Bill Kurtis explains the Tallgrass Story in his own words.

2. Health

Eliminating artificial hormones and antibiotics to create a healthier product was not a hard decision. From all the uproar about them—even a ban by Europe on our hormone-injected meat—their banishment seemed inevitable anyway. But we didn’t realize the revolt against industrialized agriculture had already begun.

Timing is a strange thing. You can’t plan for it. It just happens.

Although we knew that a rising tide of consumers were searching for natural items for their diet with an eye on nutrition rather than shelf-life, we were surprised to find that many consumers were already choosing products with labels promoting Omega-3 fatty acids and CLAs, something unheard of just a few years prior.

Silently, on their own, they were seeking out healthy alternatives and driving a brand new trend. Organic sections in super-markets were increasing at a rate of 20% a year, representing a ten billion dollar segment of the food industry, and rising. The Boomers had joined the food revolution.

Our timing was accidentally…perfect. But there’s more.

In addition to catching the wave of the natural food movement, I was making other discoveries about grass-fed beef that were truly amazing.

Grass-fed and finished beef transforms the much-maligned “red meat” that doctors take off their heart patient’s plates into a health food.

Yes, I know. It sounds like a prelude to a press release for some “miracle breakthrough with genetic engineering.” But the miracle is what happens when the cow is returned to its natural diet—of grass.

How could this be?

As an investigative reporter, I put on the old green eye shade and plunged into the worlds of medical research and molecular biology with a properly skeptical eye.

The first thing I learned is that essential fatty acids (EFAs) have become the darling of the health food business.

Paul Stitt, a biochemist, told a Canadian conference in 1988 that 200 studies are published per month on fatty acids and to date, more than 350,000 have been catalogued on lipids and fats.

Two fatty acids in particular have become celebrities, Omega-3 and Omega-6. They function down at the cellular level to regulate what goes in and what is kept out of cells. They help keep cell membranes fluid and flexible.

In 1982, Dr. J.R. Vane shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in showing how the metabolism of Omega-3 fatty acids helped to prevent heart problems.

Udo Erasmus, in his book entitled Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, puts essential fatty acids at the top of a list of 50 essential factors of physical health along with water, oxygen and light.

Without the proper balance of these two fatty acids, cells can become stiff, unhealthy, and full of problems. Since so many diseases, like cancer, start at the cellular level, researchers have targeted EFAs for extreme study.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found primarily in green leafy vegetables, flax and oils extracted from cold-water fish like mackerel, salmon, tuna or cod. It is also found in animals that graze in green pastures, just like the wild game Early Man ate millions of years ago. (You can see where I’m going. I’ll get back to this in a moment.)

Iceland is currently marketing its population’s longevity as the oldest in the world, thanks to a diet of Omega-3 that comes from cold water fish caught off its shoreline. Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz who locked up from a lack of oil, the Omega-3 fatty acids keep the fish from stiffening up in the frigid waters. And they do the same for our cells. The marketing program is appropriately called, "The Omega-3 Miracle."

And of course, you may have heard about the headline-making 2002 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which concluded that eating fish (with Omega-3s) once per month or more can reduce the risk of ischemic stroke in men.

One final example. Dr. Barry Sears, who wrote The Zone, believes homo sapiens avoided extinction and became a more cognitive being, able to conquer the world, by finding a food source high in Omega-3s. It was shellfish along the shores of Lake Turkana in the East African Rift Valley. The shellfish ate algae and accumulated algae-derived fats in higher concentrations that were, in turn, full of Omega 3s. These fats supplied the brain with blood glucose, and they laid the foundation for a new species: modern humans.

Today, everyone agrees that these fatty acids are called “essential” for a reason. They are absolutely necessary for a body to function properly. They concur on something else. We can’t create EFAs inside our bodies, on our own. The only way we can get this ‘stuff of life’ is from what we eat. Water and air are good examples. If we don’t get enough of those ‘essentials,’ we know what happens pretty fast.

Researchers are suspicious of what is happening by not getting enough fatty acids. Because over the last hundred years, EFAs, like Omega-3, have disappeared from the typical American diet.

Don’t go too fast over that sentence. If these essential fatty acids (EFAs) are absolutely necessary, and if they are no longer found in our diet or are far out of balance, then aren’t we killing ourselves? (pause for thought.)
Sunset in early winter

Let’s face it: our diet has changed. Industrialized mass food production, ocean pollution, and refining of supermarket food has caused a severe deficiency in Omega-3 fatty acids in our diet while increasing the fatty acid Omega-6, the Darth Vader among the EFAs.

Dr. Donald Rudin, in his book Omega-3 Oils, compared the Omega-3 deficiency to the B-vitamin deficiency diseases of pellagra and beriberi of the early 1900s.

