The Healing Table: The Benefits of Locally Raised Beef

*3/25/15 UPDATE:  Since writing this blog post, I got such a great response from my readers that I began a group sharing service.  If you are interested in group share, go to our website at www.sharehappycows.com for more information.  We'll be happy to walk you through how easy it is to get local meats at an affordable cost in a quantity that fits your space.  And we'll deliver it to your house.


Before we moved to Cleveland, we discovered the love of buying locally raised beef.  We have some friends back home who raise just a few Holstein cows at a time, taking excellent care to raise them in a healthy, all natural way.  After being frustrated with the meager options at the grocery store and the ridiculous mark up of price on the "organic" beef options, we decided to buy-in on Steve and Michelle's stock.

There are many reasons to fall in love with buying local beef.  It's cheaper, it's healthier, it tastes better and it supports your local economy while at the same time takes away from factory farming.  Now that we've moved, Steve and Michelle are about four hours from us, so we've had to find a new local cattle farmer in the counties around us.  It wasn't as easy as I would have hoped but after some time invested in research, we found several.

On our first run at purchasing local beef, we chose to only order a quarter of a cow to start. If you’ve never bought beef this way, you might not know how rewarding and cost effective it is. The beef is sold by the quarter, the half or the whole.  We stocked our deep freezer but it didn't take as long as we thought to go through that meat!

Each portion has a market-based per pound price that is multiplied by the hanging weight.  So for example, a half a cow hangs for about 350 pounds.  A typical market price for all naturally raised beef is around $4.00 per hanging weight pound.  So 350 X $4.00= $1,400.  Your take home yield, meaning the actual meat you come home with after processing a half cow is about 65% of that weight or 225 pounds.  So, 225 pounds of meat at $1,400 means your actual price is about $6.25 per pound for ground beef, steaks and roasts.

NOTE: If you don't want that much meat or can't afford that much of an upfront cost, you can contact us to do a group share where you can share a quarter or a half or a whole with several other families.  With group shares you can buy on a budget, it requires less storage space, and you can re-order more often, keeping your meat inventory fresher.  You also get a variety of meats and cuts.  We do beef, chicken and pork.  Contact us at www.sharehappycows.com for more information.

There are reasons other than price for buying locally-raised beef.  First, the butcher typically ages beef longer than store bought beef, 14 to 21 days compared to only 5 to 7 for commercial beef. So it tastes better.  But it’s also typically fresher because commercial beef can sit longer before it gets to your table. With local beef, once the butcher cuts it up, it's yours.  Plus, commercial ground beef comes from a variety of cows, whereas your local beef purchase is all from the same cow. That means the ground beef you buy from the grocery store is made up of several different cows.  Finally, even the "organic" beef you get from the grocery store cannot compare.  Most of it is shipped in from Australia and it is wet aged, meaning it ages inside the plastic packaging.  This makes it less flavorful, less safe and it contains more water.  So, when you pay per pound, you are paying for more water in the weight of that pound of meat.  It's a waste.

The taste of local beef is worlds away from anything you’ve ever bought at a store. If you’ve never tasted local beef, you don’t know what beef is actually supposed to taste like, but I can tell you it is delicious.  But the best thing about buying local is that you know very well how that cow was fed, raised and cared for. The cows we buy graze on pasture land and are supplementally fed an all natural diet of non-GMO feed, have plenty of room to roam, have clean living quarters and are not pumped full of steroids or antibiotics. And the beef comes from the butcher without preservatives, nitrates, nitrites or “pink slime.”  We can also get totally organic 100% grass fed cows but the cost is more and the difference is actually minimal.

Now many people may argue that red meat in your diet is not a good thing, that you should feed your family lean meats.  I disagree, sort of.  Yes, lean meats are healthier in terms of their fat and cholesterol content.  But red meat provides vital nutrients that are hard to find elsewhere in our diet.

For instance, red meat is rich in Vitamin B12 as well as thiamin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, folate, niacin and B6.  It's also a great source of Vitamin D and iron.  Red meat is also a great way for us to get zinc.  Since the American diet is not rich in organ meats and shellfish, red meat becomes the primary source for our vital nutrients such as zinc.  In red meat we also find significant amounts of minerals such as magnesium, copper, cobalt, phosphorous, chromium, nickel and selenium.  And all of these vitamins and minerals are much more bioavailable in red meat than in other sources such as our plant-based foods.  Bioavailable means the body can absorb them much more efficiently.  Finally, the fatty acid profile of red meat is far and away better than leaner white meats.

Media reports will scare you that red meat is dangerous to your health, that it leads to cancer and heart disease.  However, there have been no conclusive studies that show evidence of this.  And if anything, it's the nitrates and nitrites that commercial beef companies pump into your grocery store beef that is the most dangerous thing about it.  That HAS been proven.  This is probably the most important reason to buy local.

