Is Your Hamburger Killing You? Everything You Need To Know About Old-School vs. New-School Beef.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I'm excited because tonight I happen to know that my wife is preparing some liver for dinner. And while liver may not be your thing per se, it's certainly mine. And I've got some antibiotic free and non added hormone beef liver that I'll be enjoying to get loaded up with a lot of vitamins and minerals and nutrients, pretty much most of what I'll need for the day. And I've been using a lot of kind of kind of new sources of meat such as liver, pemmican and some other things that I am getting from a company called US Wellness Meats. And they're very unique. And I've got the mastermind farmer behind US Wellness Meats on the call with me today to talk about farming and how the method that farm animals are or the method used to raise farm animals can kind of dictate how, how healthy the food is that you put in your mouth. And we're also going to go beyond cattle and we'll be talking a little bit today about some other things like honey and butter and even something called pemmican. So John is on the call with me today. Lifelong farmer John Wood from US Wellness meets. John, how are you doing?

No, just great. Ben. Thank you very much for being on your program and congratulations on the liver. And you're also getting about 25 enzymes in the liver that actually helps in some of your metabolic processes and I think live. However, if you go back to our Native Americans that were on this continent for centuries, I've got several friends that are ancestry to those great Indian tribes and they would harvest a deer and the first thing they consumed was the liver right out of the body. The animal and the leader of the hunting party and the most senior member of the group got the first bite and they would eat that liver just directly out of the body cavity. They knew how powerful those organ meats were, the liver and the spleen and thymus glands. And they had figured out over centuries that there's some real nutrition. Especially they didn't have any way to store liver in those days. They had to consume it right on the spot. But it's interesting what our ancestors used to do to maintain proper health. There were no antibiotics, no trips to the doctor. You had to have a thriving immune system just to survive.

Yeah, we didn't quite pull it right out of the cow and eat it, but my wife made it with some onions and bacon last week. And it tastes good if you prepare it right. I know some People may not care for the taste of liver, but I'm telling you, if you, if you get your hands on a good liver recipe, it's good stuff. So John, you do something different with the way that you raise your cattle and the way that you run your farm. What do you do and why do you do what you do?

My story is somewhat interesting. I came out of a fifth generation family farm in northeast Missouri. I was, went off to college at Iowa State University and I was trained to be a cattle feeder back in the early 1970s and that was the dawn of the, you know, diasterol, one of the first hormones given to animals. And one of the buildings I attended class and was paid for by that, by that patent. And you know, I was, you know, everyone thought it was a thing to do. Nobody knew any implications otherwise. And so I charged along for about 25 dol five years and then stumbled into some research. It's kind of a long story, but somewhere in the late 1990s I became aware of some research out of the University of Wisconsin about Dr. Mike Pariza doing a PhD study on the possibility of cancer from charcoal broiling beef. That was kind of a concern back in the 1970s. And when he discovered something in red meat was impeding the growth of the tumors he was trying to grow. And another year or two later they discovered this double bonded to carbon molecule called conjugate linoleic acid, which is not what they intended to discover in this process. But CLA is produced by grass fed dairy animals, grass fed beef animals, lamb, bison, any animal with a four chambered stomach. Humans don't produce it, pigs don't produce it, but anyway, and chickens obviously don't produce it. But that kind of prompted our curiosity and, and in order to do that, this grass fed meat movement was just in its infancy. It was a very common practice in Argentina, very common practice in parts of Australia, very common practice in parts of New Zealand. In fact, Argentinians led the world in per capita beef consumption and they were far behind us. And deaths per thousand from heart disease, diabetes and cancer. So it makes one wonder just a little bit. And I think the facts are out now. We've been sadly told in the 1960s that fat was bad and there were some terrible decisions made by decision makers. You starve yourself on fats for 30 or 40 years. We've just created a carbohydrate binge and sugar binge and then we got the fallout from that all over the place. But basically 1997 we harvested the first grass Fed animal. Carrie picked the very best animal out of a pasture and took it to the local country locker. I told the butcher, I don't think it'll be fit for steaks. Let me know when you get the hide off animal what you think you would do if it was your animal. And he called back, says, well, great little choice. I said, oh no, I can't. Great little choice, just impossible. Hadn't had a master full of grain. And I went over and looked at it and I said, well, it is low choice. I can see that. I can't believe it. So go ahead and cut the. Cut the usual steaks we have in the family order. And we got the animal back in about 10 days, two weeks, and had a little barbecue grill set up one night and we compared that grass fed animal. Three of us sat around the grill, three members of the company today, and we cooked it. Compared to a piece of prime Hereford beef, I mean this was prime plus. And we all three said, without question, the grass feds got a better flavor, no question. And we cut both of them with a plastic knife and a fork. And we just didn't believe it. We're from the Show Me state of Missouri. We thought, well, this never happened again. And we went about our business for another year and we did the same thing in 1998 and we had the same results, which kind of confounded us. I mean, I couldn't believe it happened two years in a row. In 1999, we harvested the five or six animals and we sent those off and when we had them harvested this time, we actually collected tissue from them and we checked for CLA and Omega 3s and the university of Illinois lab was able to do that. That and the Iowa State University biochem lab at that time you couldn't even go to a commercial lab. They weren't set up to look for cla. We were so far ahead of the curve it wasn't even funny. And then that winter, I guess December, January, those results came back and made the decision to resign from the family farm and chart a whole new course. And I had a piece of property I purchased from my parents and planted part of the farm, the grass, a year or two before. And that's where this whole thing started. But we were so, like I said, we were so far ahead of this movement it wasn't even funny back in 1999 and 2000. Wow.