Human beings evolved with Omega-6 and Omega-3 in a 1:1 ratio, eating a diet of nuts, plants and wild game. The modern ratio can often be 10:1, even 20:1 Omega-6 to Omega-3. That's a bad balance, considering that Omega-6 can cause tumors, chronic inflammation, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis and auto-immunity when not held in check by the Omega-3 fatty acid.

A good case study is the American beef industry.

During World War II, a surplus of cheap corn provided by the government was fed by ranchers to their cattle with startling results. The meat was tasty because of excess fat, and the cattle gained weight quickly, which meant more money faster. The entire industry eventually became an assembly line from pasture to giant feedlots for grain-feeding, then on to slaughter-house, supermarket, and steakhouse.

It took fifty years before nutritionists realized that the highly marketed “corn-fed marbling” was the wrong fat, Omega-6.

It’s no use trying to blame anyone. Who knew? Fatty acids were only discovered by molecular biologists in the ‘70’s. And their presence in beef cattle, even later.

The wildly out of balance Omega 6: Omega 3 fatty acid ratio could be a profile of the American diet. And if we’re to believe the research papers, it’s a disaster.

I suppose we should have figured it out. Corn is as unnatural for cattle as fast food is for humans. Cows are ruminants that have evolved multi-chambered stomachs to break down cellulose from grass, not corn. Grain-based feeds create different bacteria within the cow’s rumen. It’s UN-natural.

We try really hard to force Mother Nature to do things that she didn’t plan. This is one. You can’t put just anything we want into our mouths, or into those of the animals we eat, and expect them to magically change it into something healthy.

Now here’s the answer to why I’m a grass-fed rancher.

The out-of-balance ratio—Omega 6 to Omega 3—changes back to normal when the cattle eat grass.

An Irish study published in the Journal of Animal Science in 2000 proved that when steers are fed grass, they have a lower Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio than steers fed concentrates.

For more supportive data, I recommend the list of scientific papers listed on our website and the links to other students of the grass-fed movement.

The Irish grass-fed animals also showed a higher concentration of conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, than grain-fed steers.

CLA? Don’t tell me it’s another miracle ingredient. Although it’s still at an early stage of research, there are indications that it may have remarkable curative properties.

Chemist Darshan S. Kelley, at the University of California, Davis says of CLA, “It has stimulated animals' immune systems, reduced body fat, protected against certain kinds of cancer, and improved cardiovascular health.” To be fair, he also says that those were animal studies and recommends that human studies should proceed.

I liken this period to Jacques Cousteau’s invention of scuba that opened the world of underwater exploration.

Molecular biology has allowed us to explore the smallest units of life, and we’re just beginning to learn how they work.

Conjugated Linoleic Acid, or CLA, a previously unrecognized nutrient, was only discovered in 1987 by Michael Pariza, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison's Food Research Institute. He discovered CLA's anti-carcinogenic properties, and also found that CLA significantly reduces atherosclerosis (heart disease) in rabbits. CLA is found primarily in beef, but not just any beef. Only animals fed a diet of fresh pasture and meadow plants produce high CLA. And the only way that cows can get fresh plants is for them to harvest it themselves by grazing in the field.
Storm clouds churn in the sky over the ranch

While American data has yet to move out of the animal testing stage, a group of Finnish researchers found that women who consumed the most CLA in their diets had a 60% lower risk of breast cancer than those who consumed the least. An Irish study extracted CLA from the milk of grass-fed cows and added very small amounts (20 parts per million) to human breast cancer cells growing in culture. By the eighth day, the CLA had killed 93% of the cells.

Sixty years ago, we knew that beef was a wonderful protein source, but we had no idea that it also carried these other benefits, because…they hadn’t been discovered yet. And there’s more.

Grass-fed and finished beef contains 20 times more Vitamin E, an anti-oxidant, than corn or soy.

A recent study showed that women with the highest levels of beta-carotene in their diets had half the risk of breast cancer as those with the lowest.

Grass-fed meat has up to four times more carotenoids than grain-fed.

Jo Robinson, author and member of the Tallgrass Beef advisory board, concludes that "given all these benefits, a steak from a cow raised on pasture is even healthier for you than a chicken breast….and it has more omega-3s and four times more CLA.”

Big, juicy, corn-fed prime steaks won’t go out of style. The grain-fed model has been all America could get for the last sixty years, and steak lovers have developed a taste for it.

But as boomers swell into the meat sections of supermarkets, as young mothers read the labels before they serve their children, and as young people, armed with the knowledge coming from the wealth of new nutritional discoveries, search for a change in the food they eat, they will find grass-fed and finished beef.

Taste | Health | Sustainability