Light Your Money on Fire, Or Eat Grass Fed Meat!

It is in the news again! The horrible treatment of animals for human consumption is downright disgusting. There is no dignity in living or in death for these animals. They are treated unfairly and live a miserable life caged up, beat up, filled with sickness and disease, and housed in unsanitary conditions.

Whatever happened to treating animals with respect. Well, there is such a case of respect for animals when a farmer decides to let his animals go cage free and live off of the pasture. Yes, it is still cruel to kill another animal for our palate, but at least if we are going to continue this practice we need to let these animals live a healthy life. In fact, if they are being abused and are eating poorly, you are taking in what they were. You are eating a very unhealthy piece of meat even though it looks great. The statement could not be more true…you are what you eat!

Believe it or not, cows are designed to only eat grass! This is why a cow has four chambers. They ferment the food they eat. Their chambers of the “stomach” are designed to make every protein they need to sustain a healthy life! Pretty simple isn’t it?

The problem is that the farmer learned that a cow could gain more weight by having them pasture less and eat more grain, soy, and corn. When a cow eats these items, they gain weight very fast in the form of unhealthy fats because of their inability to process all the sugar. They are just like us! We may love to eat our cereal everymorning, but our pancreas hates us! The more sugar we take in, the heavier we get. We are proving it right now with our kids. They take in sugar ladened substances full of high fructose corn syrup and their weight increases dramatically. This very same thing happens to the cow.

To save the day we do have cows, chickens, pigs and other animals that are allowed to live a great life roaming the farm. Cows allowed to roam and graze, chickens allowed to roam and peck, and pigs allowed to run around and use their nose to find food do exist.

In this article, my focus is on grass feed beef and the health advantages of including them in our diet. The most important reason to eat grass fed beef is because of its ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fats. In a grass fed cow that is free to roam the pasture…(gets exercise)…the balance of omega 3’s to 6’s are on a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio. On the other hand, a cow that does not get exercise and eats grain, corn, soy, and sileage has

Why is this important? In the most basic understanding of these fats, omega 6’s are pro-inflammatory (creates inflammation) and omega 3’s are anti-inflammatory. In America today, we consume and abundance of omega 6 fatty acids. In fact, our ratio of omega 6 fats to omega 3 fats stands at about 20:1 to 50:1. Folks, this ratio is supposed to be 1:1 to live a healthy life!

In fact, DHA which comes from omega 3 fats, makes up 60% of the fat in our brains. When we disturb this omega 3 to 6 ratio, the omega 6’s become the cell membranes in our brain which greatly affects cell to cell communication! Do you think that improving this ratio can help with things like depression, ADD/ADHD, Parkinsons, M.S., and other various brain lesions? Studies are underway right now on many of these subjects, and some have already been done with very positive results. The simple fact is that our brain is affected by a heavy intake of omega 6 fats without an appropriate balance of omega 3 fats.

Since our ratios are so imbalanced between omega 6’s and 3’s, we live in a pro-inflammatory state. This pro-inflammatory state can lead to further degeneration and diseases like cardiovascular disease, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, kidney disease, diabetes, eye problems, intestinal diseases, etc. Science has linked most of our degenerative diseases to inflammation as the start. This means that virtually any disease you name can be affected by improving your ratio of omega 3 fats to omega 6 fats!

By improving your ratio of omega 3 fats to omega 6 fats, you are reducing your rate of degenerative diseases! Omega 6 fats are very prevelant in most of our processed foods, not to mention the beef that is full of these fatty acids due to the overwhelming amount of feed they consume.

For those of us who do choose to eat meat because we are the top of the food chain (trust me, if we weren’t, we would be running from tigers, lions, etc…they would eat us just like we eat them…it is the balance of the world), we can improve our health by looking for grass fed meats, or we can continue to lead our bodies down the path of inflammatory changes and resultant disease.

If you are spending your money on typical grocery store beef, you might as well go back home to your house and put a $100 bill in the fire! Really, a $100 bill for that $15 steak, because you are inflaming your body with every bite! Inflammation is the path we take towards destroying our health, so that “great” $15 steak will produce health care costs at some point in time. All those “great” rib eyes and sirloins will bring about thousands of dollars of medical costs. Do you want to spend your money on quality meat now, or medical care later…it is your choice! Of course you have to fix other things in your diet too, not just the meat, but this is one step closer to living a healthy life. Pay now for abundance in health, or pay later for our incredible sick care system we live in today!

A quality purveyor of grass fed beef is www.grasslandbeef.com. On their website you can order online and have it shipped to your door. What a perfect way to enjoy meat the way nature intended us to eat it. There are various other internet sites for grass fed beef, but make sure there cows truly only roam the pasture and eat grass. A cows diet does not need to be supplemented in any other way! Enjoy eating your grass fed beef and your amazing health.

