GET STARTED
GET STARTED
GET STARTED

BIRTHFIT Podcast: Farmer John Wood of U.S. Wellness Meats

Episode 54: Farmer John Wood of U.S. Wellness Meats

[0:00:00]


Lindsey: All right, guys. Thanks to our sponsors, Original Nutritionals. Our friends at Original are on a mission with us to walk the walk when it comes to human betterment. They have created a brand founded on pure basic essential supplements that have ingredient labels you can understand. I like small labels. I’m from Texas. I don’t like big words so this works for me.


Their third party tested omega-3 is free of heavy metals and toxins and to standards higher than that of drinking water. What? Ladies, that means no mercury issues, which is good news since most fish oils on the market are poor quality, oxidized and actually don’t taste too good. Functional O3 comes in two sizes and it tastes yummy.


To make things better, Functional Original Nutritionals has created a snack. This snack is awesome because we actually use this during labor. Imagine coconut butter, cashew butter, raw cacao, sea salt and a little coffee grinds in a little pouch like for endurance athletes. That’s Coco Java Nut Butter and it’s healthy fat, ready to go in your purse, gym bag or birth bag when you’re in a pinch.


In true Original Nutritionals fashion, they recently developed whey protein from pasture-raised animals that aren’t ruined with fake flavors and sweeteners, just the good stuff. Our favorite is their whey protein from goats, which doesn’t come with allergy issues many experience with dairy.


So if you want to find more Original Nutritionals information, products, go to originalnutritionals.com. Use the code BIRTHFIT for 15% off. That’s BIRTHFIT for 15% off.


All right, guys, I’m super excited to announce our new sponsor, Well Labs. Well Labs is an online nutrition company working to make high-quality nutrition and preventative medicine available to everybody. Well Labs will take complicated functional medicine and they put it into terms that you and I can understand. Well Labs are evidence-based. They’re high quality and there are no fillers, dyes or sugars. And want to know the cool thing? Part of every Well Labs purchase funds preventative medicine for kids who cannot afford it. This is anything from music therapy and yoga to meditation and cooking classes because we’re all convinced that healthier kids will make healthy adults. You can get health and give back at the same time by trying out some of Well Labs bestseller products. These are the tasteless and odorless liquid vitamin D and K combo or the powdered probiotic which is very easy to sneak into a toddler food or baby bottle, or you can try the Well Mama Prenatal that is conveniently packaged in daily pouches for you to throw in your purse or your gym bag.


You can find out more information by visiting mywelllabs.com or you can find them on Facebook or Instagram. BIRTHFIT community, please support Well Labs because they support us. Thanks for the love.


What’s up, BIRTHFIT community? It’s Dr. Lindsey Mathews here, your BIRTHFIT founder. Today, we have a very special podcast for you. We have John Wood of U.S. Wellness Meats on the podcast and I must say like — obviously, I love meat. I grew up in Texas and I love fat and I love bacon and I love all things related to that, but this guy is going to blow your mind. It’s freaking, a fantastic podcast and I cannot wait for you to listen to. So stay tuned because at the end of the episode, we will reveal a wonderful discount code that U.S. Wellness Meats has given to the entire BIRTHFIT community. Sit back, maybe grab some bacon and enjoy.


Welcome to the BIRTHFIT podcast officially. Thank you for being on this podcast with me.


John: Honored to be a part of your show.


Lindsey: Awesome. Okay. So let’s find out all about you and your company. Do you call it U.S. Wellness Meats or Grassland Beef?


John: Well, it kind of goes both ways. Years ago we started out as Grassland Beef. We have a little issue with the patent and trademark office and it was kind of advised to us that U.S. Wellness Meats we go through in flying colors. A few people know us as Grassland Beef from the early days and most folks recently know us as U.S. Wellness Meats.


[0:05:16]


This whole journey started from probably back about 1993. I was given a book called Holistic Resource Management by Mr. Allan Savory. Allan Savory is still alive today and he’s in his 80s. Probably the premier land manager on planet Earth, there was a great TED Talk that he gave a couple of years ago. Type in Allan Savory and spend about ten minutes and you’ll understand why he captivated me back in 1993. He gave a presentation in Missouri in 1994. I heard him speak, probably the most brilliant presentation ever. I’ve been to a lot of meetings in my lifetime and he was simply over the top. And then I calculated where he might be eating lunch and kind of forced a private audience on him just for a few minutes and I told him I wanted to learn more. So we brought an educator into Missouri. I guess we had six meetings over the course of three years, trying to understand the concepts of managing land much more intelligently. And that time we were kind of focused on how we could utilize cropland and turn it into grassland, which everyone laughed when I did that back about 1998 or 1999. And we were able to mimic what Mother Nature was doing for eons. Savory’s story is pretty fascinating. He was the equivalent of our West Point in the British armory. I think Sanders is equivalent of our West Point, and he was a military officer. And he had a biology background. They sent him to Rhodesia to stop desertification back in the 1950s.


Lindsey: Oh, wow.


John: He went in and [0:07:14] [Indiscernible] too many wild animals, they harvested half the wild game, and then the problem got worse and then he realized, probably realized, that the animals were the solution to the problem of their [0:07:23] [Indiscernible] action. And he hooked up the South African philosopher named Smuts, who wrote about Holism. Everything that you do every day impacts everybody within your sphere of influence. Everything I do affects everybody in my sphere of influence. And then he met a Frenchman by the name of Voisin and Voisin was probably a hundred years ahead of his time. He was doing managed grazing. My father who’s still alive at 94 saw some of Voisin’s work in France coming out of — during World War II, they were doing — my father was over there for six months after the war ended in Berlin and under a new assignment with the U.S. Army and he left. When he left he saw some of this unusual activity in France with grass and that was Voisin’s work.


So those folks got together and figured this out and Savory had turned 20,000 acres of desert back into grasslands. When the Rhodesians decided to kick the British out and form Zimbabwe, Savory was actually regarded as a traitor to the British Army and he left at 3:00 in the morning in a fighter jet and he flew out of the country himself. It was a spectacular story. But he had realized that Afrikaners were going to win that battle and they did, and so he ended up in the United States and he is one of the more interesting people I’ve ever met. He’s either pretty bold in his ideas, but we adopted some of those principles and kind of led us on the business front end and the land front.


In 1997 we harvested the first grass-fed animal and to our surprise, it was tender, it had a great flavor, we just didn’t believe it. We compared it to a piece of prime, I mean, prime plus probably [0:09:10] [Indiscernible] one of my fellow owners, Mr. [0:09:12] [Indiscernible] had produced. We used his farm as kind of the guinea pig. And we sat down one night and compared the various two steaks and some ground beef. Three of us sat around a campfire more or less. We cooked these on an outside grill and we all said that the flavor was by far better. The fat would stick to the roof of our mouth. We saw something different there and we just didn’t believe it. In fact, we just simply didn’t believe it was so good. And being from the Show Me State, we had to do it a couple more years to develop a [0:09:47] [Indiscernible]. In 1999 we did it again. In 2000 we did it again. I guess not back up yet. 1998 was year 2, 1999 was year 3. We harvested six animals and sent tissue off then.


