If you're a beef eater, it is to your benefit to look for grass-fed beef. When cows graze on what they would eat if not domesticated, instead of on the foods that are pro-inflammatory to any animal, the resulting flesh is higher in omega-3 fatty acids.
I recently learned about a Uruguayan/Argentinian brand of beef, Estancia, that is grass-fed on native grass (no rainforest destroyed for these ranches), that is available in the Western United States. It's primarily sold in California, but because Arizona sits between California and the Texas ports where this beef is unloaded from the boats, and the trucks stop off here on the way to their destination, we can get it in our Fry's Signature Stores as well.
Here is the information on nutrition and health from the Estancia website. If you do not happen to have this particular brand in your local area, be sure to ask your butcher what brand they DO have with similar characteristics. The more a butcher or store knows a product will be sold, the more likely it is that they will go through the trouble to bring it to their shelves.
I dedicate this post to Susan Dopart and Jeffrey Batchelor. Susan is a contributor to this blog…her post about the power of fish oil and flaxseed oil combination has been pretty widely read around the Internet.
Susan and Jeffrey e-mailed me from a recent trip to Switzerland where they were going ga-ga over the wonderful food. I mentioned that Emmenthaler Swiss cheese has been found to have a higher content of omega-3's than the average cheese, and Susan recently mentioned that she's found a store at home in Santa Monica, where she can special order the stuff she loved so much in Switzerland.
So today I walked over to the grocery store to get my lunch and it turned out it was cheese sampling day. Kara, the local Cheese Goddess, happened to be there and since she is so knowledgeable about cheese I call her the Human Cheese Rolodex, I pulled her aside and picked her brain about what might be some fun options for healthy cheese.
Her recommendations were based on the following criteria I gave her: --grass fed (corn fed cows turn out like corn fed people, too much inflammatory fat in their tissue) --organic (hormones are very chemically similar to estrogen and can disrupt hormone balance
She gave me a list of some options. She told me that artisan cheeses, made by smaller dairies, tend to grass feed over grain feeding, but that is not always so. You need to ask.
Point Reyes Bleu Cheese Cypress Grove Winchester Dairy Sierra Nevada Organic Dairy Rouge et Noir Bravo Farms Fiscalini Cheese Rumiano Gioia Bellwether Farms Maytag Dairy Carr Valley Black Goat Dairy Beecher's Cheese
Most of these come from California, hence the Happy California Cow picture.
The most interesting cheese Kara told me about was Beemster cheese from Holland. These cows graze on pesticide-free grass in pastures that lie below sea level. These pastures are located on top of a former sea lagoon, and their soil is made of a blue sea clay, and the combination of how this clay nourishes the grass these cows eat, produces cheese with 20% less sodium than the average cheese. I am curious whether this pasture history means somehow there are some omega-3's getting into this cheese…but I couldn't find anything online to answer that question.
If you are a true cheese aficionado and must have Beemster cheese…there is a little bad news…only 2000 wheels are made each year, in the springtime. The good news is, that could be an extremely fun pilgrimage.
http://www.beemster.us/the-cheeses/the-taste/
Now some science to round out Kara's trivia.
Cheese has its good qualities, when eaten in moderation. --It's high in protein and calcium --It contains CLA, an omega-3 intermediate which may help with weight control --It's convenient --If it's the right kind, it contains omega-3's --If you are like me, whose first language was German, there is no life without cheese.
Moderation is the key, for several reasons --Cheese is a good source of saturated fat --Cheese is one of the few nonprocessed foods that contains trans fats --Cheese has calories
Susan and Jeffrey and I will be at the first Fertile Intentions Couples Infertility Day Spa on October 25, 2008. Along with our co-hosts, we will be discussing cheese as well as many other great things about food, health, stress management, and environmental awareness as they pertain to balancing hormones and fertility.
There is a lot of demand for milk alternatives, for a lot of reasons. Some of you are lactose intolerant or have tested positive to a dairy allergy. So I wanted to compare the alternatives for you, if you fall in either of these categories, to give you some facts on which to base your personal decision.
Before I move on to milk alternatives, a word about cow's milk.
I'm not pro- or anti- cow's milk. I simply want you to have the facts about all of your options and base your decisions on facts. Much of what is said about cow's milk is personal opinion, not based on peer-reviewed evidence. In fact, there is not a single peer-reviewed article in the National Library of Medicine database even mentioning any kind of relationship between PCOS and cow's milk.
What IS found in that database, is a study I often cite, written in part by respected Harvard researcher Walter Willett, in which it was reported that women who consume one fat-containing serving of dairy a day were actually more fertile than those who did not. The statistics used to evaluate this relationship were derived from data obtained in the Harvard Nurses' Health Study II, from 18,555 registered nurses over a period of 8 years. Those are pretty impressive credentials! So I find the conclusions to be worthy of your consideration. Keep in mind, these women were not advised to change the type of milk they drank, so they were not steered toward raw milk, organic milk, or any other variation. They were most probably drinking plain milk you get from the corner grocer.