So, if you are interested in getting involved in group sharing of locally raised beef, chicken or pork, check out our site and contact us for more information.  You will not be sorry and you will probably never buy beef at the grocery store again.  www.sharehappycows.com.

The Oxygen Mask: A Weekly Dedication to Taking Care of the Caretaker

First Edition: Your Gall Bladder & Pregnancy

The Oxygen Mask is going to be a weekly issue that I will post focusing on Mommy Health.  I think it is important to take time out to discuss our own health and ways we can improve it.  As we well know, we are often the pilot, the navigator AND the flight attendant on this crazy ride and we cannot safely and securely care for our little passengers if we're not at least occasionally tending to our own needs as well.

In this first edition, I want to talk about our gall bladders.  This might be an unusual place to start, since it's not an organ we pay much attention to, but for personal reasons, I think it is a good place to start.  In my own experience of becoming a mother for the first time, I discovered that there were a lot of "things they don't tell you about pregnancy."  I say that in quotations because I found myself saying that a lot all of a sudden to anyone who would listen.  That's because I had an expectation that, since women have been giving birth for thousands of years, we probably knew everything there was to know about it and that I would be fully debriefed about EVERYTHING that could or would happen.  I was wrong.  I began a journey of discovery when I got pregnant, about my own body, about health and about the consequences of pregnancy.  The first thing I learned about was my gall bladder.

A short time after I gave birth to Mariella, I was struck by a sudden and agonizing pain in my torso that literally took my breath away.  I remember I was sitting on the couch, relaxing after putting her to bed, and indulging in a snack.  The episode came on like a freight train.  I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move.  Now this was in the fall of 2009, right around the time the media was buzzing about the H1N1 flu virus.  Remember that?  Yeah, well, the only thing I could think was, "Oh my God, I have H1N1 and I'm dying."

I ended up in the emergency room in the middle of the night, with a newborn in tow.  After hours of the worst pain I've ever felt in my life (and remember I had just given birth), the doctor's reported that I "probably have gall stones."  What???  They sent me home with Vicodin and told me to follow up with my GP but warned me that I was likely going to have to have gall bladder surgery.  My husband, being the superior researcher that he is, decided he wanted a second opinion because of all the horror stories he'd heard about gall bladder removal surgery.  He said that everyone he'd talked to who'd had the surgery "continued to live with pain and digestive problems."  He recommended we try a homeopathic purge that he found on the Internet.

In  the meantime, my attacks were becoming more frequent, more severe, lasting longer and becoming more resilient against the pain killers.  At my worst I was taking three Vicodin to dull the pain.....and it wasn't working.  My attacks would last as long as an hour sometimes and I began to describe them like "one long labor contraction that won't let up."  I would be on all fours on the floor, frozen and panting like a sick dog.  Afraid of surgery and the consequences thereof, I decided to give the purge a try.

The purge was basically a recipe of drinking Epsom salts every two hours for a whole day and then drinking a whole cup of olive oil and lemon juice.  Then you spend the whole next day on the toilet, purging your gall stones and everything else in your system.  I'm not recommending this process, but if you're curious about it, I'm sure it can be found easily by Googling.

It worked at first, I didn't have another attack for a few weeks.  But then they started again.  I still wasn't ready to give in to surgery, so I decided to do the purge again (they say it can take a few tries and apparently some people do it as a regular maintenance thing).  This time, I wanted proof so I did a very gross thing.  I put on rubber gloves, got a sieve and "fished out" my gall stones.  There were a lot.  I counted over 25 stones, some the size of a quarter.  And this was my second purge.  After collecting my bounty, I cleaned them off and put them in a baggie and stuck them in the freezer so they would keep until I could take them to the doctor.  I thought, "Surely that must be it.  I'm good now."  Wrong again.

About a week later, I was hit again.  Hard.  This time I decided to see the surgeon.  I took my baggy of stones, to which he responded with shock and amusement.  "How did you do this?"  he asked before he paraded my baggy around the office for show-and-tell.  I told him I purged them out.  He said he'd never heard of such a thing.  In the end, he removed my gall bladder but before he did, I asked him if I could see it once it was out.  He said no but that he would take photos of it for me.  When I came to after surgery, he showed me those photos.  After two purges, and after removing at least 25 stones on my second purge, my gall bladder still looked like a bag of marbles.

Now, luckily, I haven't gone on to live with continued pain and digestive problems.  But I'm discussing this with you now because I learned something very important that I think all women who plan to get pregnant or have had similar experiences should know.  You see, I wanted to know why this happened to me.  What I learned is that pregnancy predisposes women to high risk of gall stones because of the high hormone levels.  Progesterone inhibits the function of the gall bladder, relaxing it and causing bile to build up inside it, which leads to stones.