[0:10:00]


I was an Iowa State grad, and the professor Dan Beitz who’s still there on campus, believe it or not, since 1969, one of the more famous biochem professors in the United States. He took our samples and did the lab work on them, and discovered that the CLA was really good, and the omega-6 to 3 ratio was really good.


And we sent another set of samples to the University of Illinois. Jim Crum, another founding member who was a University of Illinois grad, and we had blind studies going in both universities, and then the numbers came back almost exactly the same. So that gave us the courage to jump out off the airplane at 30,000 feet and see if we could market something that no one knew really what it was or what we had. And it was a long arduous journey, and we were on the bleeding edge of this revolution, I guess I would call it.


And you have to remind yourself, 1999, 2000, we were only five years in to the age of the internet, I mean internet transactions. I think 1995 was when there was some e-commerce that really got started. So we were on the very leading edge of e-commerce at that point. And websites were not near as good as they are today. We went to two or three of those in the first two or three years, we found one that can really do our needs. But it was just a matter of educating people, and slowly but surely, through networking and email newsletters, and connections with people like Dr. Mercola in 2001, we eventually carved a niche into the industry.


I think the pendulum swung about 2006 when there were some videos that came out. Food Inc. was probably the one that really tipped it over. I think that was the tipping point in this movement. That really went viral and I think it actually educated a lot of consumers at that point.


So we’re 13 years into a 20-year paradigm movement, I think. The market is still growing, and I think there are still people out there that don’t really understand what we have and why we have it. Tragically, a lot of people don’t pay attention of what they eat until they become ill and have a disease. Something happens to them, and all of a sudden reality sets in. We got to do better. So tragically a lot of people are forced to reevaluate themselves and they’re really astute consumers to figure this out before they become ill, and try to maintain themselves with good smart food.


Lindsey: Yeah, that’s an amazing story. I love that. What’s funny is, I include I think it’s 1993 is the launch of the world wide web. And believe it or not, I don’t know if you know this, in 1993 was the first study done in epidurals as they relate to childbirth. And they basically said, “We’re not going to continue this study because too many people were ending up with C-sections. So right about that time, you launched your business, I would say. I’m going to include that in my history facts when I teach birth education again.


John: Very interesting.


Lindsey: Yeah. So this seems like a very family business, am I correct, with dad and friends?


John: Yeah, that’s correct. It was family. We had initially six families that came out of this group of meetings we had with Allan Savory classes. That’s the nucleus we started with. And year three we lost two members. It was stressful and the future looked a little bit bleak, and I got to check out of this part of the story. One was a CPA, and CPAs are famous for looking backwards. They don’t have any forward vision. So the CPA was the first guy to jump out of the window, and I’m the internal optimist, so I thought that was a good sign. We’re probably at the bottom. It was always darkest before dawn.


And another member just didn’t want to work. He was honest. He’d just taken an awful lot of work to get marketing traction, and we spent a lot of time worrying about selling out of products.


And we soon realized that in the internet, it’s trust is just as important than that transaction is anything you do in life. So it takes time to develop credibility and trust. I think the first in 2000 we turned the website on November the 7th, which was the famous Election Day in Florida, when we had the hanging chad elections.


Lindsey: Oh, my gosh.


John: And that was the day that it actually went live was Election Day of all things. That was interesting moment as well. And we had 45 orders by the end of the year and only two people we didn’t know. So that demonstrated to us that the internet is where we find the great adventure. But you have to be found. You have to be searched. You have to make yourself known. And so then the real reality set in. We thought this was going to be pretty quick and easy, and a lot of people probably thought the same thing. I don’t know of the World Wide Web, but it’s an interesting endeavor, and then we proceeded to persevere.


[0:15:05]


I’m Scotch-Irish by nature, and in fact, the four of us that were left in the business were the more stoic ones in the group, don’t usually get rattled and we just worked really hard. We didn’t have a sugar daddy, so we had to be really careful. We didn’t make any serious blunders and surely we regained traction. And of all things, the mad cow crisis in 2003 really helped us. We had actually won a taste contest with the New York Times and miss Marian Burros, a famous food writer for the Times, and she had given us a shout-out in November after some taste testing with the rib eye that we’d sent. We got maybe like one sentence or two sentences in the New York Times holiday shopping guide, which I thought won’t amount to much, but I didn’t realize at that time how powerful she was.


And then she called me the day after the mad cow thing happened and wanted my rural opinion on the odds of this happening. And I told her that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series back to back before we had two mad cows, because that animal came out of Canada. It wasn’t a US-born animal, and now we’re nervous because the Chicago Cubs won the World Series last year. So we’ll see what happens when we went back to that.


Lindsey: Oh, my gosh.


John: Anyways, but it was little things like that that kind of helped us. And after 2003, I felt like we had a really good shot to survive. We were gaining market share and lots of newsletter about that time. We started going to trade shows and started making our self known and that just takes a lot of time and effort to do, but we were making it happen.


Lindsey: So what was the first animal that you harvested?


John: It was, believe it or not, I can remember the animal vividly. It was a Charolais Angus cross steer and probably weighed 1200 pounds. And I remember I called up the abattoir and I said, “You know, when you get the hide off it let me know what you think.” And the guy called me back. He said, “A little grade low choice.” I says, “No, no, no. I can’t grade low choice.” I said, “Add a little bit of grain.” He said, “Well, it will.”


And so I drove over to look at it, and he had three or four beef carcasses on the cooler. And you could pick out the grass-fed carcass that didn’t have the back fat. But the rib eye sure enough had the good marbling, and this animal had some really high quality forage. And so that was an eye-opener. We actually had a winter grazing operation now on the gulf coast a couple a couple miles from Mobile Bay, and about 12 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. We have animals down there grazing as we talk here in really good beautiful grass. I was down there last week. It’s just spectacular. But those animals will come off of those pastures in April and May, and we’ll have animals that grade 50% to 60% choice. It’s just amazing because Mother Nature is just the way it is. It’s just the perfect climate down there, really high energy grass, and the sugars get right, and the protein gets just right, and the animals just explode and it happens every year. I’m no longer surprised by it.


And up until the 1960s in this country, we pretty much all ate grass-fed beef. It wasn’t all after World War II. Prior to World War II, the corn that we produced in this country, which was not a lot of corn by the today’s standards, but that went to feed the chickens and the pigs.


They were much better converters to corn than the beef cattle, and the beef cattle were pretty much forage raised. My father tells me in the 1950s in the sand hills of Nebraska that was some of the most coveted beef in the Chicago-New York restaurants. And they would bring those in Omaha, Nebraska, and they would auction those cattle in the livestock pens in Omaha. And the restaurants here would bid on those things. And the same thing took place in California in the winter, and northern California produced a lot of three-year old grass-fed beef.


So after World War II, we had a lot of ammonia nitrate left over from the war making bombs, and the agriculture department was asked to dispose of it, and we put it on corn fields, so doubled the yield of corn in about three years. And by 1952 we had a lot of corn. The market was terrible and farmers were distressed. And then the land grass decided to feed the corn to cattle, because they would eat 20 pounds a day compared to chickens at two or three-tenths a pound a day, and pigs would eat maybe a pound a day at the most. So that’s how they got rid of all the surplus grain. They didn’t realize it at the time, but the first stomach of the bovine is a fermentation valve. And there are four stomachs, the rumen or the fermentation valve, and the abomasums, reticulum and small intestine. And the pH on the grazing animals was around 7 pH and the grain-fed animals 4.5 to 5.


