass-fed products may help reduce your risk of a number of diseases, including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. You are also supporting small farmers, safeguarding the environment, promoting animal welfare, and eating food that is nutritious, wholesome and delicious.
High-quality pasture is the key to high-quality animal products. Raising animals on pasture requires more knowledge and skill than sending them to the feedlots. In order for the meat to be wholesome and tender, the animals need high-quality forage. This requires healthy soil and careful pasture management and land stewardship so that the animals are grazing the grass at its optimal stage of growth.
We do not administer supplemental hormones, antibiotics or growth-promoting additives because we are content to let the animals grow at their normal pace on their natural diet. Our animals live low-stress lives, there's no pressure to force them to reach desired weights by manipulation of their diets or lifestyles.
Lower in Fat and Calories
There are a number of nutritional differences between the meat of pasture-raised and feedlot-raised animals. To begin with, meat from grass-fed cattle, sheep, and bison is lower in total fat. If the meat is very lean, it can have one third as much fat as a similar cut from a grain-fed animal. In fact, as you can see by the graph below, grass-fed beef can have the same amount of fat as skinless chicken breast, wild deer, or elk.[1] Research shows that lean beef actually lowers your "bad" LDL cholesterol levels.[2]
Data from J. Animal Sci 80(5):1202-11.
Because meat from grass-fed animals is lower in fat than meat from grain-fed animals, it is also lower in calories. (Fat has 9 calories per gram, compared with only 4 calories for protein and carbohydrates. The greater the fat content, the greater the number of calories.) As an example, a 6-ounce steak from a grass-finished steer can have 100 fewer calories than a 6-ounce steak from a grain-fed steer. If you eat a typical amount of beef (66.5 pounds a year), switching to lean grassfed beef will save you 17,733 calories a year without requiring any willpower or change in your eating habits. If everything else in your diet remains constant, you'll lose about six pounds a year. If all Americans switched to grassfed meat, our national epidemic of obesity might diminish.
In the past few years, producers of grass-fed beef have been looking for ways to increase the amount of marbling in the meat so that consumers will have a more familiar product. But even these fatter cuts of grass-fed beef are lower in fat and calories than beef from grain-fed cattle.
Extra Omega-3s - Meat from grass-fed animals has two to four times more omega-3 fatty acids than meat from grain- fed animals. Omega-3s are called "good fats" because they play a vital role in every cell and system in your body. For example, of all the fats, they are the most heart-friendly. People who have ample amounts of omega-3s in their diet are less likely to have high blood pressure or an irregular heartbeat. Remarkably, they are 50 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack.[3] Omega-3s are essential for your brain as well. People with a diet rich in omega-3s are less likely to suffer from depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder (hyperactivity), or Alzheimer's disease.[4]
Another benefit of omega-3s is that they may reduce your risk of cancer. In animal studies, these essential fats have slowed the growth of a wide array of cancers and also kept them from spreading.[5] Although the human research is in its infancy, researchers have shown that omega-3s can slow or even reverse the extreme weight loss that accompanies advanced cancer and also hasten recovery from surgery.[6,7]
Omega-3s are most abundant in seafood and certain nuts and seeds such as flaxseeds and walnuts, but they are also found in animals raised on pasture. The reason is simple. Omega-3s are formed in the chloroplasts of green leaves and algae. Sixty percent of the fatty acids in grass are omega-3s. When cattle are taken off omega-3 rich grass and shipped to a feedlot to be fattened on omega-3 poor grain, they begin losing their store of this beneficial fat. Each day that an animal spends in the feedlot, its supply of omega-3s is diminished.[8] The graph below illustrates this steady decline.
Data from: J Animal Sci (1993) 71(8):2079-88.
It has been estimated that only 40 percent of Americans consume an adequate supply of omega-3 fatty acids. Twenty percent have blood levels so low that they cannot be detected.[10] Switching to the meat, milk, and dairy products of grass-fed animals is one way to restore this vital nutrient to your diet.
REAL Beef Eat Grass -- Not Grains
Grain fed beef can have an omega 6:3 ratio higher than 20:1
J. Anim. Sci. 2000. 78:2849-2855
This well exceeds the 4:1 ratio where health problems begin to show up because of the essential fat imbalance. Also grain fed beef can have over 50% of the total fat as the far less healthy saturated fat.
Grass fed beef has an omega 6:3 ratio of 0.16 to 1
This is the
ratio science suggests is ideal for our diet. This is about the
same ratio that fish has. Grass fed beef usually has less than 10%
of its fat as saturated. If you are a pregnant or breastfeeding
mom, the extra omega 3 from the grass fed beef will provide
incredible nutritional benefits for your child.
The CLA Bonus. Meat and dairy products from grass-fed ruminants are the richest known source of another type of good fat called "conjugated linoleic acid" or CLA. When ruminants are raised on fresh pasture alone, their products contain from three to five times more CLA than products from animals fed conventional diets.[11] (A steak from the most marbled grass-fed animals will have the most CLA ,as much of the CLA is stored in fat cells.)
CLA may be one of our most potent defenses against cancer. In laboratory animals, a very small percentage of CLA - a mere 0.1 percent of total calories - greatly reduced tumor growth. [12] There is new evidence that CLA may also reduce cancer risk in humans. In a Finnish study, women who had the highest levels of CLA in their diet, had a 60 percent lower risk of breast cancer than those with the lowest levels. Switching from grain-fed to grassfed meat and dairy products places women in this lowest risk category.[13] Researcher Tilak Dhiman from Utah State University estimates that you may be able to lower your risk of cancer simply by eating the following grassfed products each day: one glass of whole milk, one ounce of cheese, and one serving of meat. You would have to eat five times that amount of grain-fed meat and dairy products to get the same level of protection.
