Just How Healthy Is GrassFed Beef? Depends on the Grass!

You’ve probably heard that grass-fed beef is better for you than corn-finished beef.  But….it turns out that the benefits that come from grass-finished beef depend a lot on what’s in “the grass” they were finished on…..

If the cows that became beef were eating a wide variety of different plant species….they were not just a lot healthier than corn-finished beef – they are significantly healthier than beef raised on only one type of grass!

These and many other fascinating facts are being learned from the work of Dr. Stephan van Vliet - a researcher at Utah State University leading the biggest nutrient density survey of beef to date.

In this episode, we will learn all about this work and the implications it has for consumers and the planet during our feature interview with Dr. van Vliet.

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But first, following our new format, I’d like to share with you a clip from one of Dr. Jill Clapperton’s talks to our private online network: The Global Food & Farm Community.  In this clip, Jill explains how ranchers add biodiversity to their pasture – the kind that results in this much better beef……..

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Want to go further on this topic?  Join our private online community and watch several videos on creating multi-species pastures and understanding their benefits in our digital streaming library: RegenFlix.

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Transcript

Stephan van Vliet: 0:13

If we look at phytochemicals these plant compounds with antioxidants and anti inflammatory effects, they are about three times higher on average green grassfed beef compared to grain fed beef. But amongst grassfed beef, the highest grassroots sample is ten times higher than the lowest recipe sample. So that is something to keep in mind, I think also for the consumer and then with the benefit for biodiverse, forages those are the farmers that have the most nutrient dense meat.

Sara Harper: 0:42

Welcome back to our podcast Tasting Terroir, a journey that explores the link between healthy soil and the flavor and health of your food. I'm your host, Sarah Harper. That was an excerpt from my interview with beef nutrient density researcher Dr. Stefan VanVleet. The findings that are emerging from this study are calling much needed attention to the fact that it is multispecies pastures that create the true nutritional advantage for grassfed beef, not just the fact that the cows avoided grain. You've probably heard that grassfed beef is better for you than cornfinished beef, but it turns out that the benefits that come from grass finished beef depend a lot on what's in the grass that they were finished on. If the cows that became beef for eating a wide variety of different plant species, they were not just a lot healthier than corn finished beef, they were a lot healthier than beef raised on only one type of grass as well. These and many other fascinating facts are being learned from the work of Dr. Stefan Van Fleet, a researcher at Utah State University, leading the biggest nutrient density survey of beef to date. In this episode, we will learn all about his work and the implications it has for consumers as well as the flavor of beef in our feature interview with Dr. VanVleet. But first, following our new format this season, I'd like to share with you a clip from one of Dr. Jill Clapperton's talks to our private online network, the Global Food and Farm Community. In this clip, Jill explains how ranchers add biodiversity to their pasture, the kind that results in this much better beef.

Jill Clapperton: 2:25

Stitching pastures is similar to Oversawing Pastures. It's not the same as pasture cropping. So maybe we'll go through a few definitions here. First, pasture cropping is more like your pasture goes dormant and then you grow a cash crop on your dormant pasture. So that would be what most people would consider pasture cropping. In this case, you are rejuvenating a pasture or you are putting in a cool season pasture after a warm season pasture. So your warm season pasture goes dormant and then you see it in a cool season annual pasture on top of your warm season. And it's all about grazing. So Stitching Pastures is about grazing. It's about also feeding species that are like broad leaves into a grass pasture. So in other words, let's say you have a pasture like an old pasture, and some people will call these improved pastures. So they'll be timothy or they'll be brown grass or rye grass or something, but they'll be all grass because they've been in a long enough time and you're missing broad leaves. And so the pasture starts to decline in productivity, but you want to boost it up a bit. So if you want to boost your pasture up a bit, then the idea would be to stitch in or seed in some broadleaf plants in order to make the forage in the pasture more palatable, but also more nutritious for the cattle or whatever it is you're grazing. There are specific ways to do this, and one of them you can't stitching or seeding into a pasture that's really grown up. It hasn't been grazed. That's almost impossible. You could do it, but nothing would grow. So what you want to do is go in after it's grazed or in the spring when things aren't growing very fast, and get some fast growing broad leaves in there so that when the grass starts growing, you also have broad leafs in there. And most of the time you would see the annuals, but you can see perennials, too, and it's a way to rejuvenate an old pasture. And with annuals, you could do it every year. Ideally, what you'd want to do is let your annuals go to seed, at least at some point, so that you have them growing again the next year.

Sara Harper: 4:43

It makes sense that cows fed on diverse pastures or forage would be healthier than those either eating only one species of grass or getting fat on grain for the last few months of their lives. To learn just how much of a difference multispecies pastures make and how that happens, let's turn now to my interview with beef nutrient density researcher Dr. Stefan Von Velite. I am so happy to welcome today to our podcast, dr. Stefan Von Velite, a researcher from the Department of Nutrition, Food Sciences and Dietetics at the College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences at Utah State University. That's quite a mouthful. And on this episode, we are going to dive into Dr. Van Villet's most recent work, the Beef Nutrient Density Project, which is the largest profiling to date of beef's nutrient density and all the great findings that can come from that. So thanks so much for joining us today.

Stephan van Vliet: 5:44

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Sarah. It's a pleasure.

Sara Harper: 5:49

Well, great. Well, to start us off, can you share more with the audience? And keeping in mind this is a lay audience, just what is the nutrient density that you were looking for in beef? How is that defined? And maybe why should consumers care?

Stephan van Vliet: 6:05

Well, consumers should care because it is their health, right? So that's an important one. But if we look at nutrient density, you have the term nutrient density. It doesn't per se have a hard definition, but what it's usually referred to, at least in science, is that the amount of particularly micronutrients or phytochemicals, which are plant derived antioxidants, is the amount of that per maybe given weight of a product per 100 grams or per 4oz, for instance. So if we have more vitamin E or vitamin A per 100 grams of product, then we would consider that more nutrient dense. Or if you have more polyphenols per 100 grams of product or per 4oz of product, then we consider that more nutrient dense. So for a given amount of weight, we just have more nutrients in there. And particularly it's oftentimes referred to as to micronutrients and phytochemicals when we refer to nutrient density and not so much fat or protein.