And you're not just, you're not just doing any old thing with the, with the cattle that you're raising. You're actually kind of using some different farming methods. Can you explain how it is that you are raising your cattle?

Well, basically, you know, grass fed beef is nothing new to this planet. I mean, you go back 1.8 million years ago and you know, our hunter gatherer ancestors were consuming the same thing. But what we do, it's a little bit unique. The buffalo did it to a certain ext. They would graze in one area and then move on. You know, they would only stay in a local area for a limited period of time. At that time there were some predators around and they would, you know, overgraze, not overgraze, they would just graze in there. It may not come back for two years. Let's call managed grazing. And mother Nature had a system for that. And on the farms that we manage up until the mid-1950s, most of the beef consumed in the United States. With grass fed beef. My father tells me there would be an auction in Omaha every summer. The really fancy three year old steers would come off of the sand hill pastures in Nebraska and the restaurateurs of New York City and Chicago had bid on those animals on a live basis in Omaha stockyards. It's the famous auction. And those days disappeared as we got into the grain feeding business. But what we do differently now, we can get those animals up to weight in two, two and a half years. Doesn't take three years. And we do. It's called manage intensive grazing. It was a term coined by the University of Missouri back in the 1980s. Dr. Jim Gerrish was kind of pioneer and Missouri was probably the forerunner in the entire country on managing grass. And basically, if you can imagine the room that you're placing this call in today and you broke the floor up into 30 individual sections. Each one represents one day of the month. And the cattle start off on day one. Let's say there's four acres and 100 animals. And day two they go to the second paddock, day three, the third paddock. Well, you can imagine if you only mowed your yard once every 30 days, you'd have a lot of green grass, you know, and that's what we're trying, trying to give the grass plants a chance to rest by doing that instead of cannibalizing their root systems in order to keep growing top growth. Because Beanie puff every day they actually grow deeper and the roots go deeper. The water now we soak up more of the rainfall that falls. The animals spread their manure around more uniformly. We're doing a better job of Managing plant nutrients and the nutrients from the animals. After four or five years, all of a sudden you wonder where all this grass came from. And we've improved the plant community, we've improved the. Instead of having two or three species, now all of a sudden you've got six or seven species of plants. Some of the old native plants that were wiped out in the 1800s. You see the bluestems and the switchgrasses and the Indian grasses starting to come back to life. And so you change the entire biodiversity of the landscape. And this is fun to watch. In fact, Jim Gerrish is in your great state of Idaho in May. Idaho. He's practicing his trade there now as an independent consultant. But he does a lot of great work in the intermountain regions of the western states.

So how come if this is so good for the environment and better for the animals, I mean, why don't all farmers kind of use this method?