[0:20:00]


The bacteria that do the fermentation, there’s one or two billion of them in the rumen. At pH 7 they produce us some this omega-6/3 ratio of about 2 to 1, 3 to 1. Chickens got to be 3 to 1 and then the grain-fed beef is going to be about 20 to 1, 18 to 20 to 1 which is a huge difference if you get way too much omega-6 and not near enough omega-3s. I’ve got no bone to pick with the cattle feeders. I did that for 25 years in my first 25 years in my adult life. We produce the cheapest, some of the safest beef in the world in this country, and half the population is looking for value and they’re not really studying the health principles like you and I are studying it. I’ll still say 25% of the population will actually eventually buy grass-fed meat just because they understand why it’s important to eat smart and avoid gluten and avoid Roundup and the dyed and avoid starches and all these things that too often happen to people, and they just don’t realize it.


But anyway, what we did in this country is we set this up. In 1980, we had the first death in Seattle at the Jack in the Box, and that was E. coli 157 and that was because the starch diet and we’re eating all the grain, the pH drops 4.5 or 5 and the bacterial ecology completely changed. But once we did the work at pH 7, it produced all the nice omega-3s and minimal omega-6s, now we’re back to the acidic diet. And now, you’re producing that omega-6/3 ratio, 20 to 1 and very little CLA.


Believe it or not, we have figure fitness models and like gals doing the gymnastics and one-arm pushups. They’ll buy the 75% lean grass-fed beef from us, which is, I guess the typical fitness coach would just say, “Oh my God, no, don’t do that.” They understand the CLA and they’re after those omega-3s and so they’ll eat a really high fat breakfast and then they’ll go into like a flank steak for the evening meal after they train and they want just pure protein to repair muscles. For myself, personally, I start off the day with a pemmican bar which is a Cherokee Indian recipe. Our native ancestors, that’s how they preserve meat. They would take the leanest muscle out the buffalo and they would dry it either over a fire or either using solar power. And then they would take the fat from the buffalo. They would render that into tallow and then they would blend in and it’s dried. And I don’t know how they chopped up those muscles into little bits of like bacon bits. That’s how they preserved their protein and their fat. Lewis and Clark actually made pemmican on the Missouri River in South Dakota on the way to the west coast and they came back a year and a half later, dug it up out of the sandbar, in a burlap bag, and it was preserved in the soil at 55 degrees. And they actually ate it. It’s in the journals of Lewis and Clark.


And the Russians, John Deflorio [Phonetic] was a pretty famous trainer in the Syosset, New York. And John called me in 2002, I think. And he wanted to know if we can pemmican. And I said, “Well, I’ve heard of the term. I kind of vaguely knew what it was.” And he just returned from Russia that year. He was one of like five people out of maybe 80 people that had signed up for kind of a lottery and they went to Russia and they met with these 80 and 90 real strength coaches from the old days and Russian athletes, and the weightlifters were forced to eat two to three or four pounds of pemmican a day. This was before steroids. In the 1930s and 40s, the Russians always won the Olympic Powerlifting championships and they came out of Siberia. They had the same methods as we did in the Great Plains. Up until steroids came along, the Russian weightlifters were force-fed all those pemmicans. I start the day off with a pemmican bar. I want this 45% fat and 55% jerky and 200 calories and about 12 grams of protein. That’s the way I start my day every day.


Lindsey: It sounds amazing.


John: And they got Nora Gedgaudas, the writer of Primal Body, Primal Mind from Portland, Oregon and her diet is 75% or 80% straight fat and then Maureen Quinn, another great lady we work with on the East Coast and she’s a strong woman. She’s a microbiologist by day and she trains in the evenings. And amazing story there, her diet is also 75% to 80% fat intake. I mean, these are good fats, grass-fed fats. She only eats once a day. She has one meal a day between 5:30 and 6:00 and she reminds me, tongue-in-cheek, “John, remember lions only eat once every two or three days.” And she can deadlift. She’s 120 pounds and a year ago, she was deadlifting over 300 pounds and she helped us at Paleo f(x) last year and helped us again this year. This year we’re going to get some barbells for Paleo f(x), and it will just blow people away. It’s looking out where you would never dream it possible. But the whole thing is about good food, and she just went from a 10,000 meter runner in college to a strong woman at age 25.


[0:25:18]


Lindsey: Wow!


John: And the food thing is what drives the whole thing.


Lindsey: Yes, it’s a pretty solid foundation to build from. For the listeners, can you elaborate some about the omegas, omega-3 versus omega-6s? Because a lot of our listeners pay close attention to fish oil and stuff like that. But why is omega-6 not amazing?


John: Well, we need a certain amount of omega-6s every day. The brain needs omega-6s, and the problem is omega-6s are inflammatory fats in really simple terms. Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory. I mean I say really simply if I’m going to give a speech. Omega-3 is our fats that heal, and omega-6s are fats that kill, real bluntly, because too many omega-6 fats. And that’s just like you go to the grocery store and you buy a piece of organic beef, granted there’s no hormones, no antibiotics. But the organic beef is going to have the same level of omega-6s as a non-organic beef, because it’s driven off of this rumen fermentation valve. So if you’re buying an organic beef at the market, the real health hazard hormones are bad, antibiotics are bad. But the real health risk is too many omega-6s for your circulatory system. So, I’ve always said the grass-fed is really beyond organic, because the fact they have this beautiful omega-6 to 3 ratio, 2:1, 3:1.


And that’s why the doctor always used to say eat your chicken, because chicken is 3:1, and we were kids growing up and the medical people would say, “Eat your chicken.” So in America they eat a lot of chicken. They’ve taken that to heart. They’re about to run the cattle in the south of country because we have chicken and sheep.


But just really simply, omega-3s are fats that heal, H-E-A-L, and omega-6s are fats that kill in overabundance, and it’s just as simple as that. I think if you go back and look at the United States in 1900, and the reference on this is a book written by Randall Fitzgerald. It’s called The Hundred Year Lie. He’s a writer from California who lost his parents, and siblings, and uncles. He was a costumer of ours. And he wrote this about 15 years ago. And at 1900 in the United States, 2% of us were diabetic compared to today, which has gone to the moon. Cancer and heart disease are not even discussed in the medical schools. The first mention of heart disease at the Mayo Clinic was about 1923 when they first realized heart disease was worthy of more consideration.


And if you turn the clock back to about 1905 or 1908, the Cargill Corporation which is a primary grinder or miller of flour for bread in the United States, had gone to the University of Minnesota, and they had asked the wheat breeders to produce a wheat that was easier to mill, had more starch, and it turns out fewer minerals and fewer vitamins because the wheat was bread to produce more starch. After let’s say 10 or 15 years, this wheat was pretty much widespread. And the bread that our pioneers ate or ancestors ate in the 1800s was much, much healthier than the bread that we eat today. White bread actually has to be supplemented with minerals because of the way the wheat plant has been developed to produce bigger yields and bigger or higher yields of starch.


