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What’s in a name – 2
…continuing our rant about labeling (See What’s in a Name below)… Our daughter, Carolyn, is a cancer surgeon in Texas though her career has moved more and more to nutrition and integrative medicine. She is now the director of the Baylor Medical Center integrative medicine department and it was in that role she was interviewed on a Dallas radio program the other day. Naturally, she was singing the benefits of grass fed beef and was surprised when one of the callers to the program said he was a grass fed beef farmer and at that very moment was delivering meat to one of his customers. Almost seemed like a plant,…
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The secret ingredient….
….in Thistle Hill cows and beef. But it’s no secret, we’ve been saying for some time we think (next to Wooz’ care, of course) it’s our mineral program. Visitors invariably remark that they have never seen a group of healthier, more vital animals than those at Thistle Hill. We do a lot of experimenting, try various grazing plans, top-seed clover, spray with different natural fertilizer combinations. But the one thing we’ve held constant is our mineral program. It’s a cafeteria-style approach, where the cows don’t have a mixture of all the essential minerals as designed by “experts” but select from trays of the individual minerals. They do actually self-diagnose. Soils vary…
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Diet advice that makes sense…
A number of bloggers in recent months have discovered Gary Taubes, a science writer, who has analyzed the popular advice on dieting and concluded it just doesn’t make sense. Taubes first book was really an investigative tour de force, debunking the basic “calories in-calories out” approach. He even questioned the benefits of exercise. He has a more popular version of his research out now and, if you’ve never had much luck losing weight and keeping it off, you may want to check it out. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307474259/?tag=powlin-20 Confession: having enjoyed my own cooking too much in recent years, I decided it was time to reverse course. Since the day after Thanksgiving, I’ve…
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We’ll never learn….
…or at least the so-called experts never learn. We continue to be surprised by the number of people who tell us they’ve stopped eating meat for health reasons. Wooz still tries to set the record straight; I’ve given up. And these same people, and for health reasons, will go vegetarian, vegan or eat diet foods containing chemicals guaranteed to poison! We’re reminded of that by a blurb in Kit Pharo’s recent newsletter. Imagine you’ve got a group of men who’ve survived a heart attack. They agree to participate in a four-year-long experiment where they’re placed onto one of two diets: Diet One is a “Mediterranean Diet” high in fruits, vegetables,…
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Once more with feeling…
….we were at a party last night where, once more, someone in one of the conversation circles, announced her family “just doesn’t eat much red meat anymore”. Not a vegetarian exactly, you understand, just would rather not eat much red meat. Because I was a guest (and off-duty), I again let the remark pass. I did not tell the lady that the chicken and pork she was feeding her family was a whole lot worse for them than red meat. But still, despite all the evidence, it’s my impression that most of the experts today are still cautioning against “too much”, whatever that is, red meat. We’ve linked to various…
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The least patriotic food in America?
That’s the headline in the Washington Post and their answer is, yes, the hamburger. The article is in four parts: the burger itself, the bun, the fixings and equality. The bottom line is that fresh, nutritious, real food has increasingly been reserved for the more affluent. The poor are left with the artificial, cheaper, processed food…dressed up with salt and flavorings, packaging, and advertising. It was a problem Thomas Jefferson worried about 200 years ago, noting that the wealthy ate vegetables and the poor did not. The major points in the article: The burger. 85% of all the burger Americans eat come from just four giant food processors. They control…
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Et tu, NIH?
One of the rewards of what we do is talking to our friends and neighbors as they get their latest grass fed beef and pork fix. There were a couple of those conversations yesterday. One about the federal study that says the low carb diet is best for losing weight after all….and another with a woman who says she depends on the perfect fats in grass fed beef to supply just the right amount of fat she needs. We’ve ranted here before about the nonsense masquerading as science that comes out of not only the government but the medical industry. Anyone for the food pyramid? Now, though, this latest study…
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Just by coincidence…
I had barely finished writing my post below warning that grass fed farmers needed to carefully consider before shipping their animals into the commercial marketplace. My point was that designing your animals for “The Box” is what got the meat industry into trouble in the first place. It’s an easy way to sell your steers, assuming you produce them to the required size, but I wanted to point out it was possibly the proverbial “bargain with the Devil”. (Why didn’t I think of that phrase sooner?) The big food processors have been buying up the smaller organic and natural labels and inevitably, I argued, that will lead to the corruption…
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The developing grass fed beef market (Part 2)….
Bill Roberts’ dissent from the old bromide perception is reality reminded me of another: “Each man is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts”. It’s generally attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan but goes back a lot farther than that. And while we have some serious concerns over Bill’s article (see Part1 just below), we accept his basic fact: to meet the requirements of the commercial meat trade a steer must have a hanging weight of at least 600 pounds and that requires a live weight of more than 1,000 pounds. That’s Bill’s major concentration right now….putting together trailer-loads of grass steers…to be sent to processors. To…
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Grandpa knows best….
It’s interesting to watch our old friend Kit Pharo move in the direction of becoming a “healthy eating” advocate. For those of you who don’t know him, Kit is a very successful Colorado rancher who raised himself from rodeo vagabond to head what may be the largest bull stud operation in the country. We’re not sure whether it’s becoming a grandfather, or just age, but Kit now regularly writes about eating right. Until recently, he’s been far more into raising cattle at the lowest cost than he was about the quality of the meat they produced. Here’s the latest from his on-line blog: Carbage – Several people said our pre-sale…