Well, number one, it takes more time, it takes more management. And you know, there again, it's what drives your passion. You know, I'm passionate about land, I'm passionate about producing grass fed beef. Most cow calf operators, you know, the cows are part of their financial network of the business, but they put more emphasis on raising their crops. The cows go out to pasture, they don't really see them again until fall because, you know, you don't have to haul hay to them in the summertime. And so you can get by with the least amount of management. Well, by upping the management quotient, what we're trying to do a handful is trying to produce grass fed beef. We're working twice as hard to get, you know, two or three times as hard because we're out there every day. You've got to build some, you have additional fencing requirements. It's a pretty simple fence to hold the animals. They get really smart. They see you coming on your little four wheeler, they run up to the gate, they wait till you open the gate. They go in and put their head down. They'll chop away for 20 minutes. Never even want to lift their heads up. So the animals are in a utopia. They're fresh grass every day, just the way we manage them. They're much more content than the conventional situation. And sadly, in most pastures they spend 90% of their time grazing on 10% of the pasture. They never walk very far away from the water source or the shade source. And by this method we actually encourage those animals to utilize the entire landscape and far more nutritional.

So it's better for the landscape it's more friendly for the animal. But how about when you dig into the nutrient profile limit? You mentioned higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid, which has, I know, some great properties for everything from brain health to enhancing fat burning. But what else do you notice in the nutrient profile of an animal that is raised using this method?

Well, the most dramatic thing is, and also roll your clock back to 1900. You know, heart disease was hardly ever, wasn't even really discussed in medical school, the 1910s or 20s. I mean, Mayo Clinic first talked about it in the 1920s. And prior to that point, you know, it was all grass fed beef. Very little grain was ever fed to cattle. They ate too much and the grain went to pigs and chickens. But what happens when you feed a bovine lots of grain, 20, 25 pounds of corn a day, you increase, you dramatically increase the omega 6 profile. Decrease in omega 3 profile. And the grazing animal, you have an omega 6 to 3 ratio of 2 to 1. 3 to 1. Fish and chicken are 3 or 4 to 1, and grain fed beef is about 18 to 20 to 1. So you have a dramatic difference in omega 6s. And we worked with a strongman athlete, John Anderson, who was kind of one of the top strongman athletes back in 2003 and four. Now he's involved in WWE. But John told me after consuming three to four pounds of our beef a day for about five weeks, it wasn't how much stronger he felt back in 2003. He said, Gee, me Christmas, my own elbows are better, my hands are better, my hips are better, knees are better. Of course, a guy like John Anderson, who's sitting there deadlifting, you know, 900 pounds and squatting 800 pounds 15 or 20 times, I mean, just wear and tear. And so he immediately noticed the effect of the omega 3s. That's the most dramatic thing. And the doctor said for years, eat your fish and chicken. Well, the whole deal was slow down red meat and increase fish and chicken, the white meats, and to lower that omega 6 level. And so, you know, we all need some omega 6s, but we get way too many in the American diet. And then from an athletic perspective, the branch chain amino acids are higher. So if you're an athlete, basketball player, you can jump higher, rebound higher, and baseball players ought to be able to. We've got a couple of pro baseball players and one of them called me the other day or sent me a text an hour before game time last Friday. Want to know if you should eat a pemmican bar. Said my guy. Yes, I said your fly balls go 50ft further, a little extra energy. But so you know, in real nutshell, in the bullet point for omega 6. 3 ratio, dramatically better. The CLA ratio is much higher because there's very little CLA in grain fed beef. There's a little bit the animal retains as a calf when it's on its mother. But by keeping these animals on grass for 200 days, really raised CLA levels where they are a significant contributor. Polyunsaturated, good for the heart, fights cancer, fights diabetes and helps take off fat and put on lean muscle. There was a trial in the winter of 1999, 2000 at Iowa State where they fed some pigs hydrogenated safflower oil, which is a synthetic form of CLA. Well, the pigs had 25% less back fat and 10% larger loini. So they were putting on less fat and putting on more muscle. And then the cattleman's group saw the same thing. But there was no economical way to feed safflower oil. I mean we got in on kind of a free. Our lab work was free the first time. They were actually really excited to get some actual grass fed samples to compare against their that examples.

Right now you have obviously expanded beyond beef and I know that you've got some other things I'll link to us Wellness meets by the way, for people listening in who want to kind of look at some of this stuff. But what other types of things are you now raising on your. I guess you've got more than one farm now, right?