Sara Harper: 7:08

Yeah, well, that's great. That's great. Okay, so with that understanding, can you share more about the study's objective? What were you looking for and why were you looking for it?

Stephan van Vliet: 7:20

So, in our previous work, which was through various USDA grants, we were profiling grass fed beef farms and comparing them oftentimes with feedlot finished beef. So in our earlier work, which started a couple of years ago, we found important differences in mainly fatty acids, also phytochemicals, certain B vitamins such as vitamin B three, a few nucleotides and peptides, which are things. For instance, an example could be four H and E, which is an advanced lipoxidation end product, which is part of the reason why sometimes red meat is considered a carcinogen through some groups at least. So before it's found lower amounts of that in grassfed beef. And that is tied also to animal health. So we started to find differences in these profiles. And these go far beyond omega three fatty acids. I must admit, previously people thought that, well, aggressive and grain fat beef is similar, but you see some difference in omega three fatty acids. But we find about a 40% difference routinely in nutrients far beyond omega three. So these phytochemicals nucleotides beef vitamins as well. So we did it on a couple of farms and at some point I got approached by the BioNutrient Institute, which we're working together with on the Beef Nutrient Density Project to see if we could maybe do this in more commercial farms and do it at a bigger scale, essentially. So we started that project about a year and a half ago and last year we had a big round of analysis and then this spring will have another big round of analysis. So the goal is essentially to study 250 farms, 750 steaks, so three steaks per farm, and just look at everything from grass fed beef or regenerative grass fed. Oftentimes farmers would highlight it as rotational grazing, continuous grazing, biodiverse forages, non biodiverse forages as well as feedlot finished beef, where there's also a lot of differences in is what we're finding depending on what the animal is fat. So across these 250 farms, we're looking to profile supply chain, look at all the nutrients in beef, define nutrient density and see how production practices impact the nutrient density of beef.

Sara Harper: 9:43

One thing you mentioned, and I think a lot of people are not aware of this, so they may be aware of grass fed, but there are differences within grass fed. So just like what you said about multi species forage, maybe just share a little bit about what is that?

Stephan van Vliet: 9:59

Yeah, grass fed isn't grass fed isn't grass fed, that's for sure. Especially amongst the grass fed beef samples, we find a tenfold variation in nutrient density. So that is quite a bit. Yeah. So that's a little bit of a Wild West. Certainly the most nutrient dense grass fed sample was about five or six times more nutrient dense in these phytochemicals than feedlot finished beef. But the worst grass fed beef sample was still three times lower than the best grass fed than the best feedlot finished beef sample.

Sara Harper: 10:31

Wow.

Stephan van Vliet: 10:32

Especially there, we find large differences. But what we're typically finding so far in the pattern of sorcerer merch is that when farmers do some sort of adaptive grazing or well managed grazing, usually that's rotational grazing, whether it's every few days or daily, it depends on the specific operation, of course, what works best and the size of the products. We find a benefit for dairy and at the same time, we also find a benefit for biodiversity. So if a farmer has, let's say, five or ten plant species, as opposed to maybe one or two very dominant grasses, then we also find that the more biodiverse pastures, and especially also this could be things with like wildflowers or other, maybe in western rains. And Shrops and Forbes that animals nibble on may not be a huge amount of the diet, but they do provide an important source of these phytochemicals, these plant derived compounds with potential health benefits from the forages and that are being transferred into the meat. So typically we find that more biodiverse forages and animals that are rotationally grazed that don't not OVERGrace the passage, those are amongst the most phytochemically rich samples.

Sara Harper: 11:47

So once again, it's like back to nature. Does it nature had it right. If you're out there in the pasture and the pasture has all these different kind of plants and all this diversity, that cow is going to be healthier, and then the meat from it is going to be healthier, then even if whether it's giving it a concentrated amount of grass, grass fed or grain, either one of those systems doesn't beat the diversity. Right? Is that what you're saying?

Stephan van Vliet: 12:17

That's indeed what we're finding, yeah. So we are now doing human studies to see if whether this translates also into a human health effect or not. But I do feel confident saying is that, yes, if we profile the meat, then on paper, animals that were on biodiverse forages this rich pasture of a variety of different plants, on paper, that meat looks the healthiest because it concentrates a lot more phytochemicals. And we've also done profiling of the plant samples on the past year. So we do a pasture walk, and we collect samples from all over the past year, usually working with the farmers and observing the animals to the plants that they mostly eat. So we collected those pasture samples, and we also did similar analysis on that. And what we're finding is that if there's more of these phytochemicals in the pasture, the plants on the pasture, then that translates to more phytochemicals in the meat. There's a relationship between the two. So, much like they say about humans, you are what you eat. Cows also are what they eat. And probably even more so because it's a much more controlled environment. Right. We go out and have a much larger selection of foods that we can eat. We can go through drive throughs, we can go to restaurants. We can have access to all kinds of foods. But with an animal on pasture, the plants that are on pasture is what the animal has access to. And if those are more phytochemically rich, that translates to direct enrichments of these phytochemicals in the meat.

Sara Harper: 13:46

Yeah, that's just fascinating. So Jill wanted to make sure and ask about giving the audience a sense of the kind of samples that you need. And you talked a little bit about the pasture, but what kind of samples did you need and how many and how did you prep them and how did you analyze them? Of course, you know, scientist to scientist, she's interested in all these details.

Stephan van Vliet: 14:12

Nitty gritty. That's right. So what we asked was we asked farmers to send in three steaks, three ribeye steaks from three different animals. So we wanted three biological replicates so that we don't put all of our eggs or all of our ribby stakes in one basket. I guess because there's some variation from animal to animal, even though even animals that are on the same pasture, different animals will select slightly different plants. So we wanted to make sure that we accounted for that variability within a given farm. Then we also had so each steak.

Sara Harper: 14:48

Was from a different cow.

Stephan van Vliet: 14:49

Yeah, each steak was from a different cow. Three ribeyes or one ribeye from three different cows.

Sara Harper: 14:54

That's right.

Stephan van Vliet: 14:56

And then we also had farmers collect forages through detailed standard operating procedures that we provide.

Sara Harper: 15:04

And forages just means plants. Right.

