Here’s an excerpt from my book, The Enlightened Cook: Protein Entrees. In addition to recipes, you’ll become smart about choices at the market. It’s all designed to help you navigate your way though some pretty treacherous food choices out there to healthy proteins.
So what’s the beef about red meat?
It may be a surprise to some to find red meat in a health food cookbook, but it’s my contention that consuming animal products in moderation and eating the purest ones available are the factors that count most. For instance, though pricey, grass-fed, free-range beef is by far the healthiest beef available. These animals live the life nature intended before commerce stepped in and both they and we are far healthier for it. Roaming steer eat no grain or commercial feed, but instead consume only grass when they are provided with the physical space to graze for it. Their robust health doesn’t require the stream antibiotics that commercial livestock receive. Free-range animals in general also aren’t riddled with stress hormones that are a natural response to the inhumane living conditions most commercial livestock are forced to tolerate.
Then there is the much-discussed protein benefit of meat. Because nine of the twenty- two amino acids essential to a healthy body that must be derived from diet are present in red meat, it’s considered a “perfect protein.” Although those amino acids (histidine, lysine, threonine, methionine, isoleucine, leucine, valine, phenylalanine and tryptophan) can be derived from combinations of plant-based foods, only animal protein contains all nine.
In addition, the protein in red meat makes the healthy dose of iron it also delivers more absorbable. That’s especially important for menstruating women, because they need to replace lost iron each month. Blackstrap molasses is a fantastic source of iron, too, but a juicy steak is certainly more sumptuous!
True, red meat has saturated fat, but saturated fat is essential to the body and especially to brain function. Much data points to the understanding that cholesterol in the bloodstream has little or nothing to do with dietary cholesterol and heart disease. What’s more, coronary health’s relationship to cholesterol is suspiciously linked to pharmaceutical companies’ interest in marketing statin drugs. I recommend researching extensively on line and making your own assessment of data available, before viewing red meat as a compromise to health.