 You know I've talked over and over again about the risk of eating too much red meat But if you still want your steak, so be it But not all steak is created equal so when you're at the store and you're buying your steak to go home and cook or Even if you're at a restaurant you have to know what to look for and what to avoid and that's why I'm here and I'm from Omaha, Nebraska the beef state and Let me tell you I know beef. In fact, believe it or not our high school prom We're always held at the Omaha Stockyards. No kidding. So beef is my middle name and Beef is my game So you want to eat steak? first of all Look for grass fed and grass finished beef Now we love the idea of corn feeding our Beef our cows. Why? because that corn fed beef is Marbled with that succulent delicious fat that gives us the mouth feel that we're we associate with a great tasting steak And it makes the steak incredibly tender, but here's the problem corn is just pure Omega-6 inflammatory fats now traditionally cows that are fed on grass Have in their fat an omega six to omega three ratio of Anywhere from three to five Omega-6 parts to one part omega-3 fat and that's a natural ratio When we add corn to the mix that ratio can go up to 25 to 50 to 1 Instead of the three to five that we're looking for so that juicy tender mouth watering steak becomes an inflammatory Fat nightmare those fats actually Increasingly are becoming realizing as one of the biggest drivers of inflammation in our country particularly They turn into compounds called aldehydes One aldehyde that you're probably aware of is form aldehyde the things that we Preserve bodies with I spent a lot of time with around form aldehyde in medical school And I assure you you don't want to eat a steak that turns to form aldehyde in your body And yet that's exactly what it does now the problem with marbling and actually the problem with Grass-fed is there's actually no law no federal law that tells you what grass-fed means technically all cows eat grass for some part of their life if You then feed them grass for even one day as an example and then take them to the feed lot and Give them corn and soybeans for the rest of their lives Legally there's nothing to stop the company from telling this is grass-fed beef what good producers will do is They'll feed them for grass most of their lives But then to give you the mouthfeel you're looking for They'll take them to the feed lot and feed them corn and soybeans or corn only for about six weeks To fatten them up for slaughter and to give you that mouthfeel The way around that is to look for grass-fed and grass-finished beef now you see it in Some of the high-end markets you can certainly find it on the internet But if you're going to have your beef, that's what you're looking for because it's going to have much better proper ratios of Omega-6 to omega-3 So labeling is really deceptive and if you have any doubt Contact the company and ask what they do Now I'm old enough to remember that back in the old days, but even in Nebraska Meat's beef was very expensive and they certainly weren't an everyday thing and Cheaper cuts were what the average person could afford like a chuck steak or a round steak They were cheap because they had a lot of gristle and That gristle is actually where Gelatin and college and come from and it turns out our microbiome actually loves to ferment the Gristle and does not ferment muscle as well so inadvertently poor people people who couldn't afford a lot of meat and Long-lived people in general were eating these old tough cuts of meat and They weren't eating very much of it and they were doing one other thing I think that's particularly illustrative of how we ought to approach beef Lamb and pork in general So they cooked them all day long. My mother would cook a pot roast all day long for us and we'd have it actually multiple days and That gristle would break down and unbeknownst us. We were actually having gelatin and Collagen on almost a daily basis in these meats We also actually benefited from gelatin almost every day in the form of Jello Now Jello is not a health food folks But believe it or not almost every day of our lives We were having gelatin in the form of Jello. Don't rush out and buy Jello There's a lot of easier ways to get gelatin into your life but the point is we were also having a soup in those days called consomme and in fancy restaurants you even had chilled consomme as an appetizer and consomme was Simply high-end bone broth now don't rush out and buy bone broth because bone broth The arsenic and lead in bones is actually remarkably high so be careful when you're eating steaks and for goodness sakes please please please Avoid the steaks that have all the marbling you're much safer to have a filet That's grass-fed grass finish Then a ribeye even if it's grass-fed grass finish because it's going to have much less of the harmful fats Now something that I've been researching For my upcoming book and something I research in going to countries like Portugal like Spain like France like Italy is that these people particularly the poor parts of these countries use a lot of sausages fermented meats in their diet in fact the country with the longest lifespan is actually a tiny country between France and Spain called and Dora and Dorian's have a lifespan of 87.7 years pretty spectacular and Andorians do two things they eat sausages every day now. These are fermented sausages people are poor And they can't waste animals So they go they eat everything the saying is from snout to tail But to preserve these foods They actually grind them up and make sausages and the sausages are preserved by fermentation The fermentation does a lot of really cool things that you'll hear about in the upcoming book But among other things just to tease you fermentation makes these incredible mitochondrial Uncouplers polyamines and polyamines promote longevity in multiple ways the other thing that does is Is it breaks down some of the really health-destroying compounds that I write about in beef lamb and pork called new 5 GC So these folks Because they were poor Actually got tremendous health benefits by fermenting their beef products so sausages traditionally prepared From Italy from Spain from France from Portugal are actually pretty doggone good health foods But that doesn't mean you can go to the grocery store and say hi I want a pound of sausage meat or Fresh sausage and think you're going to get the same benefit All contraire These are not properly prepared and they will do you more harm than good All right, so if you want to have your meat Have it but in moderation of course Fill your plate with vegetables and make meat the garnish You should also try to decrease your consumption of meat for many reasons that you'll learn about in the new book But if you want to treat yourself to a steak every once in a while, I get it When my wife and I have a steak We buy a filet and we split it and we get the flavor we want But we're not killing ourselves in the process. I Hope you enjoyed this episode of the dr. Gundry podcast Make sure you check this one out too. It turns out that fish Consumption is also associated with an overall bigger brain size And a bigger hippocampus the memory centers of our brain