Enjoy your additional fat and cholesterol from feedlot beef billybob. Cattle need to be grass-fed all of their lives, and then "fattened up" with grain at the end to optimize their meat both for taste and for nutrition. You must have tasted beef that wasn't finished with grain, which I agree is generally stringy, tough and unpalatable.
I grew up on a working ranch, and all through junior/high school where we raised our own cattle and hogs. I was involved in raising them, from the branding and castrating to the slaughtering and butchering process. The beef that you'll find in stores and even most butcher shops and restaurants is totally inferior.
The fat is where all the toxins in meat are so enjoy those as well. CAFO cows move to feedlots once they hit 650 or 750 pounds, a weight it takes the average cow twelve months to reach on pasture. Feedlot life lasts three to four months so grain fed cattle are much more profitable.
But they are also much less healthy. Simply put, while the omega-6:omega-3 ratio in CAFO beef is worse than the ratio in grass-fed beef, it’s not because the omega-6 content of beef fat skyrockets with grain feeding; it’s because the omega-3 content is basically nonexistent. And if you don't know why we need omega-3 in our diet than you need to figure it out. Much more here.
Grass-fed truly shines in the micronutrient profile for one reason. Grass-fed cows get more nutritious food. Remember: they aren’t munching on monoculture lawn cuttings (let alone soy and corn). They’re eating a wide variety of (often wild) grasses, sedges, rushes, shrubs, and herbs, each with its own nutrient profile. Of course, how nutritious those graminoids are depends on the quality of the soil
Concentrated feed can mean any number of things, but the base food is always a grain slurry, typically of corn and corn byproducts (husks, cobs), soy and soy hulls, spent brewery grain, spent distiller’s grain, and other cereals. CAFO nutritionists can get pretty creative, though, sometimes including cotton byproducts, old candy (including wrappers), beet and citrus pulp, and peanut shells in their cows’ diet.
The bottom line is that cattle are ruminating mammals, meaning that their stomach has four compartments and they have a digestive system that is optimized for grazing in a pasture by regurgitating and re-chewing the plant materials as "cud". But I'm sure that you are already aware of that.
Edited by grokit - 7/14/12 at 2:08pm
