Health Benefits: Grass Is Good for You!
Higher in Vitamins & Anti-Oxidants
Beef is a naturally healthy product. Even grain fed beef is good for you. But grass fed and finished beef has a few things that grain fed beef doesn't. This is because during the grain finishing period, when animals are typically confined in feedlots and fed corn and other supplements, they lose a lot of nutrients, nutrients still present in pastured beef. Grass finished beef is:
- Higher in Omega 3 Fatty Acids
- Higher in CLA
- Higher in Protein
- Higher in Vitamin A
- Higher in B Vitamins Thiamin and Riboflavin
- Higher in Vitamin E
- Higher in Calcium, Magnesium and Potassium
Lower in Fat & Calories
In addition to being higher in nutrients, grass finished beef is leaner, lower in total fat and lower in saturated fat. This also means it's lower in calories. In fact, an 8 oz. grass finished steak has around 130 fewer calories than the same portion of corn fed beef.
Tasty & Tender
Grass finished beef also tastes differently. Most people think it tastes better: more like beef should taste, more "beefy". And even though it's lower in fat, properly produced grass finished beef is still nicely marbled, juicy and tender.
No Extra “Stuff”
Grain fed beef loses a lot of nutrients during the finishing process and some of it, especially from cattle finished in confined animal feeding operations (i.e. CAFOs a.k.a. feedlots), also gain some things, things most people would rather not have in their food.
Because their animals are confined, many CAFOs put low-level antibiotics into their feed every day to help keep diseases in check. They also treat the cattle heavily with pesticides to combat the flies that breed in the confined quarters. To get the animals to grow faster they are often fed hormones and implanted with steroids. All of these things allow them to produce large quantities of good tasting beef at the lowest possible price... but with compromises.
Brown Paper Beef doesn't have any of these “additions”. Our animals are never confined and are never fed "stuff". The only thing they eat is grass. They don't grow as large or as fast and they don't have as much intramuscular fat, but Brown Paper Beef tastes great and it's tender. What more could you ask for?