Farm Progress

Our health depends in part on what our prey animals eat.

R. P. 'Doc' Cooke, Blogger

August 2, 2017

2 Min Read
When our animals eat forage-based diets, we get less inflamatory fatty acids from eating them.KucherAV-iStock-Thinkstock

Three food ingredients are in short supply in the natural world: Salt, sugar and fat. Our brain and body requires all three, and if the formula is not correct there will be major health struggles and issues.

The US is in a major crisis presently concerning health. “Cheap food” has been the answer of government and many farm organizations to the economy for at least 100 years. Health care costs are up dramatically over the last 40 years, while annual food expenditure has dropped from 14% down to less than 10% during the same time frame.

Our brain and nervous systems and joints and muscles require salt, sugar and fat. Not all salt is created exactly equal. Raw salt with iodine and multiple other trace minerals is better than cleaned-up white salt. Ditto a similar parallel for sugar and certainly fat.

Add to the fact sheet that all three are capable of being an addiction. Sugar is likely the most addictive substance on the planet. Sugars (carbohydrates) are broken down and insulin kicks in and yields glucose 6-phosphate. Our brains require small amounts of glucose 6-phosphate constantly to function properly.

Fat and the proper types of fat are an equal necessity. Fat slows the absorption of sugar. Fat needs to be near raw and naturally occurring. The entirety of our brain requires high-quality fatty acids much of which need to be anti inflammatory in which to bath itself. Leaf-derived fat is anti-inflammatory. Herbivores (cattle and sheep) eating high leaf-derived diets contain high levels of anti-inflammatory fat. Cultures eating such a diet do not have American diseases, sometimes called the diseases of civilization.

Folks, what we have discovered is very important. Grassfed cattle are the answer to a bunch of puzzles. Hope you understand and learn this gospel. We need to talk about it on a regular basis.

About the Author(s)

R. P. 'Doc' Cooke

Blogger

R. P. "Doc" Cooke, DVM, is a mostly retired veterinarian from Sparta, Tennessee. Doc has been in the cattle business since the late 1970s and figures he's driven 800,000 miles, mostly at night, while practicing food animal medicine and surgery in five counties in the Upper Cumberland area of middle Tennessee. He says all those miles schooled him well in "man-made mistakes" and that his age and experiences have allowed him to be mentored by the area’s most fruitful and unfruitful "old timers." Doc believes these relationships provided him unfair advantages in thought and the opportunity to steal others’ ideas and tweak them to fit his operations. Today most of his veterinary work is telephone consultation with graziers in five or six states. He also writes and hosts ranching schools. He is a big believer in having fun while ranching but is serious about business and other producers’ questions. Doc’s operation, 499 Cattle Company, now has an annual stocking rate of about 500 pounds beef per acre of pasture and he grazes 12 months each year with no hay or farm equipment and less than two pounds of daily supplement. You can reach him by cell phone at (931) 256-0928 or at [email protected].

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