Organic food
became the rage overseas while we were living in the UK. My initial response was that it
was a money making racket, it was extremely expensive and besides, is there
really any difference in the quality of organic food to normal food?
I’m sure many South
Africans feel the same. A few years later I
began to investigate the difference between these two and I was shocked!
Before we look at the
differences between grain fed beef and grass fed, let us consider items we buy
in the supermarket. If you look at the label they are full of “E Numbers”,
which are in fact man made chemicals that are added to food to enhance their
flavouring.
Grass fed vs grain fed beef
Let us consider the cow and
the chicken. The chicken was designed to eat grain as its staple diet and it
has a very thick stomach.
A cow was designed to eat
grass. It has no way of digesting grain, so what happens is that the cow gets sick, its
lungs begin to collapse and to keep it alive, the farmer injects it with
antibiotics. It’s a proven fact that antibiotics can cause weight gain.
Twenty ago, things changed
in South Africa, big business took over, informing farmers that to remain
profitable they had to change their way of farming and begin farming using
feed-lots. Vast surpluses of grain meal, produced in mass, helped expand the
cattle-feeding industry.
Now animals, many of which
have never seen a blade of grass, are fattened on unnatural diets, with added
hormones and antibiotics and churned out for slaughter in little more than a
year. This efficient industrial process guarantees that there will always be
plenty of meat at your local supermarket and that it will consistently be
inexpensive.
It’s costing us.
One need
only look to the beef-loving country Argentina. Though Argentina leads the
world in per-capita red meat consumption, the country enjoys lower numbers in
deaths-per-1000 of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. And, yes, Argentina has specialized
in grass-fed beef production for centuries.
Something else to consider
is that most commercial grain in South Africa is Genetically Modified (GMO). What is
this grain doing to the animals and to us who are eating the meat? Read more about this…
Omega oils and CLA
The fat of grass fed beef
contains omega 3 and CLA, both very important in our diets. Grain fed beef
contains omega 6 which can increase heart disease, but very little of the good omega 3. .
The ratios of omega-6 to
omega-3 approach 20 to1. Good quantities of these help prevent heart disease,
stroke, rheumatoid problems, depression and many other diseases. CLA in grass
fed animals produce 2 to 4 times more than their grain fed counterparts.
So do you love your body?
Start eating healthy meat.
Article by Ray from Gourmet Butcher. Order you grass fed and free range meat from this online store.
For further reading
please go to; http://www.gourmetbutcher.co.za/Interesting-Info.html.
You can now purchase Grass
Fed Beef online and it’s delivered to your door at www.gourmetbutcher.co.za.