I stopped buying conventional ground beef when 'pink slime' became news. They've probably stopped that practice now since they got caught, but still the idea of eating ground beef that isn't grass fed skieves me out. I buy organic, pastured, grass fed, and non-GMO whenever I possibly can and cut back in other areas to do so.

The price differential entirely depends on where you are buying your food. My local grocery (in a marginal area) sells feedlot ribeye for $11. My local farmer's market sells grass fed ribeye for $16 and my nearest WholeFoods (in an upmarket area) sells grass fed ribeye for $23. All about the same size.

I'm 65, work full time, walk at least an hour every weekday and 4 hours on weekends, take no prescription drugs and rarely get an ache or a pain. But even if the way I eat is not responsible for that, every instinct in my being tells me it's not okay to eat strawberries spliced with sheep's genes or any of the other mad-scientist protocols devised for our corporate food supply.

I know there's such a thing as PubMed. Pointing at it doesn't really count towards providing references for a claim.

And I hope you are as healthy as I am (or even healthier).

We all have our priorities, and it's nice when there is reinforcement that we made the right choices.

To me the proof of a lifetime of making healthier food a priority is that I'm turning 69 this month, I'm a pro musician and I haven't called in sick since 1964, I'm on zero prescription drugs, and I can still walk 4 miles a day. Plus I can still play music 4 hours straight, without taking a break, on my feet, with the energy and passion of a youth, and move an audience (I don't plan on retiring).

There have been times when I discovered certain foods disagreed with me, sugar, egg yolks, fowl, and others for various reasons - and when I isolated the culprit, it's out of my diet - gone for good.

As the live music and recording session opportunity have dwindled for all musicians, I've made certain changes in my spending habits. Healthy foods will be one of the last things I cut, and if I do that, you know I'm very desperate. As long as they don't kill Social Security and as long as someone will want to hear me play sax, flute, guitar, synthesizer, bass, drums or hear me sing, I don't see myself getting that desperate.

I suspect what works for me doesn't work for everyone, but through a lifetime of listening to my body, and following the research I can find in respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals, I've turned out to be healthier than well over 90% of the people half my age and above. Barring some freak accident, I expect to live over 100 and still be healthy.

Some people would rather watch TV than be healthy, that's their choice. Others like to be healthy and do dangerous things like hang-gliding or mountain climbing, that's their choice. There is no one correct way to do it.

Bob

Don't believe me. Do your own research if you are interested. It's there for anyone on the Internet.

Or just figure 65 countries that pay their own medical bills have banned foods containing GMOs, like American GMO Corn-Fed Beef.

It's your choice, and you don't have to justify what you prefer to eat.

Bob

A lot of the beef sold as USDA Organic beef isn't even produced in the US and we don't have inspectors in foreign countries so buyer beware....

This article is along the lines of what Bob was referring to, although grass fed is never mentioned. The scientists among us should be able to find the published scientific research referred to in the article. Animal lovers: there are some disturbing pictures of rats with huge tumors induced by GMOs and Roundup.

http://www.naturalnews.com/037249_G...gan_damage.html

As someone who was born and raised in a foreign country I think it's fair to point out that they do have their own inspectors and in many countries the standards are somewhat higher than the US, particularly in regard to GMOs. Furthermore, America has a lot of rules about what foodstuffs can and cannot be imported here. So even after the foreign (untrustworthy? less than satisfactory?) inspectors have done their work, the food also has to get past whatever tests are in place to enforce the American rules.

Grass-fed does not mean that no weed killer was used on the grass. Most all grasses cultivated for cattle consumption is poisoned at least 2-3 times per year to remove the weeds.
If I could afford it I would be buying American produced organic Beef.
I have found recently that Uruguay is claiming to have 100% grass fed beef and is exporting it to the US. because they claim to have no winter so that the grass doesn't go dormant as it will in areas with a winter season when the cattle must be fed.
But again, I don't trust USDA certified in foreign countries (meat or vegetables) and the US produced organic beef is almost unaffordable...
It would be so expensive to buy organic feed that it would probably turn a $3,000 cow into a $6000 cow and the price per pound in the store would probably be around $30 per pound.