So Randall Fitzgerald ties all this in. And then he talked about the DuPont company came into Delaware, and then fluoride was a byproduct to making gunpowder, and they lobbied the United States government and working to get rid of this toxic compound. We’ll put it into drinking water in very minute quantities, it will fight cavities and purify the water in these early water systems. Well, we found out later that fluoride in small amounts over time is not a good thing for the human body. So there’s a number.


And then MSG was developed in 1908 by a Japanese chemist. I had no idea that stuff had been around for over 100 years. And it’s a great read. If you pick that thing up and read it, you’ll really have a new outlook on food because he highlights some very simple things that we take for granted today.


But he was a great costumer and a good friend, and we helped promote that book when it came out. But it’s a real quick read. But if you look at it historically and the other interesting thing if you look at this, you go to Argentina and up until about ten years ago, Argentina was about like the United States up until 1960. Almost all the beef produce in Argentina was grass-fed on the Pampas, one of the most fantastic grasslands of the world.


[0:30:10]


Until about ten years ago, the government decreed we need to produce more grain, and several cattle-feeding corporations in the United States decided to go to Argentina to teach the folks there how to really do a commercial feed lot. So now, there’s a fair amount of beef being produced in Argentina as grain-fed beef. But up until that point, the Argentineans were the highest per capita consumers of red meat on planet Earth and their medical numbers, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer were much lower than we had in the United States. And we had the best healthcare system in the world. So all the evidence is out there. You can go back and look at what western prices do in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Paleo movement, and then the latest thing is the ketonic food movement. We’re getting ready to introduce a keto burger. We have to call it a “beef, ground” to legally do it under USDA standard, but that’s going to be produced, hopefully, later this week. It’s going to be about 55% lean and 45% fat. The American consumer does not get enough fat. And especially when you have a gestating mother and you’re in a birthing business, the fat levels increase. It’s just much better for the mother and the gestating baby inside.


So, I think we were tragically mislead in the late 60’s when the food pyramid was turned upside down and we put all these carbohydrates and starches in. And [0:31:44] [Indiscernible] was lobbying for all that. It was General Mills and Kraft and all the maker of carbohydrates and starch makers. Those are very low cost ingredients and byproduct was a very unhealthy populace. I travel quite a bit. I don’t like to fly but I go through airports, and you see the perfect cross-section of America in an airport concourse. You have everybody from what I call highly healthy folks to folks who just wonder how to get through the day. You see every shape and size imaginable. But if you look at airports in the 1960’s, I’m sure the cross-section would look a lot different than we do today.


Lindsey: For sure, for sure. I mean, I love it because I love fat and all things fat-related and you’re right, that’s a big thing on our list for prenatal and postpartum is fats. And it’s still astonishing to me where people are like “Is it fat-free or they use that term that was ingrained in them years ago. So I’m definitely going to be looking for that product. What was the name of that product you just said was coming out? Sorry, I wasn’t writing stuff down.


John: It’s keto beef. I guess we’re going to call it keto burger. It stands for the ketonic diet which is high fat. Legally we have to call it “beef, ground”. If you call it ground beef, you go to jail. If you reverse the words and put a comma, it’s legal to do. So I think that’s going to be a really good seller for it. It’s just exciting.


My father is 94 years of age and he has eaten — I mean when we grew up, we had our own cow, we made our own butter, we made our own cottage cheese from a culture that was on the kitchen counter that went back 80 years, and we made our own ice cream in the summer time, and my father was a very high-fat consumer. My mother tragically heard all the rhetoric in the late ’60s and she thought fat was bad so she cut that out of her diet and she developed some dementia issues and some other issues and she passed about four years ago. And I look at those two individuals, and my father today, his mind is as sharp as a tack. In fact, his memory is better than mine, I think. At 94, he reads the news. He’s up on top of current events and really amazing health for his age. I hate to think how much butter he’s consumed in his lifetime. He kept the fat. He never backed off of the fats.


And his father lived to be a hundred and never took a pharmaceutical. He fell from a broken hip when he was 99. That was kind of his demise, but I remember the surgeon commented about how good his bones were for his age, and stunning number of eggs and bacon and all those sort of things. It’s just interesting and then you get into everything. What I’ve discovered recently is if you look at our ancestors, they were all those pioneer mothers. They actually nurse their children for up to two years.


[0:35:05]


Lindsey: Quite some time. Yeah.


John: A long time and I didn’t really quite believe in that and I talked to my father and he tells me the same story and his father had nine brothers and a sister, and the mother with lot of times had two babies trying to nurse. One a year and a half age and then she would supplement those with the milk from the cow. I have heard those stories. But there’s some really good evidence on our ancestors. And my grandfather had never had a vaccination. My father had a small pox and I think he had a polio when that came out. And I only had a polio vaccine and small pox vaccine and tetanus, and that’s all I’ve ever had.


Lindsey: That’s amazing.


John: So that’s another story we can talk about for a long time.


Lindsey: I love it.


John: But I mean, if you eat right, and you’re…


Lindsey: You’re eating real food.


John: You’re eating real food. I guess it’s really simple. Know your food, know your farm.


Lindsey: Yeah. So can you elaborate a little bit about — you said this very early on our conversation about how what people do affects the environment around them and the people around them. Can you elaborate any on that?


John: Well, it’s an interesting story. Everybody is listening to this podcast should think about what they do. A lot of times people do things so they don’t really think past themselves, but everything you do, what you consume, what you take out of the environment has an effect. It’s a cause and effect. And all the things that we do and what I feel good about is we’re actually on the land of the animals that are grazing on. If you can imagine just a basic room in your home when you break it up in 30 squares, so every day is a different day of the month for the animals, and they move from square one to three. And you can imagine if you did that with your yard, in 30 days you have much taller grass after 30 days of rest. So what we’ve done here, with managed grazing it’s really managed rest. So we’ve taken the landscape and we’re doing a better job than our ancestors did 30-40 years ago. We kind of figured this out and we use much higher levels of animals per acre but they only stay there for a day or a day and a half. So they eat uniformly, they move on, and then what happens after three or four years, the landscape, the roots grow deeper, you’re bringing minerals up from down below. Every time it rains you absorb a lot more water because the soil is much healthier, more earthworms, and the soil gets back to the soil.


We have an organization called the grassfedexchange.com. We have a national organization of beef producers and lamb producers and bison producers. We get together once a year. We have a meeting coming up and three-day event in Albany, New York in September, 27th to the 29th. We spent a lot of time educating people about how important it is to take care of the land. And if you do this sort of management, you will triple and quadruple your ability to produce grass and produce feed. So every day I feel like I’m doing good things for the land, good things for the animals, because they are in a utopia environment, from a standpoint, they are getting fresh grass every day, fresh plants.


