America has a love affair with beef.
It didn't used to be that way, as beef was just too expensive to eat more than once a week for most families until the development of huge feedlots, and the use of corn and pharmaceuticals to greatly speed up the trip of a head of cattle from birth to slaughter.
A steer gets from 80 pounds to 1100 pounds in 14 months using tremendous quantities of beef derived byproducts of slaughter for protein and fat supplementation a lot of corn and an arsenal of new drugs.
In the old days on a ranch this process took 2-3 years.
So how can this be bad? Bringing cheap food to the tables of America?
Well its just not the same food. Feeding cattle corn instead of grass changes the composition of the beef. Instead of a product that has ratios of good fats to bad fats that are highly favorable this process has made a product that contains an undesirable ratio that is pretty much one to one, when it used to be 20-1 in favor of the good fats.
Its the amount of omega 3 fatty acids in beef that makes it so much less desirable in ones diet. And nowadays its ALL beef you really can not go to a store and buy grass fed beef..
We've come to think of the term "corn fed" as a banner of goodness instead of the health risk that it has really turned out to be.
The American diet has become deficient in the good fats, omega 3 fatty acids versus omega 6, that the rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and even diseases of inflammation like arthritis, cancer and autoimmune diseases such as Lupus, MS are commonplace having skyrocketed over the last 50 years.
Additionally when you feed cattle corn and the by products of cattle slaughter houses and cramp them into feed lots standing in their own feces, not surprisingly, YOU MAKE THEM SICK!
So to protect the investment from high death rates they are given hormones and antibiotics.
And this system is accepted as the standard. No questions asked from the American public.
From the outrageous rates of heart disease and diabetes to the E. coli outbreaks and mad cow disease we happily munch on McDonalds burgers. (Grass fed cows raised on pastureland have very low rates of E. coli colonization for a variety of reasons)
SO this may make you want to ask Why did we get away from feeding our cows grass, which is essentially free, to giving them corn, which one has to buy and makes for some very unhealthy eating?
Well it was collusion between farmers and big government.
Farmers began to "Finish off" cattle or fatten them up for the slaughter when they ran out of good grass in the fall and winter. Corn is a very dense source of calories and fattens the cattle up faster than grass. This also tended to eliminate seasonal differences in beef in regions that had longer winters, or draughts that hurt the grass yields in the previous summer.
Over time, especially as government subsidized corn became cheaper and cheaper and the farmer found he could buy it much cheaper than he could ever grow it himself, it no longer made sense to raise cattle on pastureland and cattle began to be raised in huge feed lots.
To help dispose of the rising mountain of corn that the government was subsidizing, these lots were encouraged by the government through tax breaks, promoting a system of grading beef based on marbling that favored corn fed over grass fed beef, and exempting these lots from clean air and water laws. (15,000 head of cattle produce a LOT of manure which instead of being an asset which was used to fertilize pastureland was now a toxic cesspool!)
In time the cattle themselves changed, bread for fast growth and large size whose energy needs could hardly be met on less calorie rich grass.
Am I suggesting that this was done on purpose to harm the American public? Not at all. It was simple economics.
But now we have a health care system that is busting at the seams and costs more than any other nations. If you think about it, you can pay more for the grass fed beef, fix your diet to correct your intake of omega 3 fatty acids, or you can continue to feed our families what we are now.
In other words you can pay now or you can pay later. Both as individuals and as a society.
We have to put some thought into what we are putting into our bodies. And it's not easy, as chicken and pork are fed corn too. It's believed though not proven that grass fed beef is better for you nutritionally than corn fed chicken.
It's not as simple as being personally a few pounds overweight or feeling good about ourselves, it effects our entire society.,
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