Stephan van Vliet: 15:05

For people that maybe depends on pasture. That's right. So they were collected through a pasture walk, and then also soil samples were collected from those pastures to also do soil testing. So we test for soil organic matter and mineral content in the soil and total exchange capacity, which is a measure of how well can the plant and the soil exchange nutrients. And we tested then the forages and then the meat, and we test those similarly. And that basically is done by grinding up either the meat sample or the plant samples. You will make it very cold on the liquid nitrogen. It's a couple of hundred degrees below freezing. You grind it up to a fine powder, you dissolve it in various reagents. Usually it's methanol. You go through a series of extraction procedures, mainly to get any heavy proteins out. And then you inject that sample into a mass spec. And what a mass spec can do is it can in a very detailed manner, it can identify individual compounds because all these compounds, for instance, these large number of phytochemicals in the plants or in the plant fruits and as well as in the meat, they all have a unique mass and a unique structure. So some are structurally similar, but they're all slightly different from each other. So if you know the structure of those and the mass of those, the mass spec can essentially effectively detect those in very small quantities. And then you could obviously compare among samples. So sample A might have twice as much as sample B and sample C might have three times as much as sample B. So that is the main way in which we detect those samples. And that's used the machine. It's called a mass pack. So it can very detailedly look at masses of these different compounds.

Sara Harper: 17:01

Well, that's great. I'm wondering, was there any look at the health of the soil? I mean, I know you're focusing on the meat, but you're doing the soil samples to look at the impact on the meat. But was there also any kind of look back at having the cattle on the pasture? Did that make the soil healthier or that's too far outside of what you're looking at at this point?

Stephan van Vliet: 17:23

Yes, because in some of our other projects we're doing repeated soil sampling. But for the farms that many of the farms that we're working with is more of a cross sectional study. So we don't know exactly yet the correlations between soil health and forge phytochemical richness. But we also did not collect samples over time. So if a farm made a lot of improvements over the last few years, it's not like we had a sample from a few years ago. So that will be hard to tell. But what we do hope to study with that is that okay, if you have more minerals in your soil or more soil organic matter, does it also relate to higher forage phytochemical richness and how does that relate to the meat? So we are indeed looking at those relationships. It's a little bit too early stages to really directly connect soil health to animal health. But we are seeing this pattern, the strong pattern emerge between plant phytochemical richness and the micronutrients in the plants and the nutrients that we find in the animal. That relationship is starting to emerge.

Sara Harper: 18:35

And you mentioned the benefit from the diversity. But is it the diversity of the plant species or the soil health that's affecting the plant health? Can you tease that out or is it coming from the soil health that then creates the diversity in the pasture? Or is it more than just the diversity of species?

Stephan van Vliet: 18:56

Yeah, I think it's a combination, probably. It's sort of circular, I would almost say, because even if you pull in the animal right, and then it can have a beneficial effect on the soil, it's all sort of a symbiotic relationship also between the animal and the plant. And the soil, of course, between the plant and the soil. We know from other literature, if you have more nutrient rich soils, that there's likely that there can be greater biodiversity. But we also know at the same time that more biodiversity enriches the soil microbes. So there's this feedback between the plant and the soil. And then, of course, when you have proper animal impact, by proper, I mean, not over grazing, then there can also be nutrients being put back into the soil right. That's through the urine and the feces of the animal that enriches the soil. That can then enrich the plant again and then go back to the animal. So it's really a sort of a symbiotic relationship where all three can strengthen each other, essentially. It's usually when we get to the human where we take more and then we sometimes give back. Right?

Sara Harper: 20:08

Yeah. Well, that's why also and I know this is outside of the scope of what you're looking at, but so often in the marketing of what's healthy, there's like, one aspect that's focused in on either as a negative, like glyphosate get it out completely, or grass fed, they zero in on one aspect. Or cows are bad for the climate, like one aspect, and they exclude the rest of the story. And so it looks like a lot of what you're doing, which is so hard, is looking at this holistic story because that's how you actually find what's actually happening. If you just zero in on one or two things, you could be right about those one or two things and be wrong overall because you're missing the whole picture. Yeah.

Stephan van Vliet: 20:54

And that is such an important point because what we see typically in a lot of our work is that also and it becomes very nuanced very quickly, it is not that straightforward. Like you said, oftentimes there's a simplified narrative. Cows are bad, plants are good. We look at emissions. Right. And of course, if animals are overgrazing pastures and which can create a monoculture, there's an inefficient an improper recycling of nutrients, then yeah, it can be very detrimental. Absolutely. We know this from historical overgrading, especially here in western rangelands. But at the same time, there's also many farmers, and hopefully an increasing number of farmers that try to mimic sort of more nature based solutions is what agro ecology, really is. It's moving animals around regularly, so during the grazing season, you can put them on pasture and animals will grace the same plant, stay at the same spots. Or if the animals are moved properly and grace pastures only for a short period of time, leave plenty of plant matter, have good animal impact, and move on to the next pasture, then, yeah, you can really start to see improvements over time in soil organic matter and plant biodiversity. And that is, of course, I think, a nuance that is oftentimes forgotten once we move through more simplified narratives and try to make these complex issues into a sort of one sentence headline.

Sara Harper: 22:36

And that's why I think it's so important that's what this podcast is really trying to get at, to help consumers have a deeper understanding of these issues so that they're kind of inoculated against some of the marketing claims. That may not be quite so accurate, but you mentioned some of the results that you found. But maybe just go a little more in depth into the most important findings in your mind of what you've learned so far.

Stephan van Vliet: 23:03

So the most important findings, I think, is that a cow is absolutely what they eat. There's such a strong relationship between the phytochemicals in the forge and the phytochemicals that end up in the meat. And one thing that was also surprising to be, well, there's a few things that stood out is, A, initially the work had focused on omega three fatty acids. And oftentimes what we hear is that there's not much difference between grass fed and grain fed animals, but actually there's large differences if you look at a broader number of compounds. So if you look at maybe 500 compounds, 600 compounds, then we can see these differences in phytochemicals, B vitamins, we can see differences in aceocarnitines and what aceocarnitines do in humans. Long chain asocarnitines, which are essentially sort of carnitine, are lipid transporters. They transport long chain fatty acids towards the mitochondria where they're used. The mitochondria is really the powerhouse of the cell in both our bodies, but also cattle. It's really conservative across species. So if you're effectively able to transport nutrients into there and fats for producing energy, that's a very efficient and healthy way of doing so. So we see that the cows kind of have that opportunity to do so better than a feedlot animal. And to give you an analogy is that the animals on pasture looks very similar, like a healthy, physically active human. And then the cows on the feedlot kind of look like more of a sedentary human that is maybe not on the healthiest of diets. Right.

