I know this is not a popular stance in the paleo community, but if I couldn't afford grassfed/pastured meats I would just stop eating meat--or buy as much pastured/grassfed meat as I could afford and only have it once or twice a week. I'd use canned wild-caught salmon and tuna to supplement my otherwise vegetarian diet with traditionally prepared legumes making up the difference. I'd still avoid grains.

There are so many problems with conventionally raised meats which others here have already done a great job of delineating. That's what attracted me to vegetarianism in the first place. It was the availability of grassfed/pastured meat that convinced me to go back to eating meat.

One problem is that the antibiotics are used to keep the animals (barely) alive until slaughter.

Wild predators frequently cut sick/weak animals from the herd and they have the robust immune, GI tracts needed to deal with such meat.

We are unfortunately quite domesticated in most cases and we lack the vigor to deal with pathogens and toxins. So, contaminated/sick meat is likely to cause us problems.

Try buying a package of supermarket chicken livers. A few will be red, but none will be the really dark red of pastured chickens. Some of the livers will be so sick that they'll be pale or not even red--more like a sickly yellow-brown. Now imagine how healthy the rest of those chickens' bodies were!

Continuing with the chicken example, if you buy Cornish Game Hens they are basically the same kind of chicken but they are very young. They're so young they haven't had time enough to get quite so sick, so if you look at the skin and meat they have more of the appearance of a healthy skin/meat.

Since beef are in conditions that could be considered worse, since they're walking around in the stuff that usually falls out the bottom of the chicken cages, they are REALLY contaminated and sickly.

So before you even talk about contaminants in the meat and the metabolic effects of those contaminants, you should shudder at the thought of how sick many of those animals were when slaughtered. Once trimmed and packaged their health status isn't so obvious.

All that said, people like me who are on Social Security can't afford to eat nothing but pastured beef. We have to do the best we can, you know?

I think it's pretty telling that Don Mastesz of Primal Wisdom wrote a Paleo on a Budget series where he was an apologist for hormone/antibiotic use in factory farmed animals and their use in a budget paleo diet. Six months later, he said "farewell to paleo" because he and his wife were feeling sick on their diet. His wife is now completely against eating meat. It's no wonder, given what they were eating, the things she says are true.

It's pretty hard to study the effects of these things on humans though and that's why Don's original posts are so deceptively appealing. Who is going to fund such a study? But the few studies that exist on pastured hormone/antibiotic free meat demonstrate its superiority. And if you are what you eat, do you want to eat an animal plumped up by antibiotics so it can survive in a cesspool? Out of precaution, I'd prefer not to eat that, at least very often. Then there is the ethical issue, which is also important to me.

But you could look at all the studies that show meat is bad for you as an indictment of factory-farmed meat. There are a great many of them. Too bad it's hard to fund competing studies using grass-fed meat. Most of the universities doing this type of research are corporate-funded.

The precautionary principle is the driving force of regulation in the EU, which has prohibited many of the things we do to animals here, such as artificial hormones and non-therapeutic antibiotics. The health effects of these are not limited to the consumer of the actual beef, as antibiotic resistance in microbes and hormones in water are environmental problems. American beef is BANNED in Europe. Lower on the thread, someone brought up the fact that hormones/antibiotics are the tip of the iceberg and cows are being fed waste from factory farmed chickens, which is also filled with hormones/antibiotics. The US meat system is a recipe for disaster.

Chris Kressler wrote that old-fashioned beef was higher in hormones because people ate high-testosterone bulls. Um, not all hormones are bad. American men could use more testosterone, but that's not what is being used in feedlot beef, it's estradiol and progestins, which we do NOT need since similar hormones are environmental contaminants.

That said, you can get "natural" beef that is at least not fed/treated with total garbage and lives most of its life on pasture for pretty cheap. Some of our own cows are marketed as "natural" instead of grass-fed because some of them got sick after we bought them and we had to feed them some grain.

i'm in the minority on this topic, it seems. until recently i was eating mostly conventional meat on my paleo diet. it wasn't until the last few months that i've switched to almost exclusively grassfed and i see/feel no difference in how it makes me feel. i changed because i found a good affordable source where i could finally switch over to grassfed for moral reasons.

we claim to be the science-based nutrition people over here, yet i see mainly opinions about what they believe anti-biotics and hormones in CAFO meat(mainly referring to ruminants here) does and and not one peer-reviewed study. many of us can name the vitamins that are deficient in cafo meat- easily replaced by pastured butter at a much better cost- and the a difference in PUFA's in the fat. but the truth is, i have yet to come across a reputable study that says that CAFO meat is actually BAD for you.

