Welcome to

The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 3 is all about options for sourcing high-quality meat. We start by discussing the concept of “good, better, and best” when it comes to meat quality, and share how we source our meat.

Then, we interview Diana Rodgers, the creator of the new documentary Kale vs. Cow, about how to best source protein other than beef, and what we can all do to become more sustainable. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

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Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Quality of meat on a scale [3:29]

2. How Mickey and Angie source their meat [8:22]

3. Interview with Diana Rodgers [20:45]

4. Sourcing protein other than beef [26:23]

5. Joining the sustainability movement [29:07]

6. Kale Versus Cow documentary [36:57]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everybody! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, season 3. How’s it going today, Angie?

Angie Alt: It’s going well. I’m excited to talk about this topic. I know it’s kind of weird, but I’m sort of into it.

Mickey Trescott: So, today, we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic of the season; real food on a budget. Today’s episode is going to be about options for sourcing high-quality meat. So this is one of the important parts of the autoimmune protocol diet, whether or not you’re on the elimination diet or you’ve done some reintroductions. Making sure that you have some high-quality meat on your plate is definitely important.

So first, let’s have a chat about this concept of good, better, and best. Angie, do you want to kind of give a little overview of what we mean by that?

Angie Alt: Yeah. It’s basically a scale that we like to use when we’re comparing food quality. I think we first developed it when we wrote our book. Is that right, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: Yeah.

Angie Alt: When we wrote The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook, we kind of developed this scale. Because we really wanted folks to understand that just going for it in terms of making a dietary change for healing is worthwhile. Even if it can’t be perfect. We wanted to kind of dispel this perfectionism myth, and help folks understand that there’s a scale here. And how to best use that scale for whatever your budget and your sourcing abilities are.

Mickey Trescott: Yep. And I think that’s really important that you highlighted two reasons why it might be different. So, budget and accessibility. Sometimes people have barriers in both those areas. Sometimes one and not the other. So just because you can afford something doesn’t mean you can always find it, and vice versa.

Angie Alt: Yeah. So let’s start at the far end of the scale. Let’s start with good. When we say good, in terms of meat quality, we’re talking about if you can’t afford or source grass-fed, or pastured meats, or wild-caught seafood. You can focus on buying leaner cuts of conventionally raised meats. You can still try to make sure they’re at least hormone free. They should be. There are regulations around this stuff. But you can work on adding more organ meats and fish to your diet.

Conventionally raised organ meat is inexpensive, and it’s still very nutrient dense. And farmed fish is better for you than no fish at all. I know there’s a lot of folks that there that are going to balk at that, but you can even check in with the Paleo Mom. She’s done the research here. It’s better to get some fish in, no matter what.

You can also consider wild-caught canned salmon, tuna, or sardines. Which are relatively cheap, but they’re still packed with nutritional value. Be sure to look for canned fish that’s free of soy and spices, though, if you’re following the autoimmune protocol.

And then, you can limit how much conventionally raised poultry you eat, since it does have the lowest value in terms of nutrition. What we mean by buying leaner cuts of other kinds of meat is; looking for less fat. The toxins that kind of accumulate in an animal that’s been fed a less than healthy diet tends to be in the fat. So if you bought conventionally raised pork, you’d trim off the fat on those pork chops. If you had to buy conventionally raised beef, you’d trim off the fat there. That’s what we mean by leaner.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And that kind of goes a little bit against what we normally recommend with AIP. Which is to eat the fat. And that’s because we are advocating for eating higher quality meat. But it’s totally ok, and there is no shame, if you can only afford conventionally raised meat. Just be cautious with that fat content.

And a lot of people actually ask about the organ meats. They think that maybe because it’s conventionally raised, that those are a no-go. But actually organ meats are very lean, and conventionally raised organ meats are still ok. And they’re very, very affordable.

The next level up is what we call better. So kind of one step above good is if you can afford or source some organic grass-fed or pastured meats. Or even that wild-caught seafood. Focus on buying those fatty cuts. So this is where you can kind of play with the boundary between the different food qualities that you have available to you.

Like we said, that fat is really good for you. It’s also where a lot of the toxins are stored. So if you can afford a little bit of that higher quality stuff, think those fatty roasts. Maybe some salmon filets. You might even be able to find some high-quality ground meat on sale from time to time. So you can stock up and freeze that. So that’s kind of how you can use both of those categories to your advantage if you have a little bit in your budget for a little bit higher quality meat.

Angie Alt: Right. And then the next step up. This is other far end of the scale. This is what we call best; we refer to as best. That’s getting all your meat and seafood organic grass-fed or pastured, and wild caught. That’s the ideal that we hope we’re all aiming for. Our budget and our sourcing is able to meet both of these.

This is like finding farmers or fishmongers from whom you can buy directly in bulk in order to save the most money while still getting the highest quality. You can ask the farmers about buying beef, pork, or lamb in wholes, halves, or quarters. This is buying the whole animal, half the animal, quarter of the animal, to save money.

You might be able to share meat with a group of friends if you don’t have enough freezer space or you don’t need to have such large quantities of meat. Buying in bulk keeps the cost down, but you may not have a need for all of that. So sharing is one way to deal with it. It gives you the advantage of the lower bulk price and the higher quality meat.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah. And I really think at this best level, we’re not really saying that this is food sourced from a grocery store. But actually at the highest level, ideally you’re working directly with a farmer that is local to you. So for some people, they don’t have local farms around them. You might be ordering meat online from different sources that maybe ship you frozen meat or something.

