Photos of recipes from the new book Tender Grassfed Barbecue
Photos of recipes from the cookbook Tender Grassfed Meat
Why I Eat Organic or the Equivalent
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
I strongly recommend the use of organic ingredients in Tender Grassfed Meat. The reason is simple. I want to eat the most nutritious food I can, and the tastiest food I can. Dr. Weston A. Price discovered that people eating the traditional diet of their ancestors were healthy. All of the food contained in these traditional diets was organic or the equivalent. My health was restored by trying to copy the diets described by Dr. Price. After I restricted my diet to organic or the equivalent, I learned something. The food tasted better — much better.
The human body is made to process natural, unaltered food.
The methods that the human body uses to sustain, nourish and rebuild itself are many, and very complex. Nutrients are not processed in isolation, but together. For example, it is now known that an oversupply of one B vitamin can actually cause a deficiency in other B vitamins, because the body is set up to process these nutrients together, the way they are present in food. When you get your nutrients from unaltered food, everything is present that is needed to fully assimilate the nutrients. Our ancestors learned which foods were good to eat, and all of the nutrients and cofactors in those foods are necessary to properly assimilate the nutrients. Our ancestors also learned to combine foods to ensure proper nutrition. While they could not identify specific vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids, they knew what to eat. This knowledge was passed from generation to generation, over thousands of years.
Non-organic foods are altered and different from traditional foods.
Modern food raising practices have altered the very chemistry of food. For example, feeding grain and other non-grass substances to cattle change the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids dramatically, from one to one to twenty to one. When you eat meat from an animal made to eat grass, your body expects the food to have the proper ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. When the meat does not have the proper ratio, your body is not getting what it is ready to process. We do know that an excess of omega-6 fatty acids can cause inflammation and a host of illnesses.
Vegetables that are sprayed regularly with pesticides, which they absorb, are different from the vegetables humankind has eaten for most of history. Artificially fertilized soil lacks many of the nutrients and minerals present in naturally rich soil, and food grown with artificial fertilizers is different from food grown in naturally rich soil. This forces your body to process substances that either have never existed before (artificial chemicals and pesticides), and/or lack the substances the body expects to find in the food, which may be necessary to properly process and assimilate the nutrients.
GMOs did not exist in nature, and were not eaten by our ancestors.
None of the healthy peoples studied by Dr. Price ever ate GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms), because GMOs did not exist at the time. GMOs are plants that are changed in a laboratory, sometimes having insect genes and other foreign components added to them. This once again presents your body with substances that it does not expect. Most GMO crops are designed with an internal pesticide, or designed to absorb and tolerate huge amounts of pesticides, amounts that might kill a normal plant. The presence of these pesticides in the crops once again forces your body to deal with a substance it does not expect, or know what to do with.
Modern science has identified only some of the nutrients and cofactors needed by our bodies.
Scientists keep discovering new nutrients as time goes on, from vitamin K2 (which used to be unknown), omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, which were also unknown decades ago, and a number of other substances. Vitamin K2, omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids all are very important nutrients. The point is that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of nutrients and substances necessary to process nutrients that are currently unknown. Since conventional agricultural practices change the very chemistry of food, it is impossible to know what nutrients are altered or missing, since so many nutrients have not even been discovered.
How to get all the nutrients and cofactors.
How can we get all of the nutrients and cofactors we need, if science has not identified all of them? The answer is very simple and I know it works because I have done it. Eating the nutrient-dense food enjoyed by our ancestors will give us all the nutrients and cofactors we need. Foods that are organic or the equivalent are the closest we can get to the food that was actually eaten by our ancestors.
What is the equivalent of organic?
The phrase “organic or the equivalent†is often used. “Equivalent†means food that has been raised according to organic food practices, but has not been certified organic by an authorized agency. The food is the same, it just doesn’t have the stamp of approval, which can be quite expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Food meets my definition of “organic or the equivalent†if it is raised without the use of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, chemicals, or ionizing radiation. It cannot be GMO. Animals must be raised without the use of growth hormones or antibiotics. I add another requirement to the meat that I eat. The food that is fed to the animals must be species appropriate, meaning that it is very similar to the natural diet of the animal. For ruminant animals, such as cattle, bison, and lamb, this means 100 percent grassfed.
Organic food tastes much better.
There is another benefit to using ingredients that are organic or the equivalent. They will make your food taste much better. Vegetables grown in good soil, without the use of pesticides or artificial fertilizer, have much more flavor. You can really taste this when you use a recipe that has only a few ingredients. Organic spices grown in good soil that contains the full range of minerals and nutrients have a depth of flavor that is far superior to the conventional varieties. The meat of grassfed animals who have eaten lush, green grass, grown in good soil has a deep, wonderful flavor that no feedlot meat can equal.
