If you’ve been scared off of eating meat because of research supposedly linking it to colon cancer and other illnesses, you’ve been misled by a meaty oversimplification. It’s the kind of meat you eat that’s important.
A certain natural chemical in the right kind of meat helps your digestive tract … and kills cancer cells.
The problem with many of the studies that warn you off meat is that the research doesn’t differentiate among different kinds of meat. So when they find extra cases of cancer among meat eaters, it’s impossible to untangle organic meat’s relationship to illness.
You should avoid processed meats like luncheon meats, hot dogs and the commercially-produced burgers that you get not only from fast food joints but in the frozen foods section at your supermarket.
But a steak made from grass-fed, pasture-raised beef (remember that “organic” can mean the animal was raised eating organic grains, but that’s not their native diet), is rich in a substance called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) – a fatty acid that has been shown to improve your immune system, heal illnesses, and stop the growth and spread of many cancers.
A study at the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) research team at Virginia Tech shows that CLA can help control Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
“Furthermore, we have demonstrated that probiotic bacteria (the friendly bacteria in your intestines) can produce CLA locally and suppress colitis. Therefore, CLA can be administered directly in capsules or indirectly through CLA-producing probiotic bacteria,” says researcher Raquel Hontecillas.
This is the kind of research that should be going on more often – looking into how natural substances can help improve our well-being. A fatty acid like CLA helps stops cancer cold, and promote the kinds of healing that merge with the body’s normal way of maintaining homeostasis. That provides a health solution with dependable long term benefits.
As I mentioned, you get good healthy doses of CLA when you eat grass-fed beef. But you can also get it from a few other little-known sources. Two are bitter melon seeds and pomegranate seeds. And mushrooms, besides taking sunlight and turning it onto vitamin D like we do, also make some CLA with it.
Eating while watching TV leads to weight gain http://t.co/lFLKgj5ScO
Eating while watching TV leads to weight gain http://t.co/lFLKgj5ScO