That's correct. And after about 2003 we were having real troubles and we were working on the marketing side and we actually brought an outside consultant and said you guys really need some marketing flank or something. And a football player has been marketing flankers. And so we added grass fed butter and we added free range chickens. And we immediately noticed an uptick in sales and we were real careful. We found a great company in Minnesota who they were with us for about seven years and actually went out of business tragically about two years ago. That was some of the best grass fed butter in the world. And we replaced it with some kerrygold butter out of Ireland, which is 100% grass fed butter. But the free range chickens, we got a farmer in the Carolina, he's retired president of the organic association there, have been doing free range chickens for 30 years. And so we've been able to surround ourselves with some people equally passionately involved. And we have an Oklahoma producer now that's the same Makeup can produce a lot of chickens for us. We get into grass fed lamb and that's a real niche. And we use hair sheep. These animals do not produce wool, so you don't have near the landlord. So it's really clean. In fact, I, I think grass fed lamb loin chops are equal to beef tenderloin fillets. I mean, they're just exquisite in quality and flavor. So and then we, the people are really after lean meat. They were after the bison. And we've been selling bison now for seven years. And our primary supplier is an Indian reservation northeast of Rapid City, South Dakota. They still harvest the bison in the field. They bring a USDA abattoir to the field. It's a really clever way they do it, but I mean, this is the way bison were harvested, you know, for centuries. So a pretty unique story. And we have a rabbit producer producing rabbits on alfalfa hay. And it's a really clean product. A gentleman's retired Russian analyst for the U.S. army. We just surrounded ourselves from really fun people by searching out people that really have were doing the same thinking process. We were able to help their marketing out as we went along. But those are the primary proteins that we're dealing with.

So if you're not a fan of beef, you've got some other options like the rabbit and the lamb and obviously butter. And you're doing cheese as well?

Yeah, we do. We do about 10 different kinds of raw dairy cheese, which is just exquisite stuff. And this is made with raw and pasteurized milk. And it's got to be aged for 60 days where we can sell it. But if you're a cheese connoisseur, I guarantee you you'll find something you really like.

Now you age your cheese and I know that makes, makes it taste better. Is there any other reason that you're aging it?

Well, it's because in order to sell raw cheese, it's got to ferment for a minimum of 60 days for USDA lets you sell it. So this cheese goes into the cheese maker, has a mold of cheese and it's got to set at a certain temperature for 60 days. And then they come. USDA has a process for supervising that, but it's worked really, really well for us.

Now you also age your meat, right?

That's one of our secrets. We learned that just kind of by dumb luck. We were with the company in 1999. The first animals we harvested through a connection at the University of Missouri called PN Beef. And they were the first company to really perfect Wet aging. And that's where you harvest the animal on Monday. On Wednesday, you break the carcass into like 20 subprimal cuts. Your flanks, your skirts, your briskets, your inside rounds, outside rounds, Ribeye tenderloins. Strip loins. And those cups go into a vacuum bag and they set at 32, 33 degrees for minimum of 30 days before we ever touch them. And by doing that, we even out the flavor profile. The enzymatic action there will actually tenderize the meat. We don't let it dry age, which is the centuries old method, because dry aging evaporates 3 to 5% of the water out of the carcass in the process. And cooking meat tenderness is moisture. It's real short and simple. The better job you do at cooking, the more moisture you leave in the product. By doing the wet aging, we've already left 5% more moisture in the product than you would have otherwise with the dry aging process. So that's been one of our secrets. And I've got a father who's 89 years of age, he'll let me know if it's not right. And he just raised about how tender this product. And we've got very, very few complaints about tough steaks. And that's just one thing we couldn't afford to have. So the aging process really, really helped us on that.

Yeah. And you also have this other thing that I have a freezer full of now and am pretty much hooked on and addicted to. It's called pemmican. Can you explain exactly what pemmican is and how you guys are making it or what makes it unique and how somebody would use something like this?

