Day 53- Grass-Fed vs. Corn-Fed Beef

I went for over 10 years without eating red meat (well occasionally I had beef jerky), not for really any other reason other than I just didn't like the taste, smell, or texture of red meat. I grew up with beef that my family raised, so I knew what good quality meat was at a early age. Yeah, the butchering process disgusted me, and the cow hides that we had hanging in our garage, but I didn't decide to stop eating meat for those reasons.

Over the last few years, I have really changed my views on food and eating, and during this new transformation I decided that I was missing red meat from my diet. My husband who has always been a big meat eater, was stoked at my decision, and commended me when I started bringing home beef when I would go grocery shopping. But what we didn't see eye to eye on, what the type of meat that we would bring home. To me if I am going to eat red meat, I'm only going to buy good quality meat. He on the other hand went for whatever was on sale in the meat section.

So hence the purpose of today's blog. I have been working with my husband on learning how to read labels on meat, but the truth is there are so many other people out there, just like him, that don't know the difference between the types of meat that they are purchasing or the benefits from buying good quality meat. When it comes to grass-fed vs corn-fed beef, the difference can be surprising.

First of all, a little anatomy of the cow's digestive system. Grazing animals, such as cows and sheep, are designed to convert grasses into food that we can digest. Their rumen (cow's stomach) ferment the cellulose from the grass into protein and fats, due to the natural bacteria that resides there. Unlike the human stomach, the pH of the rumen is neutral. When cows are feed a corn diet, the rumen becomes highly acidic, which causes heartburn in the animal.

Michael Pollan, author of "Omnivore's Dilemma," "In Defense of Food," and several others, wrote an interesting article in the New York Times regarding feeding cows a grain-based diet:

"Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.
A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.
Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. “I don’t know how long you could feed this ration before you’d see problems,” Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually “blow out their livers” and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.
What keeps a feedlot animal healthy—or healthy enough—are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed—a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for what we feed them."

So why is it that we feed cows a corn based diet rather than what they were designed to eat? Because it's not only cheaper, but it's faster as well. Instead of waiting until the cows are large enough, say around 4 to 5 years, corn fattens them up faster so that they can be ready at as young as 14-16 months.

Alight, we already know that feeding cows corn-fed includes the use of antibiotics and increases the chances of disease being transferred to us, but what we haven't covered yet is the nutritional differences in grass-fed vs corn-fed beef. Grass-fed beef not only is lower in overall fat and in saturated fat, but it also provides more Omega-3 fatty acids, more conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), and more vitamin E. Corn-fed beef actually typically contains only 15-20 percent as much Omega-3 fatty acids as does grass-fed beef.

Now the hard part, where do we find this kind of beef? When shopping for beef, there are a couple of key words: Organic, Grass-fed, Free-range, and Hormone/Antibiotic free. Just because the label contains one of these key words, does not mean that the rest are just understood to be there as well. If a label states that it is "organic" and "hormone/antibiotic free," you still need to confirm that it was grass-fed, since even on organic farms cows can be feed grain, especially in their last few months. Then you have labels that only state that it was grass-fed, without the organic label. In this case you have to be carefully since the grass it was grazing on could have been treated with synthetic fertilizers and herbicides. So the end result to look for? Grass-fed and finished, organic meat is your top option!

Pura Vida!

Alica Ryan, NTP