Why Is Grass-Fed So Important?

www.psychologytoday.com - January 23rd, 2013

It’s universally accepted that wild fish like salmon, which eat the algae and plankton at the bottom of the sea, are a healthier source of protein over their coastline fish farm-raised counterparts. Over their life span of eating sea greens, these fish accumulate a wonderful concentration of essential fatty acids in their muscles. When we take in these essential fatty acids (also known as ‘good fats’), these health benefits are conferred to our bodies: These healthy fats create lower inflammation in our blood vessels.

Inflammation is a major factor in many diseases including heart disease, cancer, emotional illness and auto-immune conditions. In fact, inflammation is more of a factor in heart disease than even cholesterol. Healthy fat intake from fish has been shown to be an important factor for better brain function, and strongly suspected as the main reason populations who eat more fish-based diet have lower levels of anxiety and depression too.

What About the Beef?

What many people do not know, however, is that when cows eat green plants like grass, they will also accumulate healthy fatty acids in their muscle tissue in a way that is similar to the way the fish do it. The same for chicken. The problem is, most of the meat and chicken we eat come from animals that are fed grains, corn and genetically modified soy. When range animals are fed these grains, corn and soy, they do not collect these same unsaturated healthy fats in their muscle tissue, and instead collect more saturated, unhealthy fats.  In natural food stores, these meats are touted as “antibiotic and hormone free,” “natural,” “organically-fed” and “grain-fed.” Meat that is labeled this way simply means that the animals were not treated with nasty hormones or antibiotics to help them grow faster (by the way, 70 percent of the total antibiotics used in the world are used specifically to make livestock grow faster).

While natural meats are certainly a step up from the regular antibiotic and hormone treated animals, being "natural" doesn't necessarily help the fatty acid profile of the animal meat — which may be the most important piece for our health. The problem here is that most meat labeled “organic” typically comes from animals that were still fed grains — not grass or plants. So this meat will not have the healthy unsaturated fats we humans need for lower inflammation and healthy arteries.

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Just What is 'Natural' Food?

www.latimes.com - November 30th, 2012

The word is included on many products despite meaning almost nothing.

Until a couple of years ago, Ben & Jerry's ice cream was labeled as natural. Then the company came under pressure from the Center for Science in the Public Interest because the ice cream contained, among other things, partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Unlike genetically engineered foods, for which there is little if any evidence of harm to human health, partially hydrogenated oil has been implicated as an artery-clogging ingredient to be avoided. And you can bet the soybean oil didn't hydrogenate itself. The company agreed to drop the "natural" label in 2010.

The real issue here isn't whether GMO Inside believes that different methods of human tinkering make some foods less natural than others, but that the reassuring word "natural" is included on many a product's label while meaning almost nothing. A 2009 study found that shoppers thought "natural" indicated a purer, more regulated substance than "organic." It's the other way around. But the whole point of rules for labeling is to allow people to make informed decisions about their food.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has considered defining the term a couple of times, and most recently gave up the effort in 2008. (Perhaps it should have started by trying to figure out what consumers consider natural to mean.) As the examples above show, attempts to regulate use of the word would be complicated, fraught with politics and would almost certainly involve multiple lawsuits by the food industry. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the less-complicated arena of meat and poultry, defines natural as "minimally processed," but that doesn't mean the animals were raised without antibiotics or hormones.)

The only times the FDA generally objects to the word "natural" is when it's used to describe products containing artificial coloring, flavoring or "synthetic substances." Could bioengineered DNA be considered a synthetic substance? Possibly.

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