We had a phone call from a fitness trainer in Sias at New York back in probably 2002. One of our early customers, and we knew everybody by name back in those days because we didn't have that many customers. And he was a student of the Russian strength coaches back in the 1920s and 30s. In fact, he was allowed to go to Russia. And a hand picked group of people, five or six people, were allowed to go to Russia somewhere about that same time frame. And they got to meet some of these older coaches who were in their 80s and 90s. And interestingly enough, before the dawn of steroids and weight training, they figured out that pemmican, which was made by the folks in Siberia and made by our ancestors in this country, and before refrigeration, they would harvest buffalo, this country, and I don't know what sort of animals they harvested in Russia Yaks or whatever they were, and they would take the leanest muscle of the animal and they would dry it and they would turn it into jerky, and they would almost air dry it. It was like 10% moisture. And then any of the fat that came off around the kidneys and the organs and around the underside of the hide, they would actually put that over fire. And they would reduce all the water out of it and take the impurities out of it. And then they had pure tallow and they had had pure dried jerky. And they would usually add maybe some dried cherries or some raw honey. Both of those are antibacterial. And they would make this patty called Pemmican. You can Google Pemmican P M M I C A N and you'll see a number of recipes from around the world. But the beauty of it is it's very high protein and very high fat. Well, it's a paleo food extraordinaire for the paleo movement. And the pemmican that we make is about 45% tallow and about 55% jerk. And we've kind of restructured the pemmican bars. Now a little smaller model, they're 2.14 ounces or you can buy it in a 2 pound tub. But the pemmican is just the perfect paleo food. There's no garbage in it. It comes three different ways. We make one model with 2%, I think, 2% raw honey and 3% dried cherry. Then we make in Celtic sea salt. And then we have another model. We take the honey and cherry out, leave the sea salt in. And then the third model is no salt, no honey, and no Cher. There's a pretty dramatic flavor difference there when you take the salt out. But it's one of our most wildly popular items. And pemmican is a unique food. Either you like it or you don't like it. Some people that don't really care for it will actually add some raw honey to it when they consume it. But I'll have probably three pemmican bars a day on the average.

How many calories are in one of those pemmican bars? I'm just curious because I stay full for so long after I eat one.

It is, you know, if it's a 2.14 ounce bar, you. There is, there is about one ounce of tallow or 0.96 ounces of tallow. And the balance of it's going to be dried jerky. So very, very dry jerky. So it's very high protein, very high fat, and there's, there's just a slight amount of carbohydrate. The fat gives you a very, very slight bump on the carbohydrate chart, but it is. You consume one or two of those for breakfast and you're not hungry again until 2 or 3 o' clock in the afternoon. It's a great snack to take the off.

Yeah, I've even chopped one up in some scrambled eggs before and that, that really tops me off. So, so, so you've got pemmican. And by the way, for those of you folks listening in whose mouths are just watering right now, we'll put a discount for you. I'll give it to you right now and we'll give it to you again at the end of the show. But if you go to US Wellness meets or you just follow the link that I have there in the show notes for you, you can use the discount code or the promo code Greenfish, and that'll give you a 15% off discount for pretty much anything you order, as long as it's under £40. And it's not one of their, you know, their on sale type of items. But that's code Greenfield. And we'll put a link in the show notes. Now, John, you also have some other things. You've got condiments, you know, things like seasoning salts and barbecue sauces. Are you making these yourself? Are you guys kind of like sourcing them somewhere or what's the deal with the condiments? And why would someone want to want to use something like this?