Vitamin E. In addition to being higher in omega-3s and CLA, meat from grassfed animals is also higher in vitamin E. The graph below shows vitamin E levels in meat from: 1) feedlot cattle, 2) feedlot cattle given high doses of synthetic vitamin E (1,000 IU per day), and 3) cattle raised on fresh pasture with no added supplements. The meat from the pastured cattle is four times higher in vitamin E than the meat from the feedlot cattle and, interestingly, almost twice as high as the meat from the feedlot cattle given vitamin E supplements. [14] In humans, vitamin E is linked with a lower risk of heart disease and cancer. This potent antioxidant may also have anti-aging properties. Most Americans are deficient in vitamin E.
Data from: Smith, G.C. "Dietary supplementation of vitamin E to cattle to improve shelf life and case life of beef for domestic and international markets." Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-1171
Grass-fed cows are not mad cows.
Choosing products from cattle and dairy cows that have been
raised on pasture all of their lives eliminates all possibility of
mad cow disease because the animals are never fed anything but
pasture grasses, hay, and grass silage (a form of fermented
grass.) For the record, the animals are superior to feedlot
animals in other ways as well, including the fact that they are
not treated with hormones, low-level antibiotics, or other
pharmaceutical drugs, and they are never fed "by-product"
feedstuff, a long list of ingredients that can include chicken
manure, chicken feathers, stale candy, and aerobically digested
municipal garbage. Grass-fed cows eat what Nature designed them to
eat, insuring their health and yours.
References
Portion of the above information has been obtained
from www.eatwild.com
1.Rule, D. C., K. S. Brought on, S. M. Shellito, and G. Maiorano.
"Comparison of Muscle Fatty Acid Profiles and Cholesterol
Concentrations of Bison, Beef Cattle, Elk, and Chicken." J Anim
Sci 80, no. 5 (2002): 1202-11.
2. Davidson, M. H., D. Hunninghake, et al. (1999). "Comparison of
the effects of lean red meat vs lean white meat on serum lipid
levels among free-living persons with hypercholesterolemia: a
long-term, randomized clinical trial." Arch Intern Med 159(12):
1331-8. The conclusion of this study: "... diets containing
primarily lean red meat or lean white meat produced similar
reductions in LDL cholesterol and elevations in HDL cholesterol,
which were maintained throughout the 36 weeks of treatment."
3. Siscovick, D. S., T. E. Raghunathan, et al. (1995). "Dietary
Intake and Cell Membrane Levels of Long-Chain n-3 Polyunsaturated
Fatty Acids and the Risk of Primary Cardiac Arrest." JAMA 274(17):
1363-1367.
4. Simopolous, A. P. and Jo Robinson (1999). The Omega Diet. New
York, HarperCollins. My previous book, a collaboration with Dr.
Artemis P. Simopoulos, devotes an entire chapter to the vital role
that omega-3s play in brain function.
5. Rose, D. P., J. M. Connolly, et al. (1995). "Influence of Diets
Containing Eicosapentaenoic or Docasahexaenoic Acid on Growth and
Metastasis of Breast Cancer Cells in Nude Mice." Journal of the
National Cancer Institute 87(8): 587-92.
6. Tisdale, M. J. (1999). "Wasting in cancer." J Nutr 129(1S Suppl):
243S-246S.
7. Tashiro, T., H. Yamamori, et al. (1998). "n-3 versus n-6
polyunsaturated fatty acids in critical illness." Nutrition 14(6):
551-3.
8. Duckett, S. K., D. G. Wagner, et al. (1993). "Effects of time
on feed on beef nutrient composition." J Anim Sci 71(8): 2079-88.
9. Lopez-Bote, C. J., R.Sanz Arias, A.I. Rey, A. Castano, B.
Isabel, J. Thos (1998). "Effect of free-range feeding on omega-3
fatty acids and alpha-tocopherol content and oxidative stability
of eggs." Animal Feed Science and Technology 72: 33-40.
10. Dolecek, T. A. and G. Grandits (1991). "Dietary
Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Mortality in the Multiple Risk
Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT)." World Rev Nutr Diet 66:
205-16.
11. Dhiman, T. R., G. R. Anand, et al. (1999). "Conjugated
linoleic acid content of milk from cows fed different diets." J
Dairy Sci 82(10): 2146-56. Interestingly, when the pasture was
machine-harvested and then fed to the animals as hay, the cows
produced far less CLA than when they were grazing on that pasture,
even though the hay was made from the very same grass. The fat
that the animals use to produce CLA is oxidized during the
wilting, drying process. For maximum CLA, animals need to be
grazing living pasture.
12. Ip, C, J.A. Scimeca, et al. (1994) "Conjugated linoleic acid.
A powerful anti-carcinogen from animal fat sources." p. 1053.
Cancer 74(3 suppl):1050-4.
13. Aro, A., S. Mannisto, I. Salminen, M. L. Ovaskainen, V. Kataja,
and M. Uusitupa. "Inverse Association between Dietary and Serum
Conjugated Linoleic Acid and Risk of Breast Cancer in
Postmenopausal Women." Nutr Cancer 38, no. 2 (2000): 151-7.
14. Smith, G.C. "Dietary supplementation of vitamin E to cattle to
improve shelf life and case life of beef for domestic and
international markets." Colorado State University, Fort Collins,
Colorado 80523-1171