the reason i bring this up is because many people who i turn on this type of eating can't afford or don't have access to affordable grass-fed meat. when someone comes to me with peer-reviewed studies saying that CAFO meat is biologically harmful to humans, then i'll stop recommending they buy ruminants out of the sale bin.

this is a good question that needs to be analyzed and studied b/c of the potential harm of grocery store meat and massive amount of dont-know-better people eating lots of it. knowing about grocery store meat, and food in general is enough to make me steer clear of it, no matter what leaness and just pass on meat if i cant afford it. hell i may even argue youd be better getting beans/lentils etc and preparing them right than you are eating meat that is unknown/NOS

They add hormones to meat to make the animals grow up faster. Basically they're growth hormones. That's not something you want to be putting in your body except on purpose. We are supposed to have a balance of hormones since they are pretty much the authorities in our bodies, our chemical messengers that tell other cells what to do. An imbalance can cause health problems in the weakest link in the chain.

They add antibiotics to animals because they are fed a diet that was not designed for them, and they get sick because of it. First of all, you cannot gain health from a sick animal. Secondly, if they consumed antibiotics, then so will you. I can't tell you how many bloggers and threads I've come across where people were justifiably hatin' on the antibiotics. Animal-sourced antibiotics? That can't be good for your own intestinal and gut flora. It's just common sense.

The toxins in these unhealthy animals are stored in the fatty tissues. Because these animals aren't as lean as so-called "paleo animals" (who eat and live like THEIR ancestors), they have extra fat. So basically they have even more room to store even more toxins. It's this whole big thing.

Conventionally-raised animals also lack thier normal levels of fat-soluble vitamins (A,D,E&K), and I see you're already familiar with the omega 3/6 imbalance. There are other factors as well, such as grass-fed beef having CLA which helps you burn fat. But on top of that I also heard a rumor that I haven't actually looked into yet that grass-fed cows/bison can create vitamin K7 which supposedly has amazing health benefits. Huh.

Environmental implications are also present - animals who are allowed to roam freely and feed on grass/natural diet contribute to the cycle of life - factory farms (pretty much where all the other meat comes from!) are very toxic to the environment, creating runoff from chemicals and animal waste and stuff into the rivers and so-on. It's just not good for the Earth.

Also, from the animal-cruelty standpoint, would you really want to eat meat that came at such a cost? The horrors of factory farming should ultimately be discouraged. It truly is a cruel, sad and terrible life for those factory-farmed animals.

'nuff said.

The hubby and I eat pastured meat and wild seafood for over a year now. We ate organic for the 6 years before because we didn't know what pastured was at the time.

I prefer pastured meat because it's healthier and more ethical.

However, I'd like to see more clinical trials comparing Paleo pastured vs. Paleo conventional meats.

I've met a patient in the mid 30's who did Paleo conventional (that was all he could afford) and within a year went off 9 out of the 10 drugs he was prescribed after a heart attack. He found Paleo researching on his own. His whole family went Paleo (conventional) and saw numerous health benefits. They would probably do even better on pastured, and heal faster!

That being said - is it environmentally friendly or morally right to be sick and fat on vegetarian or a high-grain diet if you know you see improvements on Paleo (even conventional Paleo)??!! I don't think so. There are too many vegan and vegetarian apologists. Since when are they apologists for Paleos?

I'm happy for people improving their health in whatever way possible - baby steps count too!

Here is an article about chicken I thought everyone should be aware of. Non Organic Chicken has 10 times more arsenic than apple juice. This $hizz is really scary.

http://nutritionfacts.org/blog/2011/09/19/dr-oz-apple-juice-and-arsenic-chicken-may-have-10-times-more/

Yeah recently I scanned over an article in a newspaper. I take everything I see in the media with a large pinch of salt but it went into detail about the antibiotics causing super resistant bugs. The science seems to check out. Trace amounts of antibiotics eaten in meat will destroy healthy bacteria and give way to depressed immunity and the science goes deeper but I have forgot the rest!. Don't forget antibiotics are not only routinely fed to non-organic animals but also sprayed onto crops. Antibiotics are sometimes use on organic animals but only when absolutely needed. That is the situation in the UK anyway. I also read a lot about farmers using homeopathic and alternative treatments, and they have had success.

Hormones - well logically if you ingest them they are entering the blood stream and messing around with your body. How? I don't know....all sorts of bad thing I suspect.

Eat plenty of fat from organic grass fed animals i.e beef fat (the nice bits of sirloin etc) and animal fat too cook with. Duck fat is also great as long as its wild caught.