Sara Harper: 24:46

With a big beer belly.

Stephan van Vliet: 24:48

Yeah, kind of potato potato cow not.

Sara Harper: 24:51

Moving around, working in the cubicle, not.

Stephan van Vliet: 24:55

Getting any exercise, eating fast food. Right. Yeah. That's really interesting to see that. You can kind of see those analogies between the two. So that was initially a very interesting takeaway also. And then another interesting finding that we make is that oftentimes you hear and again, it's a simplified narrative because not all food sources are the same and not all saturated fatty acids are the same. But oftentimes you hear saturated fat is bad for you. It has to be limited usually. My question is, well, what is the saturated fatty acid composition? Because saturated fatty acids can be all the way from four carbon chains in length all the way up to we measure all the way up to 24. And we know that the longer chain saturated fatty acids in population based studies are actually protective of heart disease and diabetes. Now, what we also found was that with animals that are on biodiverse forages or on grass, we saw an enrichment in these omega three long chain fatty acids. But we also saw an arrangement in the saturated fatty acids, these very long chain ones, that may be associated with a decreased risk of disease in humans. So even though we don't find a difference in total saturated fat between grass fed and grain fat, the composition is shifted positively in grass fat. So that was another very interesting finding that initially was not on our radar. And then another very interesting finding that we made is that I alluded to earlier four. H and E is a product that caused oxidative stress and inflammation in humans. So it's been well studied in humans in particularly. And what we found was that there are actually already lower amounts of that. So those are some of the reasons why red meat may be considered not so beneficial. Sometimes, again, it becomes very nuanced because the background diet in which you eat it, if you eat red meat as part of a fast food diet or a Mediterranean diet, is the day and night difference your health outcomes. But okay, for sort of a simplified idea, what we find is that this compound for H and E, which is a negative compound that is actually related to the metabolic health of the animal. So if the animal has glucose metabolic health is not as good because maybe they're ingesting a lot of grains, then we see, just like humans, they kind of get sort of a phenotype that looks like prediabetes almost. So we see that also in the animal. And for H and E and these advanced glycation end products, as the name suggests, glycation, they come from sugars. So if the animal has more sugars in their body, you actually already start to create more of those products that can be detrimental downstream to the consumer. But if the animal is healthier, it has less of these advanced glycation end products. So you already have sort of through what you feed the animal, you can already shift the nutritional profile by having maybe more positive compounds and less of some potentially negative compounds. And that was a very interesting finding that you can make those differences already by two main factors, which is the physical activity of the animal and what you feed the animal.

Sara Harper: 28:23

It almost sounds like the differences are significant enough that it should almost be called something different because this diverse forage fed beef seems to act very differently in terms of its nutrient density than grain fed or even single species grass fed. And a lot of the warnings, as you mentioned, the warnings to health about inflammation, about heart disease for, quote, red meat, that's almost all going to be conventionally raised. Right. Those warnings are about this subset of meat, of beef, not of this other way of doing beef, because that's not been widely done.

Stephan van Vliet: 29:03

Yeah, and it's also not been widely studied, to be honest. Usually the recommendations are about all beef. And certainly it becomes again very nuanced because usually people in population based studies that eat a lot of red meat also do other things that are not as good for their health. You can try to account for them in studies statistically, but typically high meat eaters, at least in many cohorts, also eat less fruits and vegetables, are less physically active, drink more and smoke more. So there are some differences there. You can account for that statistically and then typically you do see that the associations of red meat with metabolic disease move closer towards a neutral risk. One study that pops of mind right now to me is Alberta's Tomorrow project. And it was a very interesting one because they looked at red meat in the context of high intakes, a pound a week, but they also looked at the influence of co ingestion of vegetables. And what they found was that people that ate high amounts of red meat but ate them alongside high amounts of fruits and vegetables, they actually had a protective effect. It might not have nothing to do with the meat, but what that tells you is that diet quality, the background diet in which you consume red meat, is very important, as is the quantity. So there's two aspects to it is that you can look at the meat sort of from a nutritional composition standpoint and point out some nutrients that may be beneficial, that may be not as beneficial. But then also largely what we base our recommendations on red meat on is also on population based studies. And unfortunately, there were people probably potentially like you and me that eat red meat in the context of a very otherwise very healthy diet. Right. They are the minority.

Sara Harper: 31:04

Well, I know that taste isn't one of the things that you were analyzing, but the different compounds, the phytochemicals, the other things that you found that were present in significantly different amounts. Can you see a link back to taste or other people looking at that? Or is that an area that we might expect to see more about in the future?

Stephan van Vliet: 31:27

Certainly these compounds that we measure to phytochemicals, they're also taste compounds.

Sara Harper: 31:32

Yes.

Stephan van Vliet: 31:33

While I am not an expert in taste, or at least in that type of research, this work, when we started doing this work, obviously there was already literature before. This. And this was especially done in the context of Jesus and from French and Italian researchers. And while we study these compounds, sort of and I am a human nutrition scientist, so I look at these compounds from the human nutrition aspect and I'm thinking, well, these potent health benefits, they may be anti, antioxidants, antiinflammatory. They may have some potential anti diabetic effects, at least in laboratory models. What the French adjacent were doing, they were looking at it from a standpoint of how can we create these unique flavors in our cheese by what we feed the animals? If we feed the animals this forage that has more sage, for instance, sage brush. Do we get more of a sage flavor in there? So it's kind of like providing these flavor compounds is almost like sometimes you say marinating the meat from the inside out. If you have an animal that eats, for instance, a lot of plants that are rich in incursitin or fluorescenic acids, which are found in onions, then, yeah, you probably get a slight onion flavor in your meat already, right? So certainly by what you feed the animal and these phytochemicals, besides being potential health promoting compounds, they are also potent flavor compounds.