Only 1% of the imported foods is inspected by USDA.

I'm with you Bob, I avoid Big Food and Big Pharma as much as possible--which is like 100%. When I see all those commercials for the latest life-improving drug...I just think it's bad juju.

I also agree. I was raised by a mother from France who ate low-carb most of her life (never ate rice, beans, pasta or potatoes) and would take no drugs, not even Tylenol or Motrin when they both came out.
30 years ago when the new seedless fruits (grapes) came out she said that they were unnatural/abnormal and would not buy or eat them. Now we know that is GMO.
All of the GMO is sterol and cannot reproduce itself. Rice farmers used to get two harvest from one single planting because the first planting would throw of seeds which would germinate the second harvest, but that does not happen anymore because the rice does not go to seed.

What that means is that the chemical companies like Monsanto own our US food supply...

I had trouble finding the study. There's a study referenced in the article, but it didn't actually mention any rodents getting cancer. The lead author's name didn't yield anything on Pubmed... so I googled the lead author's name + cancer, and got this;


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair



It's a "who do you trust" sort of thing. The obvious answer will be of course "not Monsanto." But however much we might all agree that Monsanto sucks, being big and evil isn't the same as being guilty of everything that you might be accused of. Anyways, the effects of roundup fed directly to rodents is beyond the scope of my disagreement here. It's the one step further--cows eat roundup corn, rats eat cows, rats get cancer--that I'm interested in. I can't seem to find anything showing that animals eating GMO corn would carry enough glyphosate in their tissues to be relevant here. The fact that the stuff is water soluble would tend to support that.

http://www.enveurope.com/content/pd...-014-0014-5.pdf

Looks like they finally did manage to republish that gmo, roundup rat cancer study last year.

Data. I trust data. No not the character in Star Trek the Next Generation but numbers. I trust numbers.

"In God we trust. All others bring data." - W.E. Deming


TL;DR. So did they just feed the rats roundup directly or grain with roundup or GMOed grain, etc. etc.? The studies that that could not reproduce the results, did they reportedly use the same methods? I know we are down the rabbit hole and it's not your job to disprove the unproven but I thought you might know.

I still have to give the study a better read, but this in the discussion sort of sticks out;



If you look at table 2, even the controls had pretty high rates of cancer. This strain is particularly cancer-prone, at least in the typical lab setting.

The authors suggest here that the background level of cancer might be high due to other carcinogens in the environment. Complaining that more animals are needed to achieve statistical significance--well, yeah. If there are confounding variables, it will take more subjects to show a statistically significant effect. If we let them rewrite history, then they get to be statistically significant. You can't become significant by hypothesizing that every other study ever done was contaminated. Were the tumors in the control group "spontaneous" but the ones in historical data not?

Rats were given non-gmo corn without roundup as the control, or gmo corn without roundup, or gmo corn with roundup, or non-gmo corn with roundup in the drinking water. Looking back at table 2 again--trying to see a pattern, beyond it being safer to be a rat in the control group than one in any of the intervention groups just crosses my eyes. For the six most frequent pathologies, the lowest incidence was in the controls.


http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/16/3/194


This study looked at spontaneous cancer in Sprague-Dawley rats.


Simply feeding this strain of rats a "high fat" diet, whatever that means, induces a cancer rate similar to the rates shown in the gmo corn study. It's really not very hard to give this strain an extremely high rate of cancer.


Something in me wants to make something of the fact that in every category in table 2, the least tumours appeared in control rats. But then you look at the categories... they're related. Of course a rat with a mammary gland tumour will be more likely to have a mammary tumour. And kidney, liver and hepatodigestive tract cancers are liable to travel together as well. So not as much of a coincidence as it seemed at first glance.

http://weedcontrolfreaks.com/2012/0...trial-is-bogus/