Do you recommend the grass-fed meat, but if it’s not available, then how much and how often would you recommend [eating] conventional meat and poultry?

Well, what’s interesting is that even conventional meat is mostly grass-fed. It’s just grain-finished, so the difference is really what happens at the end of the process. In 100 percent grass-fed, there’s no grain finishing. With CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation] meat, it’s mostly grass-fed, and then at the end, it’s grain-finished. I think the biggest considerations with CAFO meat are things like antibiotic residue and pesticide residue. Antibiotic residues could increase antibiotic resistance and less the nutritional profile or the fatty acid profile, which is not as significant of a difference as you might think.

The first thing I would do, I mean, if it’s just not available at all, that’s one thing, but if it’s not available in stores, you can always check with local farms or farm shares. There are also companies like ​ButcherBox​, which will ship you a box of grass-fed meat wherever you are in the United States. There’s ​US Wellness Meats​. In a lot of countries, smaller countries, Latin America and other places, a lot of beef will just be grass-fed. There’s not a lot of conventional—the factory farming system is not the same there, and if you buy directly from a farmer, you could buy a quarter of beef and put it in a chest freezer, and it’s really economical that way. I would explore all those other opportunities first before you rule out that it isn’t available.

If it isn’t available, I think, still, you have to consider—when you’re making a decision about excluding something from the diet, it’s never simple. If you exclude meat, what are you going to replace it with, for example, for protein? If you switch to exclusively plant-based proteins, then you’re going to have issues with protein quality and bioavailability like the amino acid profile being inferior and then the bioavailability being inferior according to the PDCAAS [protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score] and DS scoring systems, which rate the bioavailability of animal protein. For example, the lowest rated animal protein is chicken, and that still has a score over 1 (I think it’s 1.03), and the highest rated whole plant food is chickpeas, and that’s 0.83, but beef is, like, 1.39 for rare beef. Milk is 1.32. You just see a such higher protein quality with animal proteins. You’re always kind of weighing, like, okay, there’s antibiotic residue and maybe pesticide residue in the meat; we want to minimize that, but we also want to maximize protein quality, amino acid profile, and bioavailability. It’s hard to make a specific recommendation, especially if you’re able to eat organ meats and shellfish, which are even more nutrient-dense than muscle meats, then you could focus on mostly seafood, shellfish, and organ meats, and then just eat muscle meat a few times a week if you’re truly not able to access pasture-raised meat.