Sara Harper: 33:00

And then it gets back. I mean, our podcast name is Tasting Terroir. And that's kind of the point that we've been trying to bring to people is that the ability to taste that is not just about wine. That's the popular one that everybody focuses on. But of course, the way things are grown, particularly in an animal or the milk or cheese or meat that come from it makes total sense that's going to be affected. And so then a diverse pasture linking into the environment, the weather, and then what the weather can encourage to grow in terms of in the pasture. And then of course, some hand that the rancher has in selecting different species in the pasture, all of those things could go into this unique brand of beef or cheese because of both the management and the genetics and the soil, all of these things together, the holistic management. The outcome of that though, could be this very distinct taste that could be, like you said, it marinated from the inside out, like a naturally produced flavor advantage. Could be where we're going.

Stephan van Vliet: 34:08

Yeah, absolutely. And I love the analogy with wine because people have grown different varieties of wine in different soil types, right? And that is really trying to get these flavor compounds into the wine. And essentially we're doing the same thing with meat here. When people are doing that with biodiverse forages getting unique flavors in there and unique potentially help promoting compounds, that also tells you that the connection of flavor and health and nutrient density, there is likely a connection between those things.

Sara Harper: 34:43

So it's almost like, though, we need a new term like wild fed beef or something, you know, because we get that sense from fish, you know, farm fish versus wild caught. Right away you get this concept, but we don't really have that. All of our cattle are domestic. But is there a thought going into that in terms of helping the beef industry to help inform consumers, like, what it is that they're providing? It's different.

Stephan van Vliet: 35:10

Yeah, at the moment, it's very much a grassroots movement. Right. It's like with grass fed beef farmers, they often do direct marketing. And while there's no standard currently, if you buy grass fed beef in the grocery store, you don't know what it was on. Right. It could have been on an overgrazed monoculture pasture. It could have been on a buyer that first is pasture. Now, what I've noticed, certainly is that a lot of the farmers that are doing direct marketing to consumers, they are doing that because they're proud of their beef and it's because they have duties, grazing practices that they think, okay, this improves the quality of my beef. I want to get a premium for it. So the best way probably for consumers is connecting with local farmers and learning about their production practices. I have yet to meet a farmer that is doing these rotational grazing practices and is grazing biodiverse forages that doesn't want to tell you about it or that doesn't want to show it to you as well. Right. Because it is something to be proud of. Of course. Right. The best way probably at the moment is sort of connecting with local farmers that are doing these practices. And certainly the Internet also has been incredibly helpful with connecting with a variety of farmers. But yeah, it is true that we've done profiling from samples out of the grocery store and it's a mixed bag. Absolutely.

Sara Harper: 36:38

Well, that is the thing. It's becoming more available, whether it's a CSA or buying half a cow or all these things where you can buy directly from the person that raised it. And that we have a number of those folks in our network and I know a number of them were involved in your study. And so it's exciting for them to be able to have this true advantage and then pointing to your research as a way to help consumers understand. Look, it's not just me. It's not just that. I think this is better. Like here's the actual science behind it. Is that part of what this is for in terms of beef producers?

Stephan van Vliet: 37:14

Absolutely. It's very much a long term scientific project. But that's why we're grateful for farmers that they're willing to participate in the science as well. Obviously, we give them also their data back. But the long term goal is to create sort of an open access database, almost like a dashboard essentially, where people can go on farmers, the public, and then they can just see the results of this and they can see, okay, this is the variation across these samples. If I click on the sample that is very high or a sample is very low on the nutrient density table. Where is this? What were the grading practices? So we hope to provide accountability and openness and transparency, and then hopefully that can uplift the entire industry and also that farmers can learn from each other and exchange ideas. And basically we just have a good transparency. Okay, what is the supply chain and what is perhaps the trajectory, the growth trajectory that we want to strive for?

Sara Harper: 38:17

And Jill also wanted to ask about this study that you're doing and then other studies that have been done. And when you kind of include these other studies in this direction, what can ranchers and consumers take away from the results? I guess, in other words, is this stand apart from the other research, or is there other research going in a similar direction and confirming it, or how does this fit within what other research has been done?

Stephan van Vliet: 38:44

Yes, certainly we are building up a previous research. So that's the golden rule in science. Also, if you can think of it, there's a good chance someone has thought about it long before you ever did. But what was really an inspiration to us, as I mentioned this, was the work done in the by French and Italian researchers, mainly in dairy. So this was mainly done in cheese. And they were looking at, okay, what's the relationship between these phytochemically rich forests, these plants on the mountain pastures? So maybe on Sardinia, and they all helps the Pyrenees, right. And they found, okay, these pastures that are very empowered at first, probably because they have been not touched by humans as much yet. Right. These provide very unique cheeses and unique flavors. So initially, when we looked at that research, we saw this direct relationship between the phytochemicals and the nutrients in the forage having a beneficial effect on the cheese. Then we took that, and we were interested. Well, and there has been some work done in lamb and also in beef from other groups, but haven't been done in North America as much. And these early studies, they may have looked at like ten compounds or 15 compounds, and we're looking at a few hundred now. So we've just further build on that work. And obviously, as timers on, I'm sure in 50 years from now, people will be doing thousands of compounds as the field progresses. But essentially, we are making similar findings as some of the earlier work that was found in cheese. And that was also a big inspiration for our work to do this in North American ruminance, particularly in meat. So we've done some of this work now, mostly in beef, but we've also done profiling studies in bison. So grassfed, bison, and feedlot finished bison. Certainly feedlot finished bison is different from feedlot finished beef because bison, there are still semi wild animals, even though they've breathed to be domesticated. And then a lot of them are beef alone. So they have some beef genetics in them, but they typically have more space in a feed lot, and oftentimes they are also fat a little bit less grain. So we've done some profound work of that. And you can see that also if a bicycle on the biodiverse pasture versus a feed lot, there's differences, obviously, but they're not as dramatic as grass fed beef and gray fed beef in general. Now, certainly that's painting with broad strokes because as I mentioned, there's large variation in the grain fed beef and there's large variation in grass fed beef. The best grain fed beef sample still more nutrient dense than the worst grassfed beef sample. But in general, grassfed beef is more nutrient dense in these phytochemicals. But we've also done some profiling on wild game, so deer, venison, and those were among some of the highest samples that we tested. But these also came from animals in Hawaii that were on mountain pastures, very biodiverse, and those were actually the most phytochemically rich samples that we've tested so far. That's certainly an interesting finding. But we're also building this up now to other species. If we do some work in chickens as well. Also, again, the pattern emerges. If the chicken feed is more phytochemically rich or if they're on biodiverse forages and they have some outdoor access, then yeah, that has a beneficial effect on the nutrients in chicken as well.

