In a culture where many are choosing to reduce their meat consumption, here, Dr Jenny Goodman, ecological medicine doctor and author of Staying Alive in Toxic Times, tells us why including grass-fed beef in your diet can be hugely beneficial.
100 per cent grass-fed beef has several nutritional advantages. Firstly, it contains Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), which appears to help keep blood sugar down, thus benefiting diabetics and pre-diabetics - and that is most of us these days. CLA also appears to lower the risk of breast cancer and other cancers. Secondly, there is a higher ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids in grass-fed beef, although there is of course far more omega 3 in oily fish.
Nutritionally, although nuts and seeds and other plant foods do contain essential minerals like iron and zinc, these vital nutrients are far more absorbable from meat than they are from plants. The human gut, unlike the ruminant gut, has only one stomach, and must work much harder to extract minerals from plants than a cow's gut does. Some humans can do this - the healthy vegans - but in my experience they are few and far between. Most of us need some animal food some of the time; we evolved as omnivores. And, of course, the kind of animals we would have been eating for most of our evolutionary history would have been naturally grass-fed, not grain-fed.
Regarding the fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin A and vitamin E, grass-fed beef is an excellent source. Because these vitamins are fat-soluble, we can store them - we do not need some every day, but we do need some sometimes. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have caught a wild animal from time to time, and the fat-soluble vitamins they obtained from that feast would have lasted them easily till the next catch, so they could manage on the plants they gathered in between. But it should be noted, they did not just eat the muscle meat, like we do now - they ate the fat, the liver, the kidneys, heart, bone marrow, glands and brain too. We have become squeamish about these parts of the animal, call them offal and throw them away, which is a tragic waste, because that is where most of the nutritional value is.
Perhaps this is the moment to reclaim these organs as valuable food and re-educate the public about their benefits. That said, I personally would only eat liver from an organically reared animal, as the liver is the organ of detoxification, and the liver of a non-organic animal, even grass-fed, might contain pesticide residues. The B vitamins, like the minerals, are found in both plant and animal food, but we humans absorb them much better from animal food. In 19th century China, when whole-grain rice was replaced by white (polished) rice, many poor Chinese people died of Beri-beri, the deficiency disease caused by lack of vitamin B1, Thiamine. That was because their only source of vitamin B1 was the outer husk of the rice grain. But rich Chinese people did not die; they did not even get ill, because they got plenty of vitamin B1 from eating meat - which the poor could not afford. Nutritional supplements are useful for some of the people some of the time, but there is no substitute for getting our minerals, vitamins and essential fatty acids from real food, as nature intended.
Finally, from an environmental point of view, yes, cows produce methane, but let's be honest, so do humans. I am far more worried about the effects of toxic car fumes on our health and the health of the planet, than I am about cows farting. And if the cows, and other farm animals, are allowed to roam freely over arable fields, in rotation, as they used to do, then they fertilise the ground naturally, sustainably and safely. They return the carbon to the earth, and there is no need for chemical fertilisers.