In the last couple of years, we’re adding what we call cover crop mixes where we put eight or ten species out. Some are annuals. We’ll have mixes of grasses and forbs and legumes and some flowers and the animal has really a pasture salad. We’re giving those animals eight or ten different choices, and some of these plants are designed to help out the soil microbes and below ground. It’s an advantage to them. And I have a friend in North Dakota, the Brown family near Bismarck, and they do not apply any fertilizer and they have such an active soil biology going on that they actually harvest [0:39:03] [Indiscernible] and converted it into soil and they do some conventional grain crops without any additives, whatsoever, and they do beef and they do vegetables and chickens and eggs. They’re probably one of the cleverest farmers in America. After 20 years of this kind of management, they just improved the landscape to the point where six-inch rain will soak in on their property and the neighbor and runs off after one inch. They just improved soils ability to absorb water.


Really on the Mississippi river, I mention earlier we’re a mile away from the river. And since 1993, we’ve had the ten highest flood crests that have all occurred since 1993, for seven out of ten, much more frequently, and it’s because in Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, on a drainage for the Mississippi river, we have taken millions of acres of grassland and turned it into cropland. And the water runs off. Iowans now are losing topsoil land only because they we’re not building topsoil like we did for the first million years in the state of Iowa.


[0:40:08]


So all these things have consequences, unattended consequences, but we do produce some of the cheapest food in the world. The cover crop thing is actually being adopted by grain farmers. They are starting to recognize they have to save the soil and this big rain crop on the land year round best can.


Lindsey: Yeah, I was just about to ask, why doesn’t everybody do it this way?


John: Well, actually, there’s a movement underfoot. If you Google cover crops in the United States, you’re going to find Gabe Brown coming up and Doug Peterson coming up. These are the pioneers that are out talking about this. There’s actually meetings being held all around the Midwest every year now, cover crops, both winter and summer. My son is 27 years of age. He understands why this is important. So there’s a lot of it being done. If you drive up down the railroads in the Midwest and the Great Plains, you’ll see a lot more of this. Again, that’s a paradigm shift and I think we’ll probably hear three or four of that. But there’s more emphasis on this, and the consumers, the educated consumers want to see it, so it’s all part of the game.


Lindsey: Yeah. I think there’s a huge paradigm shift just in everything that’s going on with like years as food and nutrition and crops and cattle and animals. And then you know, with ours, it’s the birth world and it’s how we bring human beings into this world. Also, you can relate it to fitness and things there. I think people are waking up and they’re requesting more, demanding more information, and yeah, I think tides are definitely turning in the next decade. We’ll definitely see huge paradigm shifts. I think that’s brilliant. People are just becoming more aware.


John: I agree, I agree 100%. Our customer service staff in this office is outstanding, and the questions that come across here today, in fact, I just sent ten samples of things that I know that are gluten-free, but we keep getting cross-examined. I sent them off to a lab in Oklahoma today and we’re going to have clinical proof that our liverwurst and braunschweiger and those sorts of sausages are 100% gluten-free. But those questions come up all the time and the consumer is so much smarter now than they were 15 years ago. They just know the questions to ask and so we’re trying to deliver on some of those answers. And it’s interesting because we appeal to all classes of consumers. We have the senior citizens that are on their 80s and 90s and they understand the omega-3s are beautiful fats. And we have soccer moms that understand. They want their kids to have a better life. We have, in fact, employees in this office. Our CFO has been with us for ten years. One of the first solid foods at our groceries that his child consumed was braunschweiger, which is 35% liver and 65% ground beef, and then they advanced to liverwurst, which has got kidneys and the heart and the liver in there, and so it’s just kind of fun.


Lindsey: So nutrient dense.


John: So nutrient-dense foods have been introduced. And then the other fascinating story is that Jon Andersen, he was a famous strongman, now he’s a figure fitness model. He’s in his upper 30s and I’ve known Jon now for about 15 years and he was one of the strongest men in the world. I met him at TheFitExpo in Pasadena. [0:43:46] [Indiscernible] magazine fame back in 2003 or 2004 and I didn’t think those guys, there was three of them came over and they were just big, muscular men. We’ve been there for three days and I thought, well, they will never understand what we’re doing. It turned out they came over on the third day and two of them actually started buying what I call awesome quantities of ground beef and they were consuming three or four pounds a day of grass-fed beef.


And here’s the neat part of the story. They were trying to do the same thing with, we’ll say a national brand, a discount grocery store brand, we’ll leave the name out of it, and they would be constipated. They couldn’t eat three pounds a day. They eat two pounds a day. It’s about all their body could take. And they were going three to three and a half, four pounds a day of the grass-fed burger. They were just raving about it. And after 30 days, I will sit with them and number one, they were so excited, they just went through them just like salmon, which tells you there is a difference in the fatty acids. But it’s their knees are better, their elbows are better. Of course these guys are doing — Jon Andersen could do nine, I saw him do a set of 900 pounds squats, ten of those, in a gym. Hardly any human on the planet can do that.


[0:45:06]


And then a year later, they did the muscle mass thing and a year later they commented about 20 pounds more lean muscle, and that stuff started showing up. But the first thing on his mouth was my elbows are better, my knees are better.


And then the other interesting story is Sal Alosi was a trainer. Now he is a trainer for the UCLA Bruins and he was with New York Jets. We’ve served the training table there now for six or seven years and Sal was doing studies of the athletes and once they put the grass-fed beef on the table they saw fewer injuries, quicker recoveries and anti-inflammatory effect. Now we sell some product to the UCLA football team.


And then there are several well-known baseball players, football players that we know well and you take a highly trained athlete, I mean at the very top part of their game and just little things about the food they consume and CLA and omega-3’s, all those things make a difference. When you talk about these high performance athletes, in fact, that’s a really good barometer. They have their own cooks, they have their own nutrition people that they would be in school with all the time. I find that a really interesting group because they take very meticulous notes on how they feel and how they act, and of course they’re under tremendous scrutiny to excel and they do the best they can be. Those guys are really fun to actually visit with because they can measure very, very little things that actually make a difference.


Lindsey: Yeah, athletes, I can see, they are very in tune with their body. And then basically you’re fine-tuning at that point.


John: That’s correct. It’s the same thing with the gestating mother. She is eating for two and you go back and you look at the 1800s in the Midwest. I mean my grandfather, I’ve got his diaries, and the one thing that’s fascinating was on the table 365 days out of the year was pork lard. They would make a large sandwich on a piece of sourdough bread. But keep in mind, the bread back in the 1800s was far more nutritious than today. But when you have the poor mother had 11 kids and she was trying to raise them. They were about a year and a half in age apart. That was the one thing. In fact, I published this in the newsletter. Published by the season of the year, fall, winter, spring, summer, the foods they ate and the things they did for occasion and the things they did for work and play and it’s a fascinating read. He wrote that when he was 80-some odd years of age what it was like to be a boy 14 years of age at the turn of the century. That’s what we commented about. But the one thing that was on the table at every meal was pork lard. They just loved it and that’s something they ate every day. They realized that those are really good fats.


Lindsey: I love that. I grew up in Texas and we use pork fat for everything. I love it.


John: Our bacon right, we’re a grass-fed beef company, but the number one seller in the entire business right now is our sugar-free bacon. And all we do to it is we rub it with Celtic sea salt, let it set for about 36 hours and smoke it with pure hickory chips and that’s all scented. The only thing on that label is pork and sea salt. So we don’t add any water to it. We don’t add any chalk to it.


Lindsey: No sugar.