Your health and wellness advocate,

Dr. James R. Haakenson

Drink your wine…or should you???

I just read a very informative article on resveratrol published in a monthly newsletter I receive in my office. The author is Dr. Mercola, but I will summarize what he said and the important things you should know about drinking red wine!

I know most of you have heard by know that red wine in moderation can be beneficial because it has antioxidant power. Antioxidants are basically things that keep you from becoming oxidized…like rust forming on a car…that is called oxidation. So, antioxidants prevent oxygen from causing oxidation due to free radicals. Free radicals are oxygen molecules that are missing an electron. Think of this molecule as a “bank robber.” It is constantly trying to steal someones electron (money in the case of a bank robber) to complete itself and make it happy. When it steals an electron it starts the process of free radical damage via oxidation.

Know, all free radicals are not bad. We actually need some free radicals in our body to support metabolic activities. It is the overabundance of free radicals from stressful living that we are concerned about. Free radicals can be produced by anything, and it is exercise, diet, and stress reduction that keeps just the right amount of them around for when we need them.

There is a chemical in red wine called resveratrol. It is a type of a polyphenol that is known as a oligomeric proanthocyanidin. It is an antioxidant with extremely powerful properties. In fact, it is shown in studies to be 50 times stronger than vitamin E and 20 times stronger than vitamin C! Actually, a man by the name of Richard Passwater Ph.D. has studied antioxidants for over 30 years, and has authored a book called Live Better Longer where he shows that OPC’s actually recycle vitamin C and act to prevent vitamin E from oxidation…essentially making them more effective by increasing their utilization

Antioxidants are important because they help to slow inflammation. Studies are leaning towards inflammation being the primary start of most of our major degenerative diseases. Antioxidants have proven to be effective in heart disease, cancer (have to be careful with breast cancer though because studies are controversial, I wouldn’t suggest resveratrol if you have a estrogen based tumor), diabetes, athritis, memory loss, and even erectile dysfunction! I won’t go into the specifics of why these OPC’s, or oligomeric proanthocyanidins, work for these conditions because it could get pretty lenghty, but as long as you understand the basic anti-inflammatory concept…then you understand the main parts.

I have told you all of that to tell you how the red wine you drink, or the supplement you take may not be effective because the way they were grown…you see, all of these supplements you take or the food you eat depends on the methods used when growing them. The reason grapes produce resveratrol is because it is a natural anti-fungal! Yep, you heard it right, it prevents fungus from attacking the grapes! WOW! The moral of the story is that if the grapes don’t “exercise” their “immune system,” you end up with grapes without much of this anti-fungal property because there is no reason to produce it! Isn’t this amazing…even grapes need to exercise their immune system. This coorelates to the human world…the kids with the most immune exercise (little childhood sicknesses, allowed to play in the dirt, pets in the house, etc.) are usually the ones least likely to be sick later!

How does this affect your red wine or the supplements that you take? The answer lies in the details of course. If these grapes that make up your red wine, or your supplement, are grapes from a farm where they use pesticides to prevent fungal infection, chances are the amount of resveratrol is little to none! On top of this, grapes that are grown in a dryer climate have less resveratrol then ones grown in a humid climate.

The point of this story is that organic is best! We all know it, but we don’t practice it. Yeah, I hear you, it is true that organic costs more, but if you begin to switch your diet to actual “real” food, and not processed junk, you will actually end up spending less because you eat less. The reason you eat less is because you feel more satisfied. Why? Because there is more nutritional value in the organic food! It all really comes back to common sense…doesn’t it?

So, enjoy your red wine in moderation, but make sure it actually contains resveratrol by making sure it is organic! As Americans, we are quick to jump to conclusions about any fad or health craze. Since the French drink red wine, smoke, and stay skinny, we have correlated this to consume more red wine because it protects us. Yes, this is true, but only if the wine actually has resveratrol in it. Just because the wine is red does not mean that it contains any of these antioxidants. Remember that there are many wine producers in France…hence most of them grow grapes organically…so, they are drinking quality red wine.

We have to remember that nutrition in general never, and I repeat never has anything to do with quantity, but it always has to do with QUALITY! The reason whole food vitamins are so effective and synthetic vitamins are not. This is a topic I will get to next week…stay tuned!

Your health and wellness advocate,

Dr. James R. Haakenson

P.S. Email me with any topic you would like to discuss. As always, send this on to your friends and family. Also visit www.mercola.com for more health and nutrition advice.