Why Grass-fed Meat (or Wild Game) Is So Darn Good For You

Right, so last week was Antioxidant Week… this week, let’s roll with a little Omega-3 information.

I guess I’m giving away the answer to the title with that intro, but hey, this isn’t a mystery novel, it’s a health information site, so that’s okay.

Meat… especially red meat… gets a bad rep, and it really shouldn’t.  Now, if you’re a vegan who does what they do for ethical reasons, that’s cool.  I personally do not subscribe to those beliefs but I do respect them.

I’m talking about the health reputation of meat.  For a while there, everybody seemed like they wanted to punch red meat in the face, metaphorically speaking, of course.  Fish and chicken, well, that was okay, but red meat… red meat was a dirty SOB who deserved a horrible death.

Well, all that was just plain wrong.  In fact, chicken and fish can be worse for you than red meat.  YES.  You read that right.  There’s probably a lot of out-dated nutritionists pooping in their pants right about now after reading that, and I don’t care.  By the time I’m done with this article, you’ll see why I can make that statement and feel 100% confident about it.

To explain why, first we need to understand WHY red meat was thrown out of the house and sent to die in the woods.  In a word:  fat.  In a couple of words:  The People Who Hate Fat Movement.

Not too long ago, everybody was convinced that a low-fat diet was the way to go.  It made intuitive sense:  if you didn’t want to BE fat, why would you EAT fat?  Surely, the fat on your dinner plate, just transmorphed into fat on your butt.

Red meat tends to have more fat in it than chicken or fish, so, the reasoning went, red meat is bad and will break into your house and steal your TV.

Plus, there were some studies showing that people who ate red meat tended to keel over and die faster than other people.  So even more reason to hate red meat, right?

WRONG!

The problem is, this reasoning is flawed on several levels.  Let’s start with the first wrong assumption:  that fat is bad.

It’s not.  Fat is actually a vital nutrient our body desperately requires.  It does things like make up cell membranes and build nerves (your brain is included in that, since it’s a big ol’ bundle of nerves) and form the basis for hormones. In particular, there are fats called Essential Fatty Acids (fatty acid is just a fancy word for fat) that are, as the name implies, essential.

Essential, meaning, you have to eat them, because your body can’t make them by itself.  The main EFAs are called Omega-3 and Omega-6.  You should have a balance between the two, but most of us don’t.  Most of the USA has around a 30:1 ratio in favor of Omega-6, which causes all kinds of health problems (which I don’t have space to go into here, but I talk about it in other posts).  The short version is, a diet high in Omega-6 makes you die young.

Red meat can be a big part of the culprit with that skewed ratio.  Notice I used the words “can be”.  That’s the key.

How’s red meat involved?  Well, because cattle aren’t raised the way they were meant to live.  Namely, they’re not allowed to walk around and eat grass like they’ve done over the course of a couple hundred thousand years’ worth of evolution.  No, instead, we pen them up into tiny spaces and stuff them full of corn, which makes them get big and fat faster (which makes them more profitable).

Corn, by the way, is pretty high in Omega-6 fatty acids.  Not so much that eating a cob of corn is a problem, but when you’re stuffing livestock full of corn almost exclusively, guess what?  All that Omega-6 goes into the cow.

Grass, on the other hand, is high in Omega-3.  Some of you are anticipating where I’m headed with this.  Since we all know “you are what you eat”, if a cow eats mostly food that’s high in Omega-6, what’s it mostly full of?  Yep.  Omega-6.  What sort of fat will be dominant in a corn-fed steak?  Omega-6.

On the other hand, if you have a cow eating mostly food high in Omega-3, what’s it mostly full of?  Omega-3, right. And, of course, a grass-fed steak will be high in Omega-3 compared to Omega-6.

So, the problem isn’t red meat.  The problem is, how’s the red meat being made?  The fat content is not the issue… the fat QUALITY is the issue.

Therefore, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with red meat, just because it has fat in it.  So long as the fat quality is good, the meat is healthy.  This also goes for other animal food products, like milk and eggs.  Whatever is in the feed that the livestock is consuming, determines how healthy the food coming from the livestock will be.

Notice I included eggs in that last paragraph.  Remember I said red meat can be healthier than chicken or fish?  Here’s the part where I explain that.

Chicken and fish aren’t magical creatures that automatically get to be healthy for you just because they’re ugly.  Like any other animal, what they eat determines how healthy they are.

Chickens are also designed to be free-roaming creatures that eat wild grasses and bugs and all sort of stuff.  Guess what most livestock chickens do?  Live in a tiny cage and eat Omega-6 filled corn.  Guess what they’re mostly made of?  If you didn’t say Omega-6, you’ve deeply hurt my feelings.  Guess what a corn-chomping hen’s eggs are mostly filled with?  Omega-6.

Conversely, free-range, grass-fed chickens are chock full of Omega-3s and so are their eggs.  The same principle even applies to fish!  The bottom of the fish food chain is algae, which is like the Big Momma Gold Mine of Omega-3.  So fish eating algae are full of Omega-3, and fish that eat fish full of Omega-3 are also full of Omega-3 and so on and so forth.  This is why fish oils from wild-caught fish are so high in Omega-3s that they form the basis for Omega-3 supplements.

However, some fish is now grown in fish “farms”, pools of water where the fish are corralled and fed a crappy diet.  Which, as you know now, means they become crappy to eat.

So nobody gets a pass just because their name is “beef” or “chicken” or “fish”.  It’s all about how you were raised, and what you were fed while you were being raised.  Remember, quality of fat is more important than quantity of fat.  Animals raised in as close to a natural, wild state as possible, will have the healthiest meat, eggs, and milk.

This is why wild game is a fantastic food source.  By definition, those little buggers are out there running around, feeding on wild grasses, berries, each other, whatever they normally would eat in a natural state.  And, therefore, their bodies are composed of a healthy mix of essential fats (amongst other things, of course, like protein).

So now you know why I get excited when I find another place carrying grass-fed eggs or beef or chicken.  It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s a bazillion times healthier.  What’s your body worth to you?

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Stay healthy!