Eating Grass

If money were no object, my CF gym would be right in the middle of my pastured beef cattle. Pastured animals change everything in the food chain from bad to good, and would be cost competitive without the negative impact of the Feds.

Along with taste, freshness and cost, consumers these days are also concerned with where their food comes from.

This new focus has created a renewed interest in grass-fed beef, both as a healthy alternative to corn- and hormone-fed cows and as an environmentally friendly industry.

Until just a few generations ago, beef cattle intended for human consumption were raised on a diet of grasses and hay. Their diet began to include corn and grains with the rise of industrialized farming after World War II. Pasture-based farming never went away completely, though, and is growing on family farms across the U.S.

Pasture-based agriculture benefits humans, the environment and animals in many ways. Grass-fed beef is higher than grain-fed in omega-3 fatty acids, and lower in calories and fat. It also has higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid, another fat thought to reduce heart disease and cancer risks, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Read more:  http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/From-grass-to-plate-1193392.php#ixzz1HrHr9zLj

Considering CLA

A quick survey of the interesting looking links from a google search on CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) revealed the following.  The BLUF:   CLA is another ingredient we used to get naturally as hunter gatherers, which seems to be deficient in the SAD.  Eat grassfed animals, eat pastured butter, and rest easy knowing you probably got the CLA you needed and are not deficient.

http://www.mercola.com/beef/cla.htm
Pretty typical summary from Mercola, in which he touts the possible advantages of CLA consumption from grass fed beef, and skewers the industrial food chain and all of its adherants, sycophants and government enablers.  Takaway: CLA seems to be good but evidence is minimal. 

http://www.eatwild.com/cla.html
Takeaway: CLA as a supplement is as questionable as 98% of supplements, but the natural form is available in grass fed cattle and is another factor in a growing list of the differences in grass fed vice feedlot cattle products:

Where do you get CLA? Many people take a synthetic version that is widely promoted as a diet aid and muscle builder. New research shows that the type of CLA in the pills may have some potentially serious side effects, including promoting insulin resistance, raising glucose levels, and reducing HDL (good) cholesterol. (3)

Few people realize that CLA is also found in nature, and this natural form does not have any known negative side effects. The most abundant source of natural CLA is the meat and dairy products of grassfed animals. Research conducted since 1999 shows that grazing animals have from 3-5 times more CLA than animals fattened on grain in a feedlot. Simply switching from grainfed to grassfed products can greatly increase your intake of CLA. (4)

http://www.naturalnews.com/010126.html
A sad article, well written but from my perspective, terminally mis-informed. Nice discussion of CLA's possible benefits, but since the author's so poorly informed about saturated fats, it's hard to take anything in this article seriously.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2007/01/30/21608.aspx
The author reviews two studies, one on rats and one on mice, which had mixed results from CLA supplementation.  Takeaway:  Don't supplement CLA if you are a rat or a mouse.

Link for this quote follows.  Takaway:  don't read The Health Ranger unless you like this sort of speculation.

I've often said that raw broccoli is such a powerful anti-cancer food that if it could be patented and sold in capsules, pharmaceutical companies would charge patients $100 a plate for the same chemical compounds that you can get in broccoli florets. So if you're looking for a supplement that can help stop breast cancer, CLA is marginally effective, but it is way down on the list -- near the bottom of the list as far as I'm concerned -- of things that are effective at preventing and reversing breast cancer. Heck, even natural sunlight has a far more powerful preventive effect than CLA, and breast cancer is precisely one of the main diseases that appears in people who lack frequent exposure to natural sunlight (they have a sunlight deficiency).
Cancer is also addressed by consuming various sea vegetables. In fact, taking daily supplements of seaweed, kelp, and fucoidan extracts is well known to both prevent and even reverse breast cancer. Dulse is another outstanding sea vegetable, and of course, spirulina is harvested from the oceans as well and contains a powerful anti-cancer pigment chemical that both gives spirulina its cyan color and demonstrates powerful anti-tumor effects in clinical studies performed in Japan.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/001579.html#ixzz1BW6wgjWG

The Health Ranger is one smart, passionate guy, and I think his advocacy is admirable; where we part is his advocacy of 'superfoods.'  I don't see a lot of evidence that we're going to thrive by hunting down a bunch of so called superfoods, rather, the way to thrive is to avoid eating foods that damage us by intelligently applying the paleolithic model of nutrition.  When I see anyone advocating a 'superfood' that comes in a quart container that's loaded with sugars, I can't take that advice or advisor seriously.

Butter? Yes!

Nice write up by Whole9; my comments at the end.
http://whole9life.com/2010/11/butter/
[We can’t justify butter] consumption without making some significant efforts to improve the quality of the butter and remove the milk solids.

• Grass-fed or “pastured”. The cows must be grass-fed, or “pastured”, indicating that they are not raised primarily on unnatural diets.  This is perhaps the biggest contributing factor to the overall health of the cow, and the milk it produces.  These cows live outside, are free to roam, and are treated humanely, unlike their factory “farmed” counterparts.  Healthy, happy cows living in their natural environment produce healthier butter.

• Organic. The cows must not be given hormones or antibiotics, or be exposed to synthetic pesticides and other banned substances. While the “organic” label is sometimes manipulated to increase profits, in this instance, it actually means something with respect to the cow’s health and treatment.  None of that junk in the cow’s environment means none can make their way into your butter.

• Clarified. You then must remove the dairy proteins by clarifying the organic, pastured butter at home.  (Instructions for clarifying your own butter are easy to find on the web.)   The clarification process removes the milk proteins, leaving behind pure, golden butterfat. (Just so you know, ghee and clarified butter are similar but not identical; ghee is heated longer, until the milk solids brown.  That imparts a richer, smokier flavor into the butterfat.)

In summary, the only way we can recommend eating butter is if it comes from a humanely raised, grass-fed, organic source, and you take the time to clarify it.  There are no major down sides to butter produced in such a manner, and we can happily recommend you use your clarified butter or ghee as one of your (varied) added fat sources.
Whole9's recommendations are on the conservative side for me.  I've read Dr. Cordain's concerns about dairy, and while there's obviously some risk, the big risk is in overconsuming carbohydrate.  In my view, that's 80% of the problem, and you needn't worry about the other 20% until you nail the first 80% and get your carbohydrate consumption within a safe range, for a long enough period of time that you allow your metabolic systems to heal.  That said, if you follow the above process you get an even better fuel source than can be had by just choosing pastured dairy.

A slice of pastured dairy butter is now like a dessert for me.  It sure adds a lot of flavor and pleasure to eating deli meat!  My kids like it too, even just plain.  Whether or not it has the CLA (conjugated linoleic acid; google it) it is supposed to have, or not, it is at worst a very fine fuel for the well tuned human engines.