At White Oak Pastures, we have expertise in three areas: animal welfare, regenerative land management, and rural communities. As farmers, we aren’t experts in nutrition. When osteopathic physician and natural health advocate Dr. Joseph Mercola came to visit, we shared our knowledge of farming with him, and he shared his knowledge of nutrition with us. Here are a few of Dr. Mercola’s thoughts on the health benefits of grassfed and pasture-based food and farming.
What are some of the benefits of grassfed and pastured products that people might not have heard about?
One of the most important nutrient groups that you can eat is healthy fat. Fat from pastured animals is very healthy, and in my view, should be consumed in far larger quantities than it is now. Healthy fat is a clean fuel for your body with far less damaging free radical generation which contributes to premature disease and death. This appears to contradict conventional wisdom on fat, but the emerging evidence strongly supports this position.
Which products are you most excited about right now?
My current passion is using food as fuel to minimize the production of free radicals. This means eating a diet that is between 75-85% healthy fat. The challenge to do this is finding a wide variety of healthy fats to fill that role. I am really excited about tallow and lard as an addition to the fats I have already identified as a useful strategy to achieve this dietary goal.
What stands out to you about our production practices at White Oak Pastures?
It’s a holistic, integrated system that works synergistically to provide a near ideal primal environment to produce healthy animals that will in turn provide healthy food for us to eat. It’s a very impressive operation and I’ve never seen anything like it. It provides great hope that this system can be modeled by other motivated farmers to offer this type of high-quality food to people in other regions.
P.S. Check out our pastured pork lard, grassfed beef fat, and the rest of our products in our online store!
Pastured Pork Lard / Grassfed Beef Fat
