Make Way for Meat

If you go to some of the most frequented, heavily trafficked natural health websites, you’re likely to find recommendations that advise against eating meats, red meats especially. While true, red meats can be high in saturated fat and are linked to studies that suggest they contribute to various cancers, I’ve never jumped aboard the “Avoid Beef at All Costs” bandwagon. I’m a proponent of protein being consumed from meat, so long as they’re consumed from organic sources and eaten sparingly.   
While there are many reasons for why the consumption of red meat can be beneficial to the body (again, when eaten sparingly), the one reason I want to focus on is their richness in phytonutrients.

If you look up the word “phytonutrients,” you’re likely to find various definitions, but they’re basically health-promoting chemicals fruits and vegetables are packed with. Actually the word’s root, phyto, is the Greek translation for “plant.”

But recent research suggests that red meat is also packed with phytonutrients, a fact you’re not likely to find any time soon on any reference-based website. But it isn’t just red meat that has phytonutrients. As reported in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, of the 115 animal-based products analyzed, each and everyone had at least some amounts of phytonutrients, including cheese, eggs and fish.

Now, this might not come as any big whoop-de-do. After all, even vegetables have some trace amounts of protein, yet everyone knows that protein is most abundantly found in animal-based products. So what’s the big deal if meat has phytonutrients? Well, besides the fact that it opens the way for a greater variety of foods from which to go to for nutrients that are effective in fighting against various forms of cancers and the world’s lead killer, heart disease (did you know heart disease claims more lives per year than the top seven causes of death among women combined?), some animal-based products have even more phytonutrients than vegetables (potatoes are one example). The same cannot be said for vegetables overtaking any animal-based product in protein content.

Phytonutrients are more of an umbrella term that represent many chemical classes, like carotenoids, phenols and phytoestrogens. Phytoestrogens are the specific chemicals that occupy most of these animal-based products, red meat included.

There’s no question that phytonutrients are predominantly found in plant-based foods and soy products. But this study blows the lid off of any authoritative listing of foods for phytonutrients.

While it’s no excuse to start eating red meat willy-nilly, this study serves as why red meat can be part of a healthy eating regimen when eaten sparingly. If you so choose to incorporate red meat into your diet, always opt with organic sources of beef, and always choose lean cuts. The leanest of choices is bison. By way of comparison, bison has fewer calories than beef (In a 3 ½ ounce cut, bison has 142 calories vs. 282 in beef) more protein (28 g vs. 26 g), less cholesterol (81 mg vs. 82), more iron (3 ½ mg vs. 2 ¾ mg) and way less fat (2 g vs. 19 g; for saturated fat, less than a gram vs. 7 ½ g).