I eat organic or the equivalent because it is healthier and tastes better.
This post is part of the blog carnival: Fight Back Friday. Click here to read more great posts at FoodRenegade.com
Bringing Back the Fat Cap – Restoring the Fat of the Land
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
Grassfed strip loin roast from U.S. Wellness Meats, cut from strip loin primal
Do you know what a fat cap is? Most people today do not. A fat cap was once considered absolutely necessary for roasting meat. Fat caps will greatly improve the nutritional qualities and taste of any grassfed meat.
Here is a link to my guest blog about fat caps on Kim Hartke’s great site, Hartke Is Online:
Fat on Grassfed Meat is Healthy, Claims Cookbook Author
Cooking Real Food — The Most Important Task
photo credit: stuartpilbrow
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
What if a drug was invented that would reduce the risk of cancer to almost nothing? What if the same drug was just as effective against heart disease? What if this drug also greatly reduced the risk of diabetes, asthma, birth defects, Alzheimer’s, depression, mental illness, ADD, arthritis, obesity, indigestion and every other chronic disease that plagues humankind? What if this very same drug strengthened your immune system to the point that the flu, colds, and infections became a thing of the past? What if the side effects of this drug were limited to a feeling of well-being, boundless energy, peaceful sleep, enhanced mental and physical ability? Wouldn’t you take this drug?
There is no such drug. But you can learn to do something that can provide all of the benefits I have described. You can learn to cook.
The human body is far more complex and intricate than anything invented by human science. There is much about the workings of the human body that is still a mystery. But we do know that the human body has an amazing capacity to protect itself, heal, regenerate, and rebuild. We also know that the body can fail, become very ill, and die.
What is the difference between a healthy body and a sick one?
Dr. Weston A Price, a dentist, noticed that each generation of his patients was less healthy than their parents. He decided to study the effect of diet on humanity, travelling to many countries to learn what healthy people ate. Dr. Price found that people eating the diet of their ancestors were healthy, with none of the chronic diseases that are so common today. These people did not have heart disease. They did not have cancer. They did not have mental illness. They did not have crime. They had no tooth decay, although they had no dentists. When the same people ate modern foods, their teeth decayed, and they suffered from all the chronic illnesses that afflict us today.
When the human body gets all the nutrients it needs, it is healthy. When the body does not get those nutrients, it is sick. Modern foods do not provide all the nutrients needed for good health. Supplements are not the answer, because the body takes its nutrients from foods, including a number of substances in the whole food called cofactors, which are often unknown, and are needed by the body to assimilate nutrients. Supplements do not have all the cofactors. The only way to get all needed nutrients is to eat real, unaltered food, prepared by somebody who knows how to cook it.
The most important task any of us can learn is to cook real food, as this is the only way we can provide the nutrients necessary for health.
Learning what to eat and how to cook takes time and work, but the rewards are worth it. To me, cooking has become more art than work. I truly enjoy it. When I cook, I am always aware that the food I am cooking will become part of me and the people I care about. I cultivate a happy, loving contentment when I cook — knowing that what I am doing will make me and my family healthier, while giving us the pleasure of a delicious meal. I cannot describe how good it feels to become healthier, and to see your family become healthier, and to know it is because of the good food you prepare.
Real cooking may seem difficult at first, but it gets easier and faster over time. If you cook enough, it will become as easy and instinctive as riding a bicycle, or driving a car.
I believe that food must taste good to be truly nutritious. The good taste and smell of real food, properly prepared, gives much pleasure while stimulating the salivary glands. The salivary glands produce substances that aid greatly in the digestion and absorption of food. Good taste helps good nutrition.
Dr. Price discovered what to eat, and what to avoid. I follow the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Dietary Guidelines. I have switched entirely to grassfed and grass finished meat, with wonderful results.
If you have decided to learn to cook real food — the most important task — I recommend the book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD. This magnificent book covers just about every aspect of cooking real food, while providing a huge amount of information on what to eat and why. While the scope of the book may seem overwhelming, you don’t have to read the whole thing at once. I recommend using the book as a cooking encyclopedia, and looking up the specific issue or recipe you want to learn about.
For a detailed and user-friendly cookbook on grassfed meat, designed for people who have never cooked grassfed meat, I recommend Tender Grassfed Meat. That is why I wrote it.
This post is part of the Real Food Wednesday blog carnival, hosted this week by Cheeseslave blog. Go see other homages to real foods, good fats on Cheeseslave.com!
Real Foods that Healed Me
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
I recently wrote a blog that describes in detail the foods that I ate to become healthy, following the recommendations of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Here is a link to the article at Moms for Safe Food.