Sara Harper: 42:34

So the term that consumers may need to be on the lookout for is multi species forage finished.

Stephan van Vliet: 42:43

Yeah, right. Yeah. Or biodiverse grass fat or something. Biodiverse biodiverse grass fat or multi species grass fat. That's is not currently an accepted term. You cannot find that at a grocery store at the moment. Right. And I don't know forever to that extent. But you can definitely learn this from your farmer.

Sara Harper: 43:09

Absolutely right. When you're having the conversation with the farmer, that's something you can ask about. And if they have no clue, well, then that tells you something. But if they dive right in, oh, yes, and let me tell you all about the amazing different things growing in our pastures, then that's the key. That's the key that unlocks the benefits.

Stephan van Vliet: 43:29

Yeah, absolutely. And most of the farmers that have biodiverse forages, and it's also related, they practice some sort of well managed grazing with regularly moving the animals. And because you regularly move the animals, you actually can create some more biodiversity in your pastures. Because one thing that we have noticed, but it's also found in the broader literature, is that overgrazing typically leads to a monoculture.

Sara Harper: 43:58

Well, you mentioned before that beef producers who are doing this could use this to kind of help explain the science behind what they're doing. But are there other ways in which beef producers can use this research?

Stephan van Vliet: 44:11

Yes, I think so. As the research progresses, we are definitely looking at some of the best practices. And can we see a consistent pattern with okay, the amount of forces that you potentially need and what are some of the practices that you can use that consistently produce the most phytochemically rich beef. So that is one way of looking at that, that hopefully we can also have farmers learn from each other. I think that's very important also because I always say I'm a scientist first and foremost, so I can't tell you how to farm. The only thing I'm doing is that we're profiling samples from farmers that usually tell me, hey, Stefan, we're doing this. And this type of breakfast, I think it makes my beef or my animals healthier. I think it makes my beef healthier, but I don't have data. And then we test that and oftentimes the farmer is indeed right. So what we're oftentimes just doing is just verifying hunches of the farmers and trying to find out what are some of these best practices. And then hopefully then farmers can use that and learn from each other and see how they can best implement that in their practices. But yeah, I'm certainly not in any position to tell people how to farm, because that's very complicated. And farmers in a way, or scientists themselves, if they were to do what they do as part of a scientific experiment, they could probably get a degree.

Sara Harper: 45:51

Well, especially because it's so many of the paths for regenerative or healthier grown food to market. They get clogged at the processing stage. I can't get to the consumer because the whole industry of processing basically doesn't want what they have for a lot of reasons. Added expense, all of that undermines their other products that they sell. But in this case, because this kind of beef is so different, it's so outside the system that pretty much you only get it by working directly with the farmer. And so they already have had to set up their alternate path to build a direct market to the consumer. So they've already built that. And now with this research, they're able to learn not only to verify what they've done, but to learn from, like you said, from other producers. And so multi species we know is good, but maybe this species of plant adds this benefit. Or over time, will you be able to see those fine differences?

Stephan van Vliet: 46:52

I'm sure we can see fine difference like that with enough samples, by the time you maybe get to 250 farms, then I think we can start to tease out some more details on that and in the relationship with soil health because we'd have a large enough data set.

Sara Harper: 47:08

Is there a particular plant that stands out right now as a likely winner to have in the past year?

Stephan van Vliet: 47:14

Well, no, it's not that not that easy. No. Also, I don't know if there's like a specific plant per se, because the past year someone in North Dakota will look different than someone in North Carolina. That's right. But what I can tell you is that even though we're working with farmers here, that might grace some more the cattle might grace some more shrubs and Forbes, as opposed to maybe more pure grasses out east. Right. But we still see these benefits for biodiversity. But there will be a different, as they call, a different terroir. Right. It will be based on the geographical region. There will be some slight differences, but I think that's something we should embrace. We appreciate that with wine, and we embrace that with wine. There's no reason that we cannot appreciate that with meat as well. Right. And if we ever get to a stage like that, I think we're in a very good place, and I think that is also so important. And I think that will also then it could help the overall supply chain industry as well. Right. At the moment, we can see that. And that, of course, makes sense if you're a big supermarket, if you can get grassfed beef out of Australia or Uruguay for half the price, right, versus maybe a local farmer that has very biodivers oranges. I mean, at the moment, you you cannot recoup that, right. Because there is there's grass fed beef is grassfed beef. At the moment it's not. But that's how it's at least being labeled. But if we get we're willing to spend a little bit more for a very good wine right. Than a three dollar headache wine for a nice maybe $12 bottle. And if that means that we can appreciate that, we certainly don't want me to become an elite product, but okay, we should also pay for the quality that we get. Another point is that if you have more nutrient dense products, then yeah, potentially you could also consume a little bit less of that. And again, it becomes a very nuanced discussion very quickly when we talk about those things. But I think those are important details that we need to start to explore over time and improve amongst all systems in that regard.

Sara Harper: 49:52

So Jill also wanted me to ask if there was a way to scale the testing and how could that be done so that more meat producers could be involved in this kind of study?

Stephan van Vliet: 50:01

Yes, the scaling of the testing. And I mean, it's just innovation. I mean, this year we're quicker than we were last year and the year before, and we were able to do things quicker over time and do it at a lower cost as we get more innovative. So at the moment, it's very much a scientific experiment and a research project. But at some point, I think we can get to a point where, okay, we can kind of have a good handle on what to look for. What is a nutrient dense piece of meat and streamline it as more of a service or something like that? Right. I always jokingly say is that the iPhone twelve is better than the iPhone one. Right. But the iPhone one had to start somewhere. Now, iPhones probably didn't get cheaper, they only got more expensive. But in our case, hopefully, we can bring the cost down because we become more efficient and quicker at what we do. So that's one of the things I think that this could scale. And then one of the things that's on our radar is I think we're at a point now, after we've done numerous samples, is that without the farmer telling us, I think we can see when the animals were on hay, on conserve forages, or if they were on fresh forages. That's one thing we can clearly see.

