P. D. Mangan tackles that question:
“Grass-fed beef has more omega-3 than grain-fed, but it’s dwarfed by salmon.
What can we conclude from this?
If you eat chicken with any frequency, say once a week, grass-fed beef will not decrease the amount of omega-6 fats that you consume. The chicken in your diet will overwhelm any decrease in omega-6 from eating grass-fed beef.
If you eat any salmon at all – and this is generally true for eating any type of fatty fish – you would get a far greater amount of omega-3 fats than from grass-fed beef.”
His info is quite interesting. I always assumed grass-fed was worth buying, I just couldn’t afford it back in the US. P. D. argues that you’d be better off going for salmon instead.
Here all the meat is grass-fed, with the exception of chicken which I don’t really like anyway, unless it’s one of my farm-raised birds.
I’m not sure about salmon. Much of it is now farmed, which may not be ideal, and the wild-caught salmon from Alaska I believe is contaminated with Fukushima isotopes.
Does it ever seem to you that life, and especially health, is filled with lots of “less bad” choices but few really good ones?
4 responses to “Is Grass-fed Beef Worth the Money?”
I’ve tried to get hubby switched over to grass-fed beef because (for me, at least) it is THE gold standard for taste. I’ve given up on trying to keep up with what is good and what is bad for you in any given week, and now go for real flavor … for me, that is grass-fed.
As for chicken, I let an acquaintance try a pint of my canned chicken, and she asked just HOW I got the chicken to taste like that. I had to explain about the Cornish-Rock commercial broilers, and how young they are in the grocery store, then mentioned I wait at least 20 weeks before slaughtering cockerels. When I said, “It’s like the difference between veal and beef,” she immediately got it.
Yes indeed – once you get used to grass-fed, eating the typical commercial meat isn’t that great anymore.
And chicken! Yes! The first time I tried home-raised free-range chickens was maybe 7 years ago when I was staying at a friend’s house. The flavor was incredible. There was always something about factory chicken that turned my stomach, but these birds were as good as a steak.
People should be eating food in the local food supply chain, because if it’s fresh food – like I assume the meat products in this study are, it would have spent less time losing nutrients through oxidization. Science tries to bring it down to numbers, when it’s always been how food was farmed (by nature) and processed, which ultimately determined the nutritional quality.
So eat whatever is produced locally. If in beef country, eat beef. If in salmon country, eat salmon. Just make sure your supplier is respecting the natural diet of the animal you are eating, and the environment they are raising them in. Outside the laboratory test tube, there are always variances depending on the quality of the environment the animals are raised in.
dear david:
1) wild pacific salmon from any where on the NorthAmerican Coast (and kelp from same area) has been tested many times and does not carry Fukushima radiation isotopes. not true of Japanese origin seafood though! also tuna, which is a fish that migrates close to japan, has been found to have very low levels of radioisotopes, but still they are there… salmon however has been found free of it :) and probably most local/coastal fish.
2) farmed salmon has much higher omega 6 content because of it’s unnatural soy/corn diet. and all of the pesticides/herbicides/ chemicals that go along with that diet and lifestyle, are retained in their fat and meat.
3) omega 3’s aren’t the only benefit to grass fed beef, or any grass-fed ruminant!
factory fed farm animals have similar problems to factory farmed fish. to name a few: high omega 6, high levels of chemicals/highly toxic herbicides in their meat, milk, and organs, higher levels of inflammatory products, abbynormally high levels of IGF (which is a causative factor in diabetes in the USA), and stress sequelae in their meat and organs from animal welfare issues inherent in factory farmed animals.
conclusion: eat what you normally would have locally if it is raised *truly* naturally –ie grass fed for herbivores, wild caught for fish, pastured for chickens. :)