Fat Is Your Friend!
One thing that has become very clear regarding nutritional guidelines is that they are very vulnerable to both corruption and fads. I won’t dive deep into the corruption and ineptitude that gave us The Food Pyramid and its successor MyPlate, but let’s just say that these guidelines are often created without regard to many factors, including your individual lifestyle, and then they are carried forward to ‘fact’ status by the flywheel of pop culture. The idea that red meat in general is bad for you, for example, is not supported by any objective meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCT’s) on red meat consumption. The data from these trials are inconsistent, and many of the trial methods are, to say the least, dubious. On the red meat side, many of these trials don’t even distinguish between eating red meat in a meal of steak with broccoli and eating red meat as an ingredient in a meal made with processed, packaged stroganoff. And most of these trials don’t control for lifestyle at all.
Regardless, even many who accept the possibility that red meat in itself is not bad for you, still accept the idea that lean meat (93% lean according to MyPlate) is the only meat one should be eating. But again, no objective meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, with controls for full diet and lifestyle, supports this idea. This is all to say that the mainstream narrative of red meat (and especially red meat high in fat) being unhealthy, amounts to a pop culture myth. It doesn’t take a scientist to come to this conclusion. Skip the headline, skip the article, skip the meme, skip the interview with the single nutritionist or single scientist on the web or on your TV, skip the story from your favorite journalist, skip the reported ‘scientific consensus’ and the AI summary from your search engine, and don’t take my word for it…just go straight to the collection of published randomized controlled trials, and go straight to the published meta-analyses, and you’ll find that this topic is poorly studied, and that the totality of the evidence is inconclusive. Anyone claiming the totality of the evidence is conclusive is just cherry-picking nonreplicable data and/or suffering from confirmation bias.
All of this brings us (finally) to the question we answered for a group of WSU students who recently visited our ranch: Why do we grain-finish our steers? The answer: Because we love beef, and we love it fully-marbled (high in fat) and tender. Don’t get me wrong, I love lean animal protein at times. I love the wild flavor and texture of lean deer and elk meat, but we prefer our beef the way we finish it.
Oddly enough, before modern dirt farming, the idea of seeking out leaner animal proteins would not have only been absurd, in practice it would’ve been fatal. Before the age of readily-available and abundant carbohydrates, a diet of lean animal protein could lead to something known as ‘rabbit starvation.’ In rabbit starvation your quantity of food could be sufficient, but the quality of your food would not, and it could be fatal. Sure, in the age of readily-available carbohydrates you almost certainly aren’t going to experience rabbit starvation, but the point here is that animal fats serve a very real purpose in our bodies, especially if you have an active lifestyle and you use the energy from these fats. In fact, the higher-concentration energy in animal fats comes with more benefits than energy from carbohydrates, without the negative short-term and long-term effects of blood sugar and insulin spikes. Before modern ranching, one would’ve gotten these fats from fish, beavers, bears, and the like, but again, source of animal fat notwithstanding, the point is that fat can be your friend. Granted, a sedentary lifestyle could make animal fat a problem for you (which is also true for carbohydrates), but based on the actual evidence, the advice for the average person shouldn’t be to avoid animal fat, the advice should be to adopt a more active lifestyle.
Regardless of everything covered above, there are plenty of other reasons that people think they prefer a leaner beef, which is often grass-finished. Some people cite the overall nutritional value of leaner, grass-finished beef, and sure, if you’re comparing barren feedlot beef finished with GMO, glyphosate-desiccated-corn to a grass-finished beef from a well-nourished animal, then you’re likely to see some nutritional advantages to leaner, grass-finished beef. Our beef, however, is a far cry from the aforementioned grain-finished beef, and in any case, the next question I would ask is: Does this nutritional difference even matter in the context of a well-balanced diet? It would be really hard to argue (with rigorous RCT evidence) that it matters. Raspberries, for example, are considered the healthiest berry, but you likely wouldn’t swear off all other berries to eat only raspberries. Again, these differences are negligible in the context of a well-balanced diet.
Other people might cite the ‘natural’ aspect of eating beef from grass-finished cows, but cows would/do eat grains in the wild and it’s odd that the preference that meat animals ONLY eat foods ‘naturally’ in their diet is a preference held mostly for cows, and not so much chickens, or pigs, etc. Some people also cite pesticides and herbicides as a reason to reject grain-finished beef, but if your beef comes from a cow that eats hay in winter (it does), then it has very possibly been fed hay that has been either directly or indirectly exposed to pesticides and/or herbicides. Even if one assumes that low levels of pesticides and herbicides sometimes found in livestock feeds are levels dangerous to livestock and therefore dangerous to humans consuming those livestock, the idea that leaner, grass-finished beef is from animals less likely to have been exposed to pesticides and herbicides is just a really inaccurate generalization.
What it boils down to is this: a lot of people have been convinced that they prefer lean, often grass-finished beef, despite having some disappointing experiences with it in reality. We’re here to tell you that it’s okay to prefer a grain-finished beef, and we think you almost certainly will prefer it once you taste our beef. Not only is it more tender, more moist, and less gamey, every bite is delicious, even down to the buttery-textured chunks of fat on a steak or roast.
If you were talked into preferring lean and/or grass-finished beef, we welcome you back to the fold where we gleefully consume beef high in fat. And this isn’t just any old beef high in fat, our beef is premium grass-and-grain-finished beef from pasture-raised cows. With a stocking rate 100x lower than feedlots (100x more space per head); available live forage managed through grazing rotations; high-quality hays that come at twice the price of traditional feeder hays; and a nutritious, highly-digestible, non-GMO grain finisher free of corn and soy that comes at a price 5x the price of common GMO grains; our beef cannot be compared to any grass-finished or grain-finished beef on the market. You won't find a more flavorful, tender, and well-marbled pasture-raised beef. You are sure to enjoy every bite. Reserve your cuts or bulk beef now in the online Ranch Shop and see for yourself!
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