Sara Harper: 51:32

Because of the fat. Like the way the fat looks?

Stephan van Vliet: 51:35

No, the phytochemicals.

Sara Harper: 51:37

The way the phytochemicals look like a signature.

Stephan van Vliet: 51:40

Yeah, the signature of the phytochemicals tells you this probably had a lot of hay that are fed, and especially alfalfa hay is obviously fed most often. So alfalfa hay has a certain signature and metal hay, and you can see that back in the meat. So you usually have a few compounds that are very high, but the other phytochemicals are fairly low. And then there's a few compounds, four or five, that you can say, okay, these we know occur in alfalfa, and these are higher in the meat. And some compounds that we know are in corn, we can see it in the meat. So we could potentially get to a point where we can do authentication as well with this.

Sara Harper: 52:23

Yeah, that's really exciting because then you're not dependent on the marketing claims or even the description of practice, because that's so often the other thing, even if it's an accurate marketing claim, like they were grass fed. Okay, well, they were grass fed, but how did that translate into the benefit? I think I'm buying by buying grass fed. And that's why if you're able to test the residue and find no residue of pesticide on a product, then you know, that's the benefit you're buying. So it's really exciting that you can authenticate these higher health benefits and even flavor, maybe the flavor profile that comes with them, because you can already see the signature, and that will probably get even clearer and easier over time.

Stephan van Vliet: 53:04

Yeah, for sure. That's certainly our findings, too, as we learn more over time and do more of these samples. I must already admit that we learned so much from scaling this up and doing a larger number of farms, is that we can then see clearly. Okay, you start to learn, well, this signature forms, like I said, the biodiversity. It displays this signature. What we usually see is that we see a wider variety of phytochemicals, basically. So there's more phytochemicals that are high, and if they're fed a very narrow amount of forages, then yeah, if one forage tends to be very high in this particular compound, then that particular compound is high, but it dominates maybe 70% to 80% of the meat. But you don't get the broadness of all the other phytochemicals and obviously the total amount is also reduced then. And it's also so important for the animal as well. And this is all the work that is done by one of my collaborators, dr. Fred Provenza, that also it benefits animal health if the animal is able to self select from different plants and is able to keep itself healthier, or when it develops some sort of parasite able to warp this off. So here again, we see that the animal health can be improved that way and the nutritional composition, so it has a benefit for animal welfare as well. And this has been well established, is that the stress, the cortisol, which is a major stress hormone in us, but also in animals, in grazing animals, is that if they have more biodiverse forages, their cortisol is lower and if they're grazing a monoculture, their cortisol is higher because you cannot select it's the same. If we would give a human a nice buffet that they can select from or you just get a bowl of porridge, right?

Sara Harper: 55:05

It's so interesting too. And I know from other producers in our network that Jill has introduced me to, that they've shown us videos of the cattle and they actually go around and they're sniffing the ground and just like you said, that they can self select. It's fascinating the sort of the natural intelligence that the animal has because they're smelling something in the plant that is more desirable to them at that point in their life than another plant. And these videos that they show, they'll show them like sniffing, sniffing, moving around and then eat a lot and then sniffing, sniffing. So they're tuned in to the scent of some nutrient or something that they need.

Stephan van Vliet: 55:47

Yeah, that is certainly fascinating. And it's hard to imagine that as humans we don't have some of that nutritional wisdom, but we've worked hard to tamp it down. We worked hard to tamp it down. Yes, but perhaps if our life is dependent on it, then we probably have it too, right? Especially if you look at all the counts of British sailors, for instance, right, that develops scurfy, they started to develop this incredible desire for citrus fruits and no one know why. No one knows why, but it's the body trying to survive, right? And so if your survival depends on it and a cow doing that day in, day out and their survival depends on it, and certainly they would seek out different forages, but same like humans and cows, right. If you provide them with a lot of corn, that is a sort of candy to them as well, right. So they will overeat that. So we can kind of hijack that a little bit. And we've done so, very much so with ourselves because with our high amounts of ultraprocessed foods that we are eating and that are certainly very addictive, potentially, I should say they are addictive. We haven't proven this beyond reasonable doubt. But what you can see is that they're definitely not associating. When people eat a lot of refined foods and ultra processed foods, they overeat. And it's kind of similar with animals. If they have less diversity, less choice, they will overeat to get those nutrients.

Sara Harper: 57:17

Well, that gets back to the point of looking at nutrient density. And you mentioned this earlier, too, that if you have a nutrient dense food, you often don't need as much. And I had heard that before, but I have switched to now like, I only buy grass fed butter and often, sadly to me, it's from Ireland, the stores that I'm at. That's the option. And I have been surprised, just in my own experience, that I need less butter. It's both creamier, it has a better flavor to me, and texture. But I've noticed I actually need less of it to be satisfied. And that's just a tiny example of if you have a steak and it has so much more actual nutrients in it, your body is sensing that, and your body is getting what it needs more in a smaller cut of meat than if it didn't have the nutrients. And so, of course, you need more because your body isn't there a link between there's some hormone or some chemical that tells you when you're full and that part of that is related to the nutrients that it senses you're getting.

Stephan van Vliet: 58:30

There is certainly some literature on that, yeah, that suggests that some of these compounds act on society pathways. So that certainly could be a part of it. Yeah. It's always notoriously hard to prove in humans, but there is some indication that may be the case. And an example I always like to give is that if you have, for instance, if you ever picked wild blueberries or something like that, they're about five times smaller than your blueberry that you grow at the grocery store, but they're also containing five times more micronutrients and phytochemicals per weight, I should say. So it's kind of like you have a bigger blueberry that has the same absolute amount of phytochemicals as the smaller blueberry. So if you need ten of the smaller blueberries versus ten of the big ones, you have ingested less calories, but you got the same, probably the same amount of micronutrients and phytochemicals. Right. And then if we translate that sort of to meat, it can also be okay if this piece of meat is twice as rich in phytochemicals or has three times more niacin, for instance, a B vitamin, then yeah, if you eat three times less, you still get the same amount of micronutrients. Certainly you get lower amounts of macronutrients. But I would say that at least most of us in in the US. And in Western civilization, where we don't have a lack of macronutrients and calories, but we certainly have also in Western society, sometimes micronutrient insufficiencies, for sure.