The researchers corrected for vitamin D and lactose, meaning vitamin D and lactose in the diet in the millk drinkers was NOT the explanation for this finding. In their words, their conclusion was this: "High intake of low-fat dairy foods may increase the risk of anovulatory infertility whereas intake of high-fat dairy foods may decrease this risk."
If you've been avoiding cow's milk and vitamin D supplementation isn't doing the trick for your vitamin D levels, I strongly encourage you to consider a second reason for drinking cow's milk. If you've been eating yogurt assuing it's an appropriate substitute for milk, it's not. Most yogurts do NOT contain vitamin D. Try switching to milk (at least 1%) and see if it makes a difference.
For those of you drinking milk, I'd like to encourage you to consider antibiotic, hormone-free, organic, grass-fed. It's not something that is readily available (many organic brands are not grass-fed), but keep your eye out for it and grab it when you see it.
Like I said, I don't care if you do or don't drink milk. I just want to be sure of two things:
1. That your choice to drink or not drink cow's milk is based on fact and not on someone else's opinion who may not have a handle on YOUR personal physiology. Every single case of PCOS is different and it is not clinically sound for anyone to make a blanket recommendation about milk to all women with PCOS.
2. That if you choose to drink cow's milk, you know what kind is most supportive of hormone balance, and if you choose not to drink cow's milk, you know what adjustments you need to make to your overall diet in order to make up for deficiencies that eliminating an entire category of foods may be creating.
On that note, tomorrow I'll summarize the pros and cons of milk alternatives.
I was on a flight from Chicago to Boston yesterday and struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me. It turned out, he is a veterinarian who does a lot of work with horses. He asked about my profession, and I gave him the Cliff Notes version, telling him that I did a lot of work with infertility.
Without even having a chance to mention that my friends think I am obsessed with omega-3 fatty acids to the point of often being teased about being the"Fish Oil Queen," he said to me,"Nutrition is very important for fertility in horses. Especially omega-3's."
Turns out, he said, the process of breeding horses is so expensive (if you thought an in vitro procedure emptied your wallet, start pricing stud services!!), that there is a lot of pressure to"get it right" as quickly as possible. And research has discovered, that omega-3 fatty acids are particularly important as part of the success formula.
I commented that it was interesting that in humans the fertility research seemed to focus on the females, while in equine science, it tended to focus on the males. He just smiled and said…"Your women need to be feeding their priceless stallions as well as they feed themselves!"
Here is an excerpt from an equine article I found at http://www.horses.com/. You will have to register to access their other articles, but it is worth the time. Hopefully some day our own nutrition will be as important as veterinarians have found it to be in animals.
Squires said sperm quality problems can increase when artificial insemination with cooled or frozen semen is involved. The problem stems in part from the fatty acids found in equine sperm. Bull sperm contains high amounts of omega-3 fatty acids that enable them to withstand the rigors involved in freezing. Horses, on the other hand, have sperm that is high in omega-6 fatty acids, which hinders sperm ability to be cooled and frozen, and the sperm is low in omega-3 fatty acids. The most important omega-3 fatty acid is docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). An omega-6 fatty acid found in semen is docosapentaenoic acid (DPA).
Squires said in semen, the fatty acid profile of stallions is similar to that of boars (male hogs). Studies in boars have shown that a high DHA to DPA ratio in semen results in enhanced fertility, whereas higher levels of DPA relative to DHA result in reduced fertility.
He said fresh grass is high in DHA, but unfortunately, a lot of stallions are fed hay and grain.
"Men that have reduced fertility have also been shown to have lower levels of DHA in seminal plasma," Squires noted."The ratio of phospholipids (fats containing phosphorous) to cholesterol in the sperm, and the ratio of unsaturated to saturated fatty acids, determines the ability of sperm to handle the rigors of cooling and freezing. Those species that have high cholesterol to phospholipid ratio have sperm that are very resistant to cold shock and thawing.
"Humans, rabbits, and roosters produce sperm that are very resistant to cold shock and their sperm freezes very well," he continued."Sperm from boars and stallions have very low tolerance to cold shock, and, in general, their sperm freezes poorly. Sperm of bulls have high levels of DHA in the cell, where those of stallions have a high level of DPA. Increasing the ration of DHA to DPA in semen has been shown to increase fertilizing capacity and semen quality. Conversely, reducing the ratio of DHA to DPA was accompanied by a reduction in fertilizing capacity."
He said researchers found that adding omega-3 fatty acids to a stallion's diet resulted in a more fluid condition of the sperm membrane, which, in turn, allowed sperm to handle the stress of cooling and freezing with potentially less damage.
