Clean Meat vs. Dirty Meat

Clean meat and dirty meat? How do we draw the line between them? Are you aware of the type of meat you are eating right now? Or do you even care? Let us talk about these two types of meat to clear some gray areas and answer some questions running in your mind. And after which I am sure you will be more careful with your meat choices.

Let’s Talk About Clean Meat

 If you do a quick Google search, you will learn that the other terms for clean meat are in-vitro, lab-grown, or cultured meat. Or it’s the meat that is grown in cell culture rather than inside of the animal’s body. Well, that’s not the type of clean meat that I am talking about here.

In this article, I am referring to clean meats as those that are produced from local family farms. And you have the option to buy clean meats that are grass-fed or better yet grass-finished. The crucial thing about clean meats is that the animals where they came from were raised without hormones or antibiotics. And you can see that on the label.

Unfortunately, most of the time, we need to personally go to the farms. We need to verify the living conditions of the animals, how they are being treated, what do they eat, and practically how are the meats being produced. And I know that is not always a practical and easy route to take. Hence, alternatively, it would help to do a little research about the farm and to ask for referrals from the people in your community who are fastidious with the type of meat that they are eating.

What Do We Mean by Dirty Meats?

First things first – we don’t know what the animals are being fed. Nowadays, corn, wheat, and soy are among the biggest food sources that these animals are eating. And as we all know, corn, wheat, and soy are only going to plump us up even more. So we don't want the GMOs; we don't want the pesticides. And we certainly don't want corn, wheat, or soy in epic amounts in our body.

So in buying meats, you have to be very aware of what the animals are being fed before you put inside your cart and eventually inside your body. And unfortunately, the majority of meats that are being sold from these big box stores don’t have this information on their labels.

If it's not written on the label, you can almost guarantee there's some kind of nonsense going on in there. Back in the days when there was an Ebola virus outbreak, they were even feeding carcasses into these animals to get protein inside them. Can you imagine eating meat from animals that were fed with carcasses?

The second thing about dirty meat is that you need to know what is being injected into the animal. The last statistic I heard was that 85% of the antibiotics sold in North America, primarily in the United States were actually sold to farmers. That's a whole lot of antibiotics and they need to inject these animals with antibiotics because of the living conditions that they're in.

So you can go and explore this world on Netflix and the various documentaries out there. I highly recommend that you do both sides of the research, especially in Canada, because you have a wide source of family farms that are fighting tremendously against the horrific treatment of these animals. So there are both sides to that coin. You have to be very careful. Support those farms that are in favor of treating their animals properly, feeding them properly with the right foods and not injecting them with all sorts of antibiotics, hormones, growth hormones, and estrogens.

Another mind-boggling fact about dirty meats is that they are loaded with not just one, but three forms of unhealthy sodium – sodium nitrate, sodium erythorbate, and sodium phosphate. That is way too much salt to gobble. And the sad thing is that you don’t even know or you don’t even care to put on extra effort in finding out about this sad reality.

If you love eating processed meats, then sodium nitrate is certainly not new to your body since it is a preservative that is commonly used in these food items. Also, sodium nitrate is known to contribute to heart problems because it can damage your blood vessels, as well as harden and narrow your arteries.

The second one, sodium erythorbate is a synthetic variation of Vitamin C or ascorbic acid. It may be safe, but it is still a new type of additive. And we know for a fact that anyone can be hypersensitive to these which can lead to harmful side effects.

Moreover, studies have linked high levels of phosphate with conditions like heart disease, decreased bone density, premature aging, kidney issues, and even early death. While consuming small amounts of sodium phosphate is likely safe, eating too much sodium phosphate can lead to unhealthy levels of phosphorus in the body.

Here’s a quick trivia before I end this article: Did you know that there are grocery stores that play around the expiration date of their meat?

A documentary by the CBC Marketplace, a Canadian newsmagazine television program, exposed how supermarkets tamper with your food’s expiration date. Some grocery stores have been known to inject different colorings into the meat so it still looks red. You know, when your meat starts to go a little shady, it starts to turn brown. So they color the meat to make sure it's still red. They pushed that expiry date by a couple of extra days and they click on a big 50% off to get rid of the meat.