Basically, the barbecue sauce, we made that ourselves. We had a shredded beef product that we were looking at. And a lot of people sell a shredded beef and like a pulled pork with the sauce in it. And we couldn't find a sauce that matter of specs. We didn't want any high fructose corn syrup, we didn't want any msg. And there's a hundred ways to hide MSG in barbecue sauce. You may not be aware of it, but it's probably. Every commercial sauce has probably got it in there. And we want it really clean and so we want it to taste good. And after three months of trial and error with a sauce maker up in North Dakota who makes all of Annie's barbecue sauce. First of all, I had to find a sauce maker that was interested in doing something that was healthy. And that was a little bit of a struggle. But anyway, this company we've been using now for seven years, six or seven years. The sauce is quite a hit. We actually have it in a shredded beef. It's one of our heat and serve products. And if you got kids in the household, you can warm it up and serve it in about 15 minutes. It's really simple. And we sell the sauce by itself. And going to. We're selling lots of sauce, way more than we ever used to. But once you tried, you're kind of hooked on it. But it actually passes in the natural aspects. From the standpoint of a natural label. There's a little bit of sugar cane. They call it organic succulent, which is like the first piece of sugar off the sugar cane. It's an unrefined, the real raw form of it. And then there's raw honey in it as well. So the barbecue sauce has been a lot of fun. The seasoning salt. We did a trade show on St. Louis, US, oh, six or seven years ago, and there was a guy that came up to me and he said, I want you to try my seasoning salt. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone's got a seasoning salt. Well, I come to find out this guy's mother, who at that time was actually deceased, she was extremely sensitive to chemicals. She was a super sensitive person. And. And, you know, she was having, you know, these gentlemen about my age. So back in the 1950s, she developed her own. It was called my house salt, and she made it herself, had coarse salt, she had herbs, and there was no oils, no binders, no garbage. And this stuff works on fish, works on chicken, works on beef, works on lamb. I mean, it's just. And I've tried a lot of sauces, you know, a lot of dry rubs, but this is really, really good stuff. And that's another unique story. And then this. Then her sons actually got a little older, and then they started selling it to some local people, wanted it, so they gave some to their friends. And then they actually started, you know, got it in a couple of grocery stores around St. Louis back in the 1980s. And now they slowly kind of grow thing. And it's a really, really unique product. And then we've got an olive oil that we've actually sourced from California. The trees are 200 years of age. It's a really unique old olive that's been in California. Like, the trees, like, for example, 200 years of age. I assume the Spaniards or somebody brought those in years and years ago. The raw honey. We have a raw honey producer here and not too far from where we work out of here, Northeast Missouri. And it's real, raw, unfiltered honey. And it's really, really good stuff. We've had a lot of people rave about the honey, so. Nice.

Nice. Yeah. This stuff is. I mean, it's so fun to just order some of this stuff and taste it. I mean, everything's just different. You can definitely taste the difference when you try it. And I think a lot of folks aren't really aware that not all salt is created equal, and not all honey is created equal, and not all barbecue sauce is created equal. And there are some important considerations when you're trying to take care of your body and make sure that you get good nutrients into it without actually doing any damage with preservatives and artificial flavorings and things of that nature. Now, our pets are also important. And you guys have pet food. And I gotta tell you, I haven't used your pet food because for. For our pets, my wife just literally makes pet food in the blender with a bunch of beef and kale and minerals and stuff like that. But if somebody wanted to actually order pet food and not make a big mess in their kitchen, what do you guys have in your pet food?

We have a pet burger, which we do. Like all the beef hearts and beef liver, all the trimmings that comes off the heart and liver goes into this pet burger product that's about 5 to 10% beef, and beef heart and beef liver trim. Then the balance of it probably 75 to 80% lean. And it just. It's just ground beef. And we put a pet. We put a pet label sticker on it just so you don't get it mixed up with the rest of your ground beef. Plus with the organ meats. You can't mix those together anyway for human consumption. But, you know, we did that years ago and never thought of it. You know, we had a few people ask us about it, and, you know, we haven't gone to the trouble to make a really complicated recipe, but I've got about £105 pound yellow lab. He just thrived on it. And in fact, he broke a leg when he was about six months of age. He had a rear leg that fell out of back my pickup tragically one Sunday afternoon at a really low speed. But anyway, bad fracture, and the vet says I can't really splint that. And there was a specialist and he wanted $3,000. And I pinned the dog up and I gave him marrow bones that we have. We have center cut marrow bones. And we actually have another company called US Cell Wellness. And I gave him some Cal mag out of there, which is a really unique calcium magnesium supplement that's made off of crystal. And it's two parts magnesium, one part calcium. And the primary driver was just a pound or two of Pitt burger a day. And after about two weeks he was putting weight on the leg. And after about four weeks he got out of his pen one day and six weeks later you couldn't tell he'd ever heard a thing. I mean, it was the darnest thing I ever heard. Saw and I took him back for an X ray, you know, a couple of months later. And the vet says whatever you do, don't tell anybody about this. It's kind of bad for my business, you know, because most people would have probably put the dog down. I mean, it was a bad break. It was a candy cane fracture. And he's four years of age now and you can't ever tell he ever had a broken leg. It's just. But it gets back to the power. Really good food. And he was gobbling. He was eating about a pound of marrow bones a day. You know, the bone marrow is really powerful stuff. And we make a marrow bone broth. If you're. You don't want to cook out your bones yourself or we sell and we have a really difficult time keeping in stock on marrow bones. The people with the caps, people on the GAPS diet have just gone kind of nuts over those bones.

