102. What You NEED to Know Before Your Next Steak: Grass-Fed vs. Grain-Fed Beef

Is your beef doing you more harm than good?

You may be surprised to know grass-fed, grass-finished beef is not only higher in omega-3 fatty acids, it's higher in vitamin C, reduced amounts of saturated fat, and a much better flavor profile. Rain-fed cattle take hormones, steroids, and all kinds of other compounds that are injected into these animals to make their life cycle 18 to 24 months, rather than 5 to 7 years.
We're actually growing them at faster rates than they're meant to be grown. We are not just what we eat.

We're what we eat eats. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast Shorts.
This was kind of an impromptu short that I just asked my team to put together.

I said, look, let's go out on the deck.

I want to talk to these guys about a subject that's very near and dear to my heart.

I get lots and lots of questions online about the true difference between grass-fed and green-fed cattle.

So I just thought I'd do a quick short on the nutrient differences and the farming practice differences

because I'm out here in Colorado, one of my favorite places in the world. I'm at 10,500 feet right now.
And at the base of this mountain is one of my favorite grass-fed, grass-finished pastures. And they raise grass-fed, grass-finished beef, chicken, eggs, free-range eggs, and all kinds of food compounds that actually come from animals that are raised the way that they were meant to be raised, and they provide whole nutrient-dense foods.
And so I get a lot of questions about, is there really a difference? And I've even seen some science saying that there's not, and I would actually take very serious issue with that. A lot of these scientific articles are put forward by the food industry and industrial farming, and they have an agenda in mind when they set these research studies out.
So I can tell you that there is a significant difference between grass-fed, grass-finished beef and grain-fed cattle. If you've ever driven that 10-mile stretch in Kansas where you see all of those commercial industrial farms and you see thousands and thousands of cattle literally just standing out in the mud eating out of grain troughs.
You tell me when a cow in its natural environment would run into corn, high fructose corn syrup, or even soybean as a source of its feed. You know, we're not just what we eat.
We're what we eat eats. And when you see an animal eating a biodiverse range of natural compounds, that means that they are going to be biodiverse when they actually end up on our table.
And so, you know, just as an overview of the difference between grass-fed, grass-finished beef and grain-fed cattle, take hormones, antibiotics, vaccinations, steroids, and all kinds of other compounds that are injected into these animals to make their life cycle 18 to 24 months rather than five to seven years, which is what it takes for a fully grass-fed, grass-finished cattle to mature. And you understand that we're actually growing them at faster rates than they're meant to be grown.
So grass-fed cattle have a tendency to actually have lower saturated fat. They have a higher amount of omega-3 fatty acids, the fatty acids that most Americans are deficient in.
Remember, we're supposed to have a balanced ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. Most of us are supposed to have a one-to-one ratio, and the average American has a 45-to-one ratio.
These high omega-6 fatty acids are very, very pro-inflammatory, and they create all kinds of downstream consequences. One of the reasons why meat is, in my opinion, blamed for crimes that it doesn't commit is because we are looking at commercially raised cattle and the beef that comes from commercially raised cattle that are fed grains and non-biodiverse compounds, and therefore they have non-biodiverse meats.
You know, it's well known, and I'm going to put the references in here for you science nerds. I'm going to put links to all of the scientific references that I'm going to make in this podcast short.

But grass-fed, grass-finished beef is not only higher in omega-3 fatty acids. For you science nerds, I'm going to put links to all of the scientific references that I'm going to make in this podcast short.

But grass-fed, grass-finished beef is not only higher in omega-3 fatty acids, it's higher in ascorbate, ascorbic acid, which is the vitamin C. It's higher in the B-complex of vitamins, including natural form of B12.
B12 is a natural metal in the body. Yes, it's not just a vitamin.
It's a metal like zinc or magnesium. And it's a very, very necessary metal to all kinds of functions, especially nerve functions in the human body.
So you have higher amounts of B12. You have higher amounts of the complex of B vitamins that you get naturally, higher amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, higher amounts of vitamin C, reduced amounts of saturated fat, and better, in my opinion, a much better flavor profile.
You know, I was just at this farm yesterday, and it was astounding to me. This might just sound like I'm going off on a complete tangent, but it was astounding to me how happy these animals seemed.
There were herds and herds of cattle just wandering around this beautiful open pasture, and when I looked down at the grass, you could see cloves and different types of grass

and all kinds of biodiversity in the environment that they're eating. There are bugs crawling

around in there that the cattle are eating. And one of the things they do is they rotate these

cattle from field to field so that they don't actually glean the field and eat all the way

down to the root of the grass. One of the things I learned from this regenerative farmer was that

when you're grass feeding cattle, they eat the grass and then the grass respawns. And if they

