I'm about as serious a high-quality protein advocate as probably exists in the leaderboard for this site (neither "organic" nor "grassfed" are particularly important adjectives for me, so much as "local" and "humane"), and I do not understand what this has to do with diet and weight loss.
Do you actually believe you're more likely to lose weight eating organic protein?
Not having read the article provided, grass-fed beef has a much better fatty-acid profile, and that does not necessarily mean "more O-3!" but rather more likely, a lot less Omega-6, so the O-6 to O-3 ratio is closer to 2:1 which is what we're (theoretically) better adapted to, rather than the ratio in grain-fed beef, which can be as high as 14:1. Both types are "essential" as far as we need to consume them, but they way our diet has been distorted of late, with seed-oils and the "war" on saturated fats, the amount of O-6 we as a population get of late is way out of proportion. In general PUFA are easier to oxidize and possibly result in long-term degradation of health. Or you could (over)simplify and just say, hey, I need to eat what I'm better adapted to, and I would similarly insist that my food (the cow) also ate what it's supposed to eat, and they are supposed to eat grass, not grains.
You're kind of restating the premise of the comment that cited the research paper.
In what appears to have been a carefully run study, under the best circumstances, grass-fed beef provides a tiny fraction of the fatty acid benefits of fish.
In other words: even if grass-fed beef has a better fatty acid profile, "better than corn-fed beef" still doesn't mean "good source of healthful fatty acids"; both grass-fed and corn-fed are poor sources. If you believe you need a better fatty acid profile in your diet, take fish oil tablets or eat fish.
I see you've left a multitude of comments in this post going on around the same, yet it seems to my the angle you've taken is that you need more omega 3s, and not for example that, compared to grain-fed beef, if you are going to eat beef, it's qualitatively better, and to me it seems more important that this way you'll get a lot less omega 6 fatty acids, thus eating food with a better fatty acid profile. To supplement O-3 for the purpose of fixing or improving _your_ fatty acid profile (vs. that of the food) well, sure, but it's orthogonal to the quality of grass vs. grain-fed beef. (Edited last sentence)
It's 30mg/100g. That's an order of magnitude lower than most fish, two orders of magnitude less than the best fish, and about what you'd get from a turkey sandwich.
Which is unsurprising, because mammals suck at making omega-3s, and plants are a bad source of healthful omega-3s.
I looked at the pricing, it costs $34 for the '2 month supply'. 100 Softgels are $5 each and last a month, so I can get at least 6 months for the same price as your boutique 2 month version.
And? Higher-fat proteins create satiety faster. Eating more fat doesn't make you fat.
If it it's lean beef that you're after, specify "lean beef", not "grass fed beef". There are plenty of retail cuts on a corn-fed cow that are plenty lean. A corn-fed tri-tip is going to be less fatty than a grass-fed chuck. If you're aiming for lean protein, your cut selection is way more important than which cow the cut comes from.
(Incidentally: I eat almost all grass-fed beef these days, since thats what my butcher sources --- but unlike pig and chicken, for which the local versions are clearly superior --- I can go back and forth on whether corn-fed beef is better or worse than grass-fed. Grass-fed is tougher and always seems to have that aged beef funk, which is sometimes welcome and sometimes not.)
It's hard to find reliable sources, but there's evidence that the difference between grass-fed and corn-fed beef goes beyond just having lower or higher fat content to things like fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid. I don't know how much these things matters, if at all.
(Incidentally: I prefer to eat the beef of an animal that is free-range and grass-fed, then finished with some healthy corn feed without drugs.)
Do you really believe that? Maybe the antibiotics in the chicken --- although truly healthy chicken is spectacularly expensive, and even products labeled "organic" can still be flooded with antibiotics "to prevent disease outbreaks" which are inevitable in factory farms.
Other than antibiotics, I generally call BS on the health benefits of "organic" and "grass fed" protein. You should eat organic --- or, VERY preferably, local --- but you should do it (a) because it tastes better, (b) to support local family farming, and (c) because it's more humane. Not because of some supposed health benefit.
Uh huh. In what way meaningful to human health is the fat from conventional beef better for you than the fat from "organic" beef?
The fat in local protein is way, way better than factory-farmed meat. By which I mean, it tastes much better. The fat from the pork chop of a responsibly raised pig tastes like bacon; the fat from a supermarket pork chop tastes like melting plastic.