Has the ability to make the bone broth out of them for healing the gut.

Exactly. And that dog, I mean, I mean, I'll feed him marrow bones about once every two weeks now or every three weeks. He'll get, he'll get a nice big bone. But if you give him too many bones, he'll just be his hair just like brand new money now. I mean, it's amazing how, how the hair coat will shine up on it. And he's 100% raw diet. He has zero processed foods.

Yeah. And you know, all this stuff is fabulous. I like your guys website that you can actually, you can get any of this stuff there. Now, of course I know I'll get the comments from people in the show notes that, you know, you need to support your local agriculture and support your local farm. And folks, I'm certainly not saying that that's not the case. You know, we, for example, we do buy a local half of a cow here in Spokane, Washington, where my wife and I live, and we get our eggs and our milk from a csa. But there are a lot of people that listen in that don't have access to that stuff. I know. And for you being able to just order this stuff like pemmican and raw honey and grass fed dairy that's actually healthy without the antibiotics and the hormones and grassland poultry and lamb and wild caught seafood, these are things that can be hard to get. And there is a little, little bit of convenience to being able to point and click. But the goal of today's podcast was to make you aware this US Wellness Meets and also to kind of educate you on the fact that not all farms are running their operations the same way. Again, John graciously offered for anybody listening in to get a 15% discount with the code GREENFIELD over at U.S. wellness Meets. And I'll be sure to to put the link and everything in the show notes as well. John, anything else you want to share with the audience?

Yes, Ben, a couple things. We started off on liver and we commented about that everybody likes liver. We actually have a couple of Oregon sausages. One's called Braunschweger, which is 35% liver and 55% or 65% ground beef. And you know, a lot of people don't like liver. Rave about the Braunschwager. If you didn't tell them it was in there, they wouldn't know it. I mean, it's a really good flavor. We put such a touch of raw honey in that to sweeten it up a little bit. So if you're not really a liver junkie like some of us are, the Braunschwager is a great choice. And we have another organ sausage called liverwurst which will be restocked here early next week. But it's got kidney and heart and liver. It's about 50% organ meats and 50% ground beef. But those are easy ways. And most kids love young children who really haven't had any. You know, they're young and naive and haven't been enough trade shows. I've rarely ever seen a child that didn't like liverwurst or like Braunschweig. As we get older, we have these preconceived ideas on what's good and what's bad. But those are in fact, one of our good customers had a pair of daughters, twin daughters born three months premature. At 18 months of age, they're well above normal height and weight. And those kids have never consumed standard baby food. They've eaten grass fed beef heart, grass fed beef liver. The father is a really true pioneer in the Paleo movement and those kids have been raised on a Paleo diet. But it's just amazing. I have a number of people I know that have made. We have several customers have lost £100 by just switching the meat they eat. We have athletes that have gone from a 540 pound deadlift in April of 2010. By November of 2010, they're doing a 720 pound deadlift. They've never used a steroid. And the main change is just changing the meat. They go from Costco, whatever the cheapest hamburger is at Sam's or wherever they buy it. And they're putting this grass fed ground beef in the diet full of CLA and Omega 3s. And it's just really fun to watch this stuff. Tape place.

Yeah, yeah, I like it. And of course folks who are listening and you probably are going to want to grab yourself a chest freezer. That's what I did. That's where all my pemmican is stocked right now. So anyways though, John, thank you so much for coming on and kind of educating us about this stuff.

It's been my pleasure, Ben. And I appreciate you taking time to spread the good news because, you know, our whole mission and this endeavor is education, education and education and you know, it's just we're having to reteach ourselves things that my great great grandfather, great great grandmother took for granted. Meaning they knew all this stuff, you go back for four and five generations because they had to be healthy. There were no antibiotics to protect infection from a blister. There were no antibiotics to protect from a sore throat. And what drove them to eat well was the fact that they had to eat well to have a well tuned autoimmune system. And I think that's a real weak link we have in this world today. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, folks, it's US Wellness Meets. You can check out the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and the 15% discount you can use at US Wellness Meets is Greenfield. And John, thanks for your time today.

Thank you very much. Have a super year. Very good.