But ideally, everyone should have; in a perfect world, we all have local farms that are raising sustainable and healthy meat that we can actually work directly. And then you can actually go kind of see what the animals are eating. How they’re being treated. And all of that is kind of another add-on to that.

Angie Alt: So maybe, Mickey, we could talk about how each of us sources our own protein. Because we have different approaches.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, for sure. We live on opposite sides of the country. Our local food systems are a little bit different. And kind of our life stages and living situations are a little different, too. So, I live on a farm. Although we don’t raise a lot of animals for meat here, but I live in a farming community. So access to quality meat is actually pretty easy for me.

One of my neighbors raises a few cattle every year just for the neighborhood on grass. So I buy a cow from my neighbor, and we have it frozen. We buy half and my mom and my sister buy the other half. So we split it. And I keep it in the deep freezer. And that lasts us about a year.

For salmon, we have a CSA. Because I live in the Pacific Northwest, so there are a lot of salmon CSAs where a company will go up to Alaska in the summer and they will fish for salmon and then freeze everything on the boat and then bring it back and you buy it in 10/20-pound boxes. So we get a couple of boxes in the summer, and that lasts us for the whole year.

And then chicken is actually hardest for me to source, just because it’s very seasonal in my area. So I do have some great farms that raise chicken. But not only is it very expensive, but they’ll raise a group of chickens, and they will harvest all of them. And then when you buy them, I’ll usually buy maybe 12 to 15 chickens. It takes up a lot of room. And that’s the one I have a harder time planning with.

So ideally I get them in whole chickens, bulk from a local farm. But I do supplement that with some of the maybe better quality Whole Foods chicken. And then pork, I have got sourced pork locally from different farms by the half. But this year we’re actually raising our own pigs for the first time. So that’s kind of exciting.

In the past, though. Now I’ve kind of maybe got it pretty figured out, because I lived on a farm and it’s a lot easier for me than a lot of other people to source meat. But I will say I have lived in the city before I lived out here in the country, and I have had to have some pretty creative sourcing ideas to get really good meat on the table.

So some things that I did when I lived in Seattle, first off I had a deep freezer when I had a living situation that wasn’t really ideal for a deep freezer. So I really prioritized that. I bought a little one. It wasn’t giant by any means. But I realized early on that being able to store meat long-term in a freezer was going to help me get more affordable meat. So that was great.

I did a CSA for a while in Seattle, where they would deliver me monthly. So I think it was something like 10 or 15 pounds of meat they would deliver in a cooler to the neighborhood. Then you’d go to the house and kind of pick up your order. And that was really handy, because that was before I had the deep freezer.

Another thing that I did, just as far as affordability. There was a local farm that I liked to buy organ meat at the farmer’s market. Because their prices, I couldn’t afford for the muscle meat. But I was buying organ meat from them because it was like $3-4 a pound for a heart, liver, or kidney.

And I asked them one day; “Do you guys ever end up with a bunch of leftover, freezer burned meat at the end of the season?” And they were like, “Yeah, we have a freezer full of that.” I was like, “What if I bought a quarter of a cow, but just in freezer burned meat. Would you give me a deal?” And they were like; “Actually, we’ll charge you for a quarter of a cow, but we’ll give you half a cow. But we’ll just give you all of the old stuff.” And I was like, heck yeah. That’s amazing.

So, all I had to do was slice off that little freezer burned piece, and it really wasn’t that big of a deal. And I got really high-quality meat. And it was really cheap. I actually shared it with my brother, who was trying to eat healthier. So that was one thing I did.

Another thing that we did when we lived in Seattle was we had a friend who had some lambs that they offered to sell us one. And my husband wanted to learn how to harvest them. So they were like; if you come out to the farm for a day and help us harvest some of the lambs, then we’ll give you one. So we did that.

My husband has kind of been into hunting and fishing throughout the year, so that’s been another kind of alternative way of getting some, obviously, wild meat.

Angie Alt: Awesome options there. I love hunting and fishing!

Mickey Trescott: I know. It’s not always a guarantee.

Angie Alt: Yeah, not always a guarantee.

Mickey Trescott: It’s a little more fun than useful. But it’s nice when it works out.

Angie Alt: Yeah, right. So I grew up with a lot of hunting and fishing, but that’s not really a good option for me anymore. I live halfway between DC and Baltimore, basically, in a very, very urban/suburban area. And that’s not really a reality of my life right now.

What I do in terms of beef, pork, and lamb is get through a local farmer and my friend through a quarterly CSA. So we pay every 3 months for 20-22 pounds of meat for the following three months. And we just pick it up from the farm monthly. And it’s just kind of a selection of the three. It’s all 100% grass-fed, pasture raised, non-GMO. She kind of goes out of her way to adopt all the best practices for raising meat of this kind. So it’s really high quality.

In terms of fish, salmon especially, occasionally I get that through bulk shares with friends who are connected to Alaskan fishermen. So they have connections with them. And we buy a whole bunch at once. And then it gets shipped her after it’s been frozen on the boat. And we split it up and all share it.

But more often, I have to do it through the grocery store. Sometimes I can get really high quality, wild caught, on sale. And sometimes I use farmed salmon, you guys. Like we were talking about earlier. Eating seafood is better for me than eating none. So sometimes that’s what I do. I also, of course, use canned salmon, canned tuna, those kinds of things so I can get the best quality for a little cheaper.

And then, like Mickey said, chicken is very hard to...