John: No sugar in fact. I didn’t realize how I learned this lesson. Every time we took sugar out of our product we reach double sales and triple sales. The sugar-free audience in this country is growing in leaps and bounds.


Lindsey: For sure.


John: People figured out how toxic sugar is.


Lindsey: Does sugar add to the shelf life of bacon? Is that why like Whole Foods or grocery stores have that?


John: I don’t think sugar has anything to do with shelf life. I think sugar is an addictive taste and that’s why you might laugh at this but I travel a fair amount and I call convenient stores on all the modern highways in the United States, I call them sugar whorehouses because if you walk in to the convenient store, you’re lucky if you’ll find hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes you’ll find some cheese. But everything in that selection is actually sugar-based. Everything in there has sugar in it. The American consumer has kind of a sweet tooth tragically.


[0:50:00]


Lindsey: We’re addicted to it.


John: Yeah, we’re addicted to it and we’re actually in the process now developing — everything we’ve done in snack sticks to date has been a frozen item. We don’t have anything. There’s no celery powder. There’s no citric acid which is kind of a common thing. That’s kind of the cleanest way to make that. And we’re now in a process of doing some R&D on a snack stick that we can introduce. We’re going to try to introduce that into the convenience store industry. At least travelers understand this. We’ll add a sugar-free choice in that aisle, and it’s going to cost a little more money, but I think the people like myself are going to go nuts when they can find it.


Lindsey: Okay. So take me or take the audience, everybody, through what does an animal do start to finish at your farms?


John: Basically this animal — the starting phase, not much different whether it’s a commodity animal or grass-fed animal. You’ve got a mama and nine months later she’s going to have a baby calf. That calf is going to be raised on mama’s milk and grass, no matter which program that you’re under. When the calf gets to be about 600 pounds, 500 to 600 pounds of life, that’s usually when the calf is weaned away from the mother. And eight times out of ten, that calf is going to round on forage, that’s the cheapest way to put the gain on. It’s just going to be on its own so to speak. Basically, in our program, up until 800 pounds, there’s not much difference between the commodity animal. The main difference is we don’t use any growth hormones. The commodity industry oftentimes will give those to these animals at weaning to accelerate growth.


And then in our program, the difference really begins at 750 to 800 pounds. Most of these animals in the commodity program are going to be on some form of enhanced energy byproduct feeds. The milling industry and grain industry in this country is the cheapest way to do it. And then for the last 140 days, the commodity animals are going to eat as much corn as you can get down the hatch. It’s a high starch diet. And those animals will be completely ready for harvest at about 14 months of age, 14 to 15 months. And our animals were going to be 24 months at the earliest, usually 28 to 29 months before we reach market weights because our gains are only half because we don’t have a high-energy component to it. But we’re building and the fascinating thing is the longer they eat green grass, the more omega-3s they lay down, the more CLA gets embedded and you have more vitamin A, beta-carotene.


So our program takes more time, but it’s basically the same program that the bison did when they roamed the Great Plains for centuries and the same thing in Siberia. All these is if we go back historically as what we did on this planet. It just takes more time. And there’s a growing market for it in the United States and it’s becoming much more widely available in grocery stores and I tell people on the radio over podcasts like this is that if you a local farmer, go support the local farmer, support this industry. One of the things that we can do is we do the unique things like the liverwurst, the braunschweiger, the head cheeses, and we do especially sausages and we do marrow bones, we do knuckle bones, and we do neck bones and a lot of things, a lot of people don’t do. We do heat and serve products. We have pot roast and gravy that’s really, really good and simple. Just warm it up and serve it. We have a brisket that you just warm and serve. We have a short rib that’s warm and serve. So we do a number of unique things and then we bring kind of the complete grocery store to you because we do lamb, we do pork, we do bison and rabbits and the pastured chickens are really unique. We just found a farmer in Indiana doing a fantastic job doing pastured turkeys. This is the real deal. They’re raised outside. It’s a one owner family. I know that the individuals. They do a super job. They have probably one of the best ground turkey products we served yet.


So we’ve been able to source good people. We have a chicken producer in South Carolina. We worked with him since 2003. He is the former president of the Organic Association in South Carolina. He’s probably raised more free-range chickens than anybody in North America and does a fantastic job. We do a soy-free chicken with him which is the only soy-free bird we produce. But anyway, that’s a — but I say support your local farmer if you have one locally. There’s a lot of people trying to do this, so I say support your local industry, and then you can use U.S. Wellness Meats for the specialty things or the extra things you can’t find locally. That’s one of our fortes.


[0:55:00]


Lindsey: I love it. I love it. So two questions. The convention or the meeting you mentioned that’s happening in the fall, is that open to the public?


John: Yes, ma’am, it is. We are encouraging consumers to attend that, the Grassfed Exchange, just like it’s spelled, no spaces. And it’s going to be September the 27th through 29th. It’s actually going to be fun because in Albany, New York, we’re pretty close to New York City and we’re going to get a couple of celebrity chefs. There’s going to be wine tasting. There’s a couple of dairies that will do the yogurts. This will be kind of a fun one. But we are actually encouraging folks to actually participate. We’re looking for some sponsors. If you’re a listener in the audience that would like to be, say, kind of a lead role in this thing, we’re actually looking for some corporate sponsors or individual sponsors to help us on this because the State of New York, everything costs about double in New York State, unfortunately.


Lindsey: I may have a famous chef that might be into it.


John: That would be great. The first day of the events can be farm tours. We’re going to be on chartered buses. It’s going to be an all-day event. We’re going to see some real live farms and farmers doing their things. There are different forms of livestock. And in the next two days will be speakers. In fact, I’ll send you a short video clip that’s going to give you the highlights of this thing. It’s kind of a compendium of our last couple episodes. If you want to share that with your readers, that would be great. We have actually [0:56:38] [Indiscernible] now, but we’ve talked about this for a long time and it’s time we get consumers involved. This is the perfect place to do it because we’ve got some food people in New York City that really believe in this.


The fascinating thing is we use our web media company in Manhattan, Channel V Media. I’ve known these two owners now for since about 2008. In 2008, they did the first upgrade on our website, and one of the owners is a former chef and the other co-owner is a gal that graduated from Brown and got a Master’s in Writing from UT and then went to Sorbonne in Paris, like the PhD of Harvard, a writer. So they’re really sharp gals. At the time in 2008, grass-fed was really a novelty even in New York City and I was in Manhattan back in September. The amazing thing was, “John, this is no longer a specialty food in New York City. It’s everywhere. I mean, grass-fed is up and down every street. Nothing unusual to see it on the menu.” And that was kind of the wow moment for me because she said, “We really need to position your website as not so much a grass-fed company, but some of these other benefits to the community and to the land and to the planet.” So it’s no longer — in New York City, for example, it is actually a mainstream food in New York City because you have some of the best chefs and once you have a really good chef and he understands the flavor and the flavor profile, it’s just a win-win. I go to a standard restaurant and I get a tender steak and I said, “Well, it’s a tender steak but it doesn’t have the flavor I’m used to.”