Sara Harper: 1:00:07

Yeah. Well, this is such an important, I think, way for us as consumers to start to rethink. Like when we, when we look at the price of something, it's easy to see, like even the price per ounce. They may have it broken down for you for that. And that seems helpful. And, oh, I'm going to compare ounce to ounce. But if you're not taking into account that it's not a nutrient dense food and if you compare it often when you buy a nutrient dense food, it looks more expensive. If you're going to compare it ounce for ounce, it looks like, well, that's way more expensive. But we're not factoring in. Not only that, it's better health, which some people get, okay, I'm going to spend more because it's healthier, but we're not factoring in the amount part. The actual amount that you need is less. And that seems to be at odds with if you're a food company, you want to sell more, your business is to sell more. So they need to be able to make that shift of selling based on quality versus amount. And I guess consumers have to maybe make that shift too.

Stephan van Vliet: 1:01:11

Yeah, absolutely. And we do. So we appreciate that quality in other aspects. Right. In Jesus, for instance, we do appreciate wine.

Sara Harper: 1:01:20

Back to wine, too, wine and cheese.

Stephan van Vliet: 1:01:22

We do appreciate equality. So I think that is very important. And also it makes sense. I mean, farmers at the moment are rewarded for yield, for weight, but we're not paying for nutrient density per se. And certainly, like I said, on the sort of the grassroots movement, people are willing to do that, right. If people often buy from local farmers, they are wanting to buy, typically they go there because they want certain quality, a certain taste. But if you look at sort of the broader supply chain, then, yeah, that is not per se the case, at least not on the scale it is with wine or cheese, for instance.

Sara Harper: 1:02:08

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation and as we wrap up, I just want to know if is there a way to kind of put you've mentioned the difference, obviously the beneficial difference between biodiverse pasture forage raised meat and grain fed conventional or even grassfed. But is there a way to quantify that for the consumer? What is the big difference or how big is the difference? So there's a difference. You found a difference, but just a take home kind of thing to kind of keep it in mind as a consumer, how big is the difference? How do you measure that in your mind?

Stephan van Vliet: 1:02:44

If we look at phytochemicals, these plant compounds with antioxidant and anti inflammatory effects, they were about three times higher on average grain grassfed beef compared to grain fed beef. But amongst grass fed beef, the highest grass beef sample is ten times higher than the lowest grassfed beef sample. So that is something. To keep in mind, I think also for the consumer and then with the benefit for biodiverse forages those are the farmers that have the most nutrient dense meat, I think that's an important takeaway for people to realize and connecting with farmers, it's okay to ask questions to your farmer on their practices. When I'm at a farmer's market, I always want to know about their practices and I always get a friendly answer and people want to tell you about that. And it's also been good for consumers to connect back to farmers. I know we're all lead busy lives and I certainly get my food and grocery stores too. And then I cannot ask the farmer, though. Sometimes you have a nice scam label on it and you can trace it back to the farm that it came from. That could be something that maybe supermarkets could do over time. But yeah, it's reconnecting with how foods are grown and reconnecting back with farmers I think is a key part of this as well, what we're doing.

Sara Harper: 1:04:01

Yeah. And not just for the nice to know, but actual health differences. That's what your study is really illuminating so well that there are actual health differences, but you only can find them if you know how the meat was grown.

Stephan van Vliet: 1:04:17

Yeah, absolutely. That is the main takeaway that we are seeing from our work right now.

Sara Harper: 1:04:22

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. This has been fascinating. And if consumers want to follow your work, how would they maybe do that?

Stephan van Vliet: 1:04:30

So I'm active on social media, on Twitter mostly. My Twitter handle is PhD. So my last name followed by the letters PhD. Other than that, if they Google me Stefan Van Fleet and Beef Nutrient Density Project or Stefan Van Fleet and Utah State University, then they'll be able to find my Google Scholar profile as well, which has all of our studies on there. And we always make sure that our papers are open access. We have to pay a hefty fee to the publisher, unfortunately, but that's a whole not a story in academia. But yeah, we try to keep our papers always open access so that everyone can read it and then at least try to an extent keep it readable for lay audience as well, because if only scientists understand it, then that is not ideal, especially when you're working on consumer products.

Sara Harper: 1:05:27

Yes. Well, that is great. And I know if you do a search of your name on YouTube that you have a number of interviews and presentations you've done. So that'll be good for them as well. Well, thanks again. I really appreciate your time and all your good work.

Stephan van Vliet: 1:05:41

Thank you so much. Sarah.

Sara Harper: 1:05:46

You'Ve been listening to Tasting Terroir, a podcast made possible by a magical collaboration between the following companies and supporters all working together to help farmers, chefs, food companies, and consumers to build healthier soil for a healthier world. Risotera owned by Dr. Joe Clapperton Risottera is an international food security consulting company providing expert guidance for creating healthy soils that yield tasty, nutrient dense foods. Check us out@risotera.com that's Rhizoterra.com and the Global Food and Farm Online Community, an ad free global social network and soil health streaming service that provides information and connections that help you apply the science and practice of improving soil health. Join us@globalfoodandfarm.com and from listeners like you to support us through our Patreon account@patreon.com tastingterwire. Patrons receive access to our full length interviews and selected additional materials. Patrons will also have the opportunity to submit questions that we will answer on the podcast. Tune in next week to hear more interviews and insights with myself, Sarah Harper and Dr. Jill Clapperton, as well as the regenerative farmers, chefs and emerging food companies in the Global Food and Farm online community and beyond. If you like our work, please give us a five star rating and share the podcast with your friends. Thanks so much for listening and for helping us get the word out about this new resource to taste the health of your food. Until next week, stay curious, keep improving, and don't stop believing that better is possible. When knowledge is available, you.