The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth About What You Should Eat and Why by Jonny Bowden Ph.d. C. N. S

Author:Jonny Bowden Ph.d. C. N. S.
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth About What You Should Eat and Why
ISBN: 9781592332281
Publisher: Fair Winds Press
Published: 2007-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

WORTH KNOWING

Urban legend department: Everyone thinks that the reason we get tired and fall asleep after Thanksgiving dinner is because of the tryptophan (an amino acid) in turkey. Nope. Four ounces of turkey actually has less than half a gram of tryptophan. We get sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner cause we eat too darn much; we zone out while all the blood leaves our head to go down to the digestive tract, where it has a ton of work to do.

Grass-fed Beef

Beef is beef and carrots are carrots, right?

Wrong, grasshopper.

Whether your food is animal, vegetable, plant, fish, or fruit, where a food comes from, how it’s raised (or grown), what it ate (or was fed), what soil it was grown on (or grazed on), how it is processed, prepared, and cooked (or not cooked) is vitally important to its nutritional content and absolutely central to its effect on your health.

Which brings us to beef.

The natural diet of cattle is grass. It is absolutely not grain. Yet most of the beef that comes to us via traditional routes has been eating nothing but grain. When a ruminant like a cow is taken off its natural diet of pasture and fattened on grain, it loses nutrients. According to one reputable source, grain-fed meat has only one-quarter as much vitamin E, one-eighth as much beta-carotene, and, probably most important, one-third as many omega-3 fatty acids. (This makes sense—grain has far fewer of these nutrients than fresh pasture!)

Grass-fed Beef Ranks Higher in All Nutritional Categories

The fat content of grass-fed beef is quite different from that of grain fed because the diet of the animals significantly alters their fatty-acid composition. Cattle that are primarily fed grass enhance their omega-3 content by 60 percent. A massive amount of research indicates that omega-3 fatty acids reduce inflammation and help prevent certain chronic diseases such as heart disease. The ratio of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 fatty acids in our diet is of enormous importance to our health. An inappropriate balance of these essential fatty acids (a high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio) contributes to the development of disease, while a proper balance helps maintain and even improves health. Our Paleolithic ancestors consumed a ratio of between 1:1 and 4:1 omega-6 to omega-3, which is believed to be optimal. The typical American diet is between 11:1 and 30:1 in favor of the proinflammatory omega-6s. The fat of grass-fed beef has a much more favorable omega-6 to omega-3 ratio than the fat of grain-fed cows.

And the benefits don’t stop with higher omega-3s. Ruminants like cows produce another very important fat called CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), which has long been investigated for its anticancer activity as well as for its ability to reduce fat accumulation, particularly around the abdomen. The antiatherosclerotic activity of CLA was first reported in 1994, and evidence for its health-promoting properties has continued to grow since then. CLA comes mainly from the meat and milk of ruminants (cows). Problem is, grain-fed cattle don’t make nearly as much CLA as their grass-fed cousins do.

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