And believe it or not, the Mark Schatzker, who is a famous writer, wrote a book called Steak, and the title had a picture of a fork with a piece of steak on top of it and it was a New York Times bestseller about seven or eight years ago. Mark Schatzker is a Canadian and he travelled the world with three biochemists. I can’t imagine I could take a year off and travel the world. Somebody was financing. I don’t know where the money came from. But they started out in Canada. They went to North America. They went to South America. And they went to Europe. And the number one steak they found was in a Scottish highland steer in France of all places. But the take home of that whole story was — and he was our keynote speaker at the Grassfed Exchange several years ago — and the flavor profile that really lights up grass-fed beef is the intermuscular lipids that are not like seen fat. You don’t really see it, but what the biochemists said, you have photolipids. Photo means from sunlight. And photo from sunlight has to come from green plants.


Because we serve steaks that aren’t heavily marbled, and one of the hardest things to get a New York chef to understand is, they’re used to prime beef. They hadn’t been taught this is where the best flavor comes from. But if you take a grass-fed animal, they can be low choice or high select. It’s not going to be loaded with marbling. But if you age it — we age everything 30 to 45 days in a Cryovac bag or an airtight bag and let the natural enzymes do their thing, break down the sinew, flat out the flavor profile. And when I serve that side by side, nine times out of ten, you’re going to say, “Gee, that’s a better flavor.” And it’s the photolipids, these things you really can’t see, and that’s kind of the take-home.


[1:00:05]


My father who is 94 again, I served him grass-fed beef for the first time in 40 years. This is 20, 15 years ago, “Now, that tastes like meat used to taste like.” And if you take a free-range chicken to somebody in their 80s, they’ll say the same thing. “This is how chicken used to taste like.” And in fact, the poultry is the most traumatic thing. We were in a fancy hotel in New York City about 10 years ago and we were in the — it was a New York Life Insurance building, I think. It was in the kitchen, massive kitchen. And I had a friend in Manhattan who had shown me around New York City for a week and we brought in a free-range chicken. We brought in some heritage pork raised outside. And I had the grass-fed beef and we had some grass-fed bison versus grain-fed bison. But the most traumatic thing of all were the chickens, the commodity chicken compared to the free range. I mean, just side by side before they were cooked in the reception. There was such a dramatic difference in appearance. And then when we cooked them, there was a stunning difference in the flavor.


But it’s just been a fun, exciting last 15, 16 years of my life. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been exhilarating and fun and just fun to see the American consumer up their game. I think if more Americans follow this pathway, we’d lower our national healthcare cost and we would improve many things in the human body because fats are the — I took a life insurance exam just a few weeks ago. You get your blood work back and I scored 100%. Everything was within what people say is normal. The doctor is kind of amazed. “So do you take any medicines?” “No, I don’t take any pharmaceuticals. I just eat better than most people.” But very few people, if you get over 60 years of age in this country, are pharmaceutical-free, I would imagine. At that point, there’s probably less than 10% of us that don’t take anything. I haven’t blood pressure meds and those sorts of things. And if you look at my fat content, my fat intake is much, much higher than most people. They look at me like I’m crazy. Well, you got to eat a lot of fat to stay healthy. That’s the main take-home message. But you got to have smart fats. You have to have fat that’s high in omega-3, is low on omega-6s and the benefit of CLA.


Lindsey: For sure. What would you say, like percentage-wise, your fat content or what you consume?


John: I’m not as extreme as the Maureen Quinn, the weight strong woman, and Mark or Nora Gedgaudas who just really, really have fat. If I had more time, I would eat more fat. But basically, I would say that my fat content in my diet is probably 40%, somewhere in that range. I sit here and munch on avocados in the day if I want a snack. I will take a spoonful or two of avocados. I used to eat quite a bit of jerky but I’ve converted to pemmican because pemmicans cut all the fat at it. I don’t use much. The older you get, and that’s the other fascinating thing I learned last summer from Kat James who’s another lady that’s into the leptin hormone and the high-fat diet. She’s probably another genius. And her book is The Truth About Beauty and that’s another great read for people trying to help themselves.


And what I’ve learned, we did a five-day event with her this summer in Missouri and she locks everybody up. There’s no chance to have any — this is a sugar-free lesson. High fat, no sugar, stresses eight hours sleep at night, which is which I’m guilty of. I don’t find the time. I wish I could find time for eight hours of sleep. But she had huge transformations on 10 people, including myself. I attended four of the five days. But what’s fascinating was is that, and this gets back to your gestating mothers again, if we consume too much protein more than the body needs, it gets converted to sugar. So Dr. Mercola’s, I’m talking about his smaller servings of beef and I used to kind of wonder about that. But now I understand as we get older, we don’t need a 12 ounce steak. We need a 6 ounce steak. And if you overdo the protein, the body converts that to sugar and that’s just as bad for you as eating probably a chocolate shake, for example. So it’s fascinating. The food things are a fascinating story, but all I know is the more fat, if you eat good fats, and then actually, the leptin hormone, if you get your fat-protein ratio, then you’re not hungry and then you just got a win-win going on.


Lindsey: Yeah, it sounds like it. So you’re going to be at Paleo f(x).


[1:04:56]


John: Yes, ma’am. That is correct. I will be at Paleo f(x) and that’s another exciting audience. To me, that’s probably — I used to think Weston Price is really an exciting audience as at is. Those were really [1:05:11] [Indiscernible] folks. But the Paleo f(x) movement and the thing about that is Paleo f(x) is community driven. It has a number of people that are pushing that to higher levels. And then, there’s a number of the keto people, the ketogenic people which are probably throwing in some of their information and I think that the Paleo movement needs to dial the protein down a notch and increase the fat a notch. But it’s a great conference. I think there was close to 5000 people in Austin last year and I expect the number is going to go up again this year. I mean there’s a lot of energy in the room, a lot of enthusiasm.


Lindsey: Definitely.


John: The one thing that you brought up a few minutes ago was on the fish oils. That’s another interesting subject. You have to be very careful that you don’t have a fish oil that’s going rancid and the Corganic is one company which we’ve tested somebody’s fish oils. But that’s a very good one. Just the letter C, the word organic, and that’s one. That’s actually passed muster with some of our folks that tested that so, yeah, those are fish oils. But if you’re eating a lot of good animal fats, you’re going to get a lot of that.


I also tell people you should eat salmon once a week. We’ve tested salmon and the omega-3 levels on the salmon fly just through the moon or through the roof and we actually carry some vital choice products which is I think the best wild seafood company in North America. And we have a pouch salmon which I take advantage of because it’s fully cooked. It’s in a tin foil pouch. It’s good for a couple of years. And there’s no preparation time and you’re getting all those good omega-3s off of that salmon. It’s just amazing. We’ve actually done the lab work on it and it’s just luring through the moon, good clean salmon.


Lindsey: I love that.


John: Once a week of salmon is what I try to put in the diet weekly.


Lindsey: Sounds like you’re doing exactly what you are born to do or what this universe needs you to do. I love that.


