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Conventional beef vs grassfed beef
I got some more expensive beef and it made me feel shitty for about a day. Night blindness returned, as it always does when i consume beta-carotene, and I felt down emotionally. I ate the same kind of meat a week later and the same thing occured.
I think it might have come down to it being grassfed, and as a result, containing way more VA (and more PUFA also).
According to this study ( https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-9-10 ) grassfed beef can have as much as 74 mcg beta carotene per 100g of meat, compared to the grain-fed meat which only had 17 mcg.
There are varying studies with different results, but they all seem to trend towards grassfed beef having a lot more carotenoids. So this might be something worth to consider, especially if you're eating a lot of beef and not making much progress.
There is another study that looked at some different results: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20219103/
Author, year, animal class Grass-fed (ug/g tissue) Grain-fed (ug/g tissue)
Insani et al., 2007, Crossbred steers 0.74* 0.17*
Descalzo et al., 2005 Crossbred steers 0.45* 0.06*
Yang et al., 2002, Crossbred steers 0.16* 0.01*
It's clear the grass fed is going to have more beta carotene, but where did you get that it would also be higher PUFA?
It should have a better omega 3-6 ratio, but the overall amount of PUFAs should be about the same.
Quote from BeefWizard on May 25, 2021, 11:08 pmIt's clear the grass fed is going to have more beta carotene, but where did you get that it would also be higher PUFA?
It should have a better omega 3-6 ratio, but the overall amount of PUFAs should be about the same.
It's in the second study I linked, page 4. It seems like grainfed and grassfed have roughly the same amount of omega-6, but the grassfed achieves the so called "good" ratio by having a lot more omega-3 and less monounsaturated fats than grainfed beef. The grassfed beef has 2x to 7x as much omega 3 as the graindfed beef. Which is a bad thing in my opinion.
Nice find, thank you for sharing.
This might explain why the carnivore dieters that go grain fed beef only (no organs) seem to do the best out of all of them.
Is there one thing I think I know that isn't going to be stood on it's head, LOL?
I also feel that I have some night blindness that I've wondered about. I'm going to have to think about whether it is during weeks that I get more carotene.
I remember reading that in places like here, where spring growth is very sudden and lush, that farm animals sometimes need to be made accustomed to it slowly. You can't just let them gorge on it suddenly after eating hay and grain all winter.
I wonder about the health-effect that Price saw, regarding the X factor (vitamin K). Is vitamin K in the spring and fall milk an antidote to the high carotene?
The "milk cure" is something I've always wondered about because I think it was used for mysterious ailments such as those that accompany VA toxicity. It was, for sure, SKIM milk. Butter is yellow because the carotenes follow the fats. I remember reading that the sanitoriums that ran the milk cure kept their own herds and cared for them in a specific way. I wonder what the way was.
In this area people built silos during a particular era. Silos make a different kind of feed than sun-dried hay. A silo takes green stalks of corn and turns it into a lacto vegetable. I'm thinking that silage would probably be a much higher VA food than sun-dried hay. In this area, silos got a bad reputation after a while. They got the nick name, which I can't quite remember, but an old-timer around these parts I think called them "poverty towers". Interesting. Technology can have unintended consequences.
On another thread I shared my theory that breast milk isn't "stacked" with VA, it just reflects the current content of the fats of the female at the time of the lactation.
I stated that I thought that the meat from an old dairy cow sent to slaughter would probably have a higher VA content than a young animal.
I've seen myself that my (free range) chickens have much yellower fats than store chickens. (and yolks)
Although I have seen my yolks come down a notch or two now that I don't feed them pumpkins all winter and other high VA kitchen scraps.
I bet that Sarabeth's breast milk VA is not at all the same for her current child than it was for her other children.
For me personally beta-carotene brings on night blindness very quickly, way worse and faster than retinol.
Hippocrates treated patients with a milk only diet for a couple of months, 2500 years ago. It wasn't cows milk though. Other animals convert/cleave beta-carotene much more efficiently than cattle do. That's why goat/sheep butter/cheese is white and not yellow. Cows milk used be quite uncommon from what I've heard, milk used to be all about goat milk and sheep milk until a couple of hundred years ago or so.
I tried drinking goats milk for a couple of months last year. It actually had both positive and negative effects, and the negatives were less bad than with cows milk. But my body became more and more and more inflamed the more in consumed of it, and I lost a lot of hair and felt extremely stressed out, and my joints hurt so much I didn't want to move out of bed. However, it didn't cause me night blindness, unlike regular milk, or if it did it did it during the span of multiple weeks/months, not from one day to the next. Same when I tried a retinol supplement. Felt absolutely horrific of course, but it didn't cause night blindness, meanwhile one serving of non-white vegetables will bring it back.
Very interesting thought about sun dried hay vs silage, I didn't even know that hay used to be sun dried.
I suppose that is where the old saying "got to make hay while the sun shines" comes from ! 🙂 They let the hay grow to it's perfect height, then they look at the weather report. They need a few days of no rain.
They cut it, let it lie in the fields. Then they come through with a machine that swishes it around and let it sit in the sun some more.Then they come through with a baler machine.
I have pictures of my ancestors doing this all by hand, up in New Hampshire. It was hot hard work! I suppose just dumping corn stalks into a silo was easier.