  About 12 percent of pregnant women each year develop gall bladder problems during pregnancy and can end up having surgery.  That's as many as 480,000 women in the United States each year!  Some even have to have emergency surgery while they're still pregnant!  This is not pseudoscience.  This is a well documented medical fact. Yet, not one doctor or OB warned me of this when I got pregnant.  And you know the response when I asked my doctor if they thought my pregnancy led to my gall bladder problems?  "I suppose it's possible."

Almost a half a million women each year end up with gall bladder problems as a result of pregnancy and no one is talking about it?  If someone had warned me that this could happen to me, that there was a good chance that this could happen to me, I would have eaten a low cholesterol diet during my pregnancy.  I would have made strides to stay healthy, be proactive and possibly avoid this extremely painful condition that inevitably led to surgery and the loss of an organ (an organ, by the way, that many doctors will say is UNNECESSARY, and that many alternative health professionals will vehemently disagree).  Maybe it would have happened anyway.  But I was never given the chance to see.

Instead, it affected my ability to breast feed my baby, it caused me unrelenting pain that made it hard for me to enjoy and care for my newborn.  It caused me to lose an organ, and it cost me a hefty medical bill that took several years to pay off.  So, ladies, I urge you.  If you are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, be sure you consider your gall bladder in your pregnancy diet.  Consider a low cholesterol diet and talk to your health care professionals about this possible consequence of pregnancy.  You may still be one of the unlucky 12 percent, but at least you'll be armed with knowledge and that's a powerful thing.  We are our own best advocate when it comes to our health.

And keep in mind that gall bladder surgery in the United States each year carries about a $10 billion price tag.  About 700,000 procedures are done each year and as many as 480,000 of them are women who got pregnant.  On the other hand, the price tag on your good health, is $0.  Nobody's making money when you're making good, educated health decisions.

Making Your Own Baby Food, Part 2: How to Do It

In this second part of this post, I'm going to discuss how to make your own baby food, and illustrate how easy it is to do.  In part one, I used an example of an 8 ounce sweet potato or yam.  Let's continue with that.

One of the best ways is to make a good amount and freeze it.  Since baby only eats a few ounces at a time, cooking a whole sweet potato can be wasteful unless you plan to eat the rest (Which as I will mention later, is an option).  So, here's what to do:

1. Boil that sweet potato until soft and then mash it up.
2. Then, if you want to puree it, you can use any blender to do so.  (ATTENTION MOMMIES:  You DO NOT need to invest in a baby food making system like Baby Bullet.  It is an expensive commodity that is totally unnecessary.  You absolutely do not need specially designed equipment to make baby food.  But if you do have a Bullet or a Vitamix or a Ninja, or whatever, great!  Use it.  If you only have a plain old boring blender, no worries. They work just as well.
3. If you do wish to thin out the food a little, you can add a little water when blending.
4. Once you've gotten it to the consistency you desire, pour it into ice cube containers.  Be sure to have clean, even sterilized, ice cube containers that are only used for baby food.  Frozen water tends to leave behind a residue of chemicals and minerals that get separated out during the freezing process.  
5. Once you have frozen your baby food, break out the cubes and toss into a freezer bag.  Label and date your bag of baby food and be sure to use within 3 months.

The nice thing about this method is that each cube is about one ounce each so it will be easy to measure out what you need for each serving.  And it allows you to make a bunch of food only once in awhile so you're not slaving over a blender every time your baby wants to eat.  And you can use fresh or frozen fruits and veggies.

 There is a particular website that I love which lays out the process of making your own baby food and a week by week plan for introducing food to baby.  It's www.babyfood101.com.  When you go there, click on "Weekly Email Course."  As I mentioned above, one option is to cook your sweet potato or other veggie and share it with your baby.  This website gives great ideas on how to do that.  And what better way to encourage family meal time than to include everyone in the same meal!  Also, what better way to encourage healthy eating than to incorporate fruits and veggies into your whole family's meal!

So, for instance in week four on www.babyfood101.com, it discusses introducing carrots and pears, information about organic versus non-organic, storage options, the health benefits of these foods, a baby recipe and an adult recipe, tips, and a shopping list, among other information.  This website lays everything out so simply with such great information.  It has truly become my go-to and I highly recommend it.

Another way to share food with your baby is to make "Banana Ice Cream."  All you do is mash up some bananas (and this is a great way to use up some of the riper ones) and freeze it.  Later, take it out and give to your older children for a great snack but also give some to your baby!  Especially if your baby is teething, this can be a great treat for them because it's nice and cold.  I love this treat and Mariella and Max love it too!

So, I hope after reading these posts you'll not only feel a little less anxious about making your own baby food, you'll see all the great benefits of it!  As always, if you have questions or wish to share ideas, feel free to contact me!