John: Well, I’m just doing a real small piece. It’s just that there’s a lot of people in this effort, you know. The Grassfed Exchange is fun to go to because you have a lot of people that — we’ve taken a lot of heat that kind of get a kick out of some of the land grant universities, Texas A&M. And I can understand why. I mean that’s a huge cattle feeding state and Dr. Eric Serrano is an MD and he teaches at Ohio State. He’s actually a former power lifter. Yeah, well, the first person I’ve ever met who understood the animal side because he graduated from K State as a veterinarian. Then he decided to go to med school. So here’s a guy with a perfect understanding of the bovine animal. Then he went to med school and he was so sought after. He’s got like six or seven kids now, and up until he started having so many babies, the professional athletes flew him all over the country on weekends and he would consult with baseball players and football players. And at the Arnold’s Sports class, he’s kind of the official medical dude over there and he’s around athletes.


But I remember Texas A&M published a paper two years ago, three years ago, critical in the grass-fed industry. It was not peer-reviewed and it got quite a bit of press and I still hear about it. Dr. Serrano’s got the reputation and the letter behind his name and he challenged Texas A&M to produce a peer-reviewed literature that backed up their assumption. And it was never forthcoming. It was kind of a smear campaign to slow us down.


And I maintained for years that we have brought beef consumers kind of out of the closet because there’s a lot of people that like our story. It’s good for the land, good for the community. We’ve brought some vegetarians. I’ve taken numerous phone calls from folks that hadn’t red meat for 15 years and now they’re back in the red meat consumers. So we’re still a small percentage of the mix. I remember there was a lady at the trade show and the Naval Expo which we do about every year at Long Island and we actually had a filmmaker [1:09:21] [Indiscernible]. It was pretty exciting. She hadn’t tasted and eaten in 20 years. Oh, she was so excited. They were giving away strip steaks or we buy samples and she just about melted down right there.


Lindsey: I was going to say I bet that changed her world.


John: She was quite excited to have beef for the first time and we’ve actually got a clip of that somewhere. It was good.


Lindsey: Amazing. Well, you know what’s ironic? I went to Texas A&M and definitely I’m going to look at this and will be like, “What the heck, guys? What are you doing?”


[1:09:50]


John: You know, it’s Texas. I mean and I have a lot of respect for the cattle-feeding industry. I’ve always maintained that we have commodity pork and commodity beef in this country and we have to feed vast quantities of the United States population. We do it cleanly. There’s safety in today’s product. We’re now actually in the business of fabricating our own beef, our own pork and our lamb. We have a USDA certified facility. We have organic certification, whole food certification. We’ve gone through all the steps and I can understand better than most producers how much difficult it is to get through these hoops and to keep USDA happy. We are the jealous/envy of the world when it comes to producing beef, pork and chicken. We do it as well as anybody in the world today. This grass-fed niche is for this 10% or 15% of the population that recognizes its difference. And you know, professional athletes, soccer moms, and then the one group we didn’t talk about is the folks with the autoimmune diseases.


Lindsey: Oh, right, yeah.


John: There are a number of those. And when you go to a doctor, they say try to clean up the diet. It’s like autism, which is epidemic in the country today and there’s another sad sore bit of a story. But one of the things that they recommend is getting as clean as you can as far as your protein sources. I’ve been talking to many moms, and I’m sure in your business, you’re dealing with that issue on-one. Dr. Don Huber is a friend and a former Professor Emeritus at Purdue and he’s one that’s been sounding the alarm on this with the GMO crops in the country today and actually has the evidence to back it up. The autism thing is just epidemic. And anybody that’s in the child-rearing age has to be very, very cognizant of what’s going on there and what you do to eat and clean yourself up as far as getting rid of any toxins.


The sad part is you talk to holistic doctors and it’s a seven-generation issue. It’s what your grandmother did can have an effect and the second generation is deep in this. And if you have diabetes, you’ve got to go seven generations to clean that gene up in the family genetic pool. If you think about that, it’s just kind of — you don’t want to think about it but it’s there.


Lindsey: Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that because we’ve talked about the generational healing that needs to happen at our seminars. And it’s so true, but it’s sad. Sad but true.


John: But at least we’re talking about it. I think that it’s critical when it comes out in conversation. It’s a sad story, but I think a few people pay attention. Your body is your temple and you need to take care of it.


Lindsey: For sure. Okay. I won’t take up too much more of your time, but would you tell the audience where they can find you at or find your products at?


John: Very simple, uswellnessmeats.com. And the toll-free number is 877-383-0051. Again, 877-383-0051. If you log in to the website, you will see that we are Facebook capable. We have a great blog. The blog is full of information on recipes and products. We do Pinterest. We do Instagram. So there’s a number of social media options that are available. I’d also encourage folks to sign up for a newsletter. If you go to the website, you can find the Newsletter tab at the top and that newsletter comes out every Sunday morning. Every other week, we have a promo code, which is going to be 15% off promo by reading one of the articles, Dr. Sears, and four or five read letters. You can log into that newsletter pretty easily and save yourself 15%. Anyway, those are the two methods. Repeating the number again, 877-383-0051, uswellnessmeats.com. We will encourage you to take a look at us and we’re available by phone 24/7 now. We have a call center in the late night hours who can answer questions. We’re just excited to be a part of your show tonight and look forward to follow up with your listeners. And anything we can do, we’d be more than glad to do it.


Lindsey: Oh, I’m so stoked that I got you on the podcast. And hopefully, I’ll see you at Paleo f(x).


John: Looking forward to it and we’ll have some great samples there, well, steaks and some of our organ sausages and our famous pork rinds. We’ll be the protein corner, protein and fat.


Lindsey: I love it. I love it. Thank you so much, John.


John: It’s been an honor, Lindsey, and good luck to you and your career, and keep doing great things for the American mother.


Lindsey: Thank you and have a good night, good Tuesday.


[1:15:00]


John: Thank you much.


Lindsey: All right, bye.


John: You’re welcome.


Lindsey: All right, BIRTHFIT community, I hope you enjoyed that podcast as much as I did. I could listen to John for hours, but I want to leave you with one final thought and a discount code. Final thought is this: Eat fat. My friends make fun of me because I will be grabbing the fat off people’s plates and I love eating fat. It is like my go to. But, seriously, consume more fat especially if you’re pregnant, if you’re nursing. All of us need to be eating more fat. Make it happen.


And a reminder: Don’t forget to use BIRTHFIT, the code, the 15% off at U.S. Wellness Meats.


[1:16:08] End of Audio

0 Comments
Add Comment

BIRTHFIT Consultation

with Coach Leah

Are you ready to explore your fears, desires, and values around birth? Inside this consult, you will discover new avenues to cultivate during your pregnancy or immediate postpartum period. Our team will offer specific strategies to enhance each of your four pillars as well as some intangible guidance. After your call, you will receive an outline of what was discussed so that you may start practicing and be in action around your desires and values.

Join the B! Newsletter

Never miss offers, news or tips that we ONLY share via Email!

Required field!
Required field!

Stay connected @birthfit

Become a part of our movement #birthfit #B!community

WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY:
It is our goal to ensure that persons with disabilities have a full and equal opportunity to benefit from the goods and services offered through the Website. If you are having trouble accessing the website or using any of its features, please email us at EMAIL for assistance. We will be happy to provide you with the information or transaction you seek through an alternate communication method.
© COPYRIGHT 2021-2023 BIRTHFIT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Your cart is empty Continue
Shopping Cart
Subtotal:
Discount 
Discount 
View Details
- +
Sold Out