Thank you. root of the grass.
One of the things I learned from this regenerative farmer was that when you're grass feeding cattle, they eat the grass and then the grass respawns. And if they feed on it too often, if they actually eat it too soon, then what they'll do is they'll actually deplete the nutrients in the grass.
You want to give the grass time to actually absorb all of the nutrients from the soil, which is another issue I'd like to do a whole podcast short on, which is the depletion of our soil. But for those of you that are interested in greenhouse emissions or you're interested in climate change, grass-fed, grass-finished cattle are actually pro-environment.
They are actually pro-green energy. They actually return nutrients back to the soil and they rotate from field to field and they end up back in the same field where they started.
So we use the same fields over and over again. They're using rainwater.
They're getting all kinds of minerals from the soil. They're not gleaning the fields and they're not industrial raised.
So this is actually really, really healthy for our environment. Not only that, but most grass-fed, grass-finished pastures are owned by small farming families.
And it's a really good thing for us to support these families rather than to support these commercial farms. But I think one of the biggest problems facing America today is that we are just not eating a whole food diet.
Now, this podcast is about grass-fed, grass-finished beef. But just as a general rule of thumb, we should be eating foods in their whole form.
You know, very often, it's not the food itself. It's the distance from the food to the table.
It's the chemicals, the additives, the preservatives, the pesticides, the herbicides, the insecticides, all of these things that we add to foods that take them from their whole food state and turn them into a processed state. So one of the ways that you can avoid this is eating wild-caught fish, is eating plants that are raised in organic environments, and eating grass-fed, grass-finished beef.
If you're eating chickens, you want to eat free-range chickens, chickens that are out there in the field that are eating worms and bugs and grasses, the things that nature meant them to eat. And very often what happens is we just go to the supermarket and we're grabbing things off the shelf and we're not thinking about what did this animal eat that I'm about to eat.
We just think about the food compound itself and not really how that food compound was raised. One of the reasons why you keep hearing me say grass-fed, grass-finished, and not just grass-fed is because, yes, you actually do need to check that these cattle have been grass-fed and grass-finished.

One of the reasons for that is that we can now get away, thanks to our food labeling laws,

we can now get away by feeding cattle grass some of their lifetime

and then feeding them grains and junk sources of non-nutritious foods for the other portion of their lifetime. We want our cattle grazing on wholly biodiverse, nutritious grasses for their entire lifetime.
When that happens, you have a grass-fed, grass-finished cattle and not just a grass-fed cattle. One of the common complaints I hear about grass-fed, grass-finished beef is that it's more expensive.
And yes, it is slightly more expensive, but it's also more nutrient-dense. And we know from processed food research that when we are not eating nutrient-dense foods, our satiation response is interrupted, meaning that we have a tendency to overeat foods that don't have high nutrient density.
One of the reasons for that is that part of our satiation response, telling our brain that we are full and we've been adequately fed, is when we get an adequate amount of nutrients. So if you're eating nutrient-dense foods, you will eat less of those foods.
And if you're eating highly processed foods, you'll eat more of those foods. And I will put the clinical research in the notes below so that you can verify this on your own.
You know, the truth is if more of us would actually gravitate towards grass-fed, grass-finished beef and away from commercial beef, you'd find that supply and demand would drive the cost of grass-fed, grass-finished beef down because it would be more economical for farmers to produce this form of food. I'm a big, big believer that we should be following a whole food diet and not being dogmatic about a diet.

I'm not against or for any specific diet. I don't think that you need to be vegan, vegetarian,

pescatarian, keto, paleo, carnivore. I think that you need to be on a whole food diet.
One of the best ways to do that is to make one of your choices grass-fed, grass-fed beef. And that's just science.