Buy local/humane protein. Just do it for real reasons.
Fat is where many toxins accumulate. If the animal you eat has been fed with pesticide-ridden, fattening-rather-than-nutritious crap and pumped up with hormones and antibiotics, I bet its fat is not as good for you.
As an heuristic, taste is supposed to be a measure of nutritional quality. Sure it can be cheated, but when something natural tastes better than something adulterated, I'm pretty confident you can rely on that hint.
Two reasons why this comment might get downvoted (it was light grey when I saw it):
(1) Supplies your intuition about whether organic food is healthier than conventional but no facts to back that up. The world is usually counterintuitive.
(2) Suggests with a straight face that palatability is a good proxy for healthfulness, a measure that suggests health food stores should stock up on Doritos.
(1) having no facts to back the opposite assertion either, I'll take intuition as an heuristic.
(2) I explicitly noted the caveat that taste may be cheated. Now, taste was developed by evolution, and is cheated by the food industry, not (normally) nature. So I wouldn't trust taste of Doritos (artificial) over natural foods, but if I actually like vegetable soup better, I'm not going to look up what's the latest trend on nutrition to assume my choice is healthier.
"Uh huh. In what way meaningful to human health is the fat from conventional beef better for you than the fat from "organic" beef?'
It's the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids that's different. Grass-fed beef is well documented to have a higher Omega 3:6 ratio than grain-fed beef.
Have you ever observed a ruminant's behavior even if it has acres and acres of free range?
It will spend the day milling around in the same area with its friends and then lay down in its own excrement for a nap. How is this qualitatively different from a CAFO operation?
a) chicken fed not with grass/organic food but with whatever's cheaper and convenient (in Europe there were several scandals where they even found that they used machine oil in chicken feed),
b) packed by the thousands in small cages,
c) full off antibiotics and hormones to grow them fatter,
are totally as healthy as organic chicken?
(I used to have a chicken den (sp?), with 10-15 chickens in my backyard (in Europe, that is), raising them organic style. I have also visited a couple of huge chicken "factories". I'd never even begin to compare the two methods, much less the quality of their output.)
I believe antibiotics are a real human health issue.
But otherwise, no, I don't believe there's a real human health difference between Purdue chicken and the Gunthorp Farms chicken I get from my butcher.
I certainly don't believe you're going to lose weight faster eating the better chicken. You might even lose weight slower, since authenticatically humane chicken is extraordinarily expensive, and chicken (that you cook at home) is probably going to tend to be a better dietary option than the alternative.
a) Your wording is weird, but yes, they are just as healthy. All scientific research on the topic has shown no health benefits to organic plants. What makes you think organic chicken is grass fed?
b) Why do you think organic chickens are any different? USDA organic cert is a joke. It doesn't mean the chickens spend their days frolicking in fields. IIRC they can be kept in cages if they have some exposure to outdoors.
c) In the US, hormone use in chickens is illegal. Antibiotics are used in all animals, organic or not.
Chickens are omnivores, not ruminants like cows. They'll eat grass but can't subsist on it. There's no such thing as "grass-fed chicken"; people who say "grass-fed", when they know what they're talking about, mean cows.
Small farms do not flood their livestock with antibiotics to increase yield. It's a bit of a straw man to suggest that people are saying antibiotics should never be used on animals; it's their routinized use in factory farms that's the issue.
Otherwise, I agree: "organic" isn't meaningful, and even the "real" good chicken isn't more healthful (apart, again, from the antibiotic issue), just better tasting.
I'll happily slice up and saute kosher (conventional) chicken breast for a salad or pasta dish. But if I'm serving roast chicken, I use the good stuff.
"""Chickens are omnivores, not ruminants like cows. They'll eat grass but can't subsist on it. There's no such thing as "grass-fed chicken"; people who say "grass-fed", when they know what they're talking about, mean cows."""
Well, re: wording, no native english speaker. With "grass fed" I mean naturally fed, not necessarily grass or solely grass. In my chicken hen I used wheet, corn, wild grass, and something that I don't know it's name in english, but I found a translation here as: " small seed of any of various annual cereal grasses especially Setaria italica millet"
Do you actually believe you're more likely to lose weight eating organic protein?