Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Should you eat the fat on your steak?

Someone Emailed me a question about animal fats, in particular about the fat you might find on a steak or other cut of meat.  I haven't posted to my blog in a long time, but this seems like a good topic to get me back into blogging.

I consider moderate amounts of fat from grass-fed, organically, vegetarian- fed animals to be perfectly fine to eat, and of course without the fat or skin meats are pretty flavorless.

The key is amount and type.  My best guess is that even if our bodies did evolve to eat large amounts of meat, most wild animals were not as fatty as the ones we eat now.  So if you want to eat like a natural paleolithic man, eat leaner meat, and these days that means grass-fed or wild.  In addition to being leaner, grass-fed beef contains more healthy omega-3 fats than feed-lot beef.  And I'm not talking about the short omega-3 fat you can get from flax or walnuts, I'm referring to the long omega-3 fats that make fish so desirable. 

It's practically gospel that you must eat fish to get long omega-3 fats, but there are small amounts of the same long omega-3 fats in eggs, beef, lamb, etc.  Studies carried out in Australia and Germany have shown these products can be more important sources of omega-3 fats than fish.