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Where to buy meats?

vxrich

vxrich

Well-Known Member
Messages
207
Location
Staffs
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Pump
With all of this stuff in the news about processed meats causing cancer I'm just interested to know where you guys buy your red meats? I've just looked at the ingredients in the pack of unsmoked bacon that I bought from Morrisons and it actually contains loads of preservatives so looks like I'll have to get my hand in my pocket and buy from a butcher (which I should be doing anyway I suppose)
Ta
 
The butchers counter in some supermarkets can be quite good, my dad swears by morrisons meat.............

I use the local abattoir, as it now has a shop attached as I guess a lot do these days , also farmers markets


but that's only when I am flush :) I got a kg of bacon from aldi last week for £1.50

Have given up listening to these health scares, did not eat an egg for a few years because my doc told me it would kill me (high cholesterol), as well as butter cream etc......now its the bloomin opposite :banghead:
 
Not listening to the latest ''scare''....sick weary and tired of them. Every week a new one to worry about and not paying any attention to this one .....its just food terrorism and heartily sick of listening to it. Shame they aren't as clued up on what foods diabetics should eat. They can't even get that right ...I rest my case on scare mongering stories they release :)
 
I saw an interview with a scientist on ITN and she admitted that they don't know whether the bowel cancer is caused by the haem in red meat (a blood product I guess) which gives it the red colour, or whether it's the preservatives.

So firstly, it seems to me, that they should have some evidence rather than a vague theory.

Ancel Keys had a theory about cholesterol which was proven to be wrong and look how many people have gotten obese eating the supposedly healthy low fat low cholesterol diet because of wrong advice !

As researchers are fond of saying, 'correlation is not causation'. If you look at 20, 599, even 10,000 people and they all eat red meat and many get cancer, that doesn't prove that they got it from eating red meat. They might be many other things going on eg smoking, alcohol, drugs and genetics.

Humans have been eating animals ever since we've been around. It might be that the nature of the meat has changed however. Much of it is grain or soya fed, much of it is fed on GM feed now.

Additives in food only have to test as non-toxic i.e. they won't kill you immediately. They don't have to be tested long-term or tested in conjunction with other additives.

Morrisons works directly with farms, as does Waitrose for much of its meat. Co-op owns some farms. I don't know about the others.

Aldi, ASDA, Co-op, Lidl, Marks and Spencer. Morrisons, Sainsbury's, Tesco and even Waitrose, all allow some GM feed in some non-organic ranges. Some allow it in anything non-organic. None of the animals raised on GM feed or their products e.g. milk, butter, eggs have to be labelled.

You have to be really careful about reading labels, because some supermarkets do add stuff like water, glucose syrup and chemicals to plain meat.

Things like ham, sausages and bacon usually do contain preservatives, even if organic.

Added together, I buy more veg, dairy, fish and game than I do red meat. It's almost always organic or wild. I'd like to buy local but this area is generally arable rather than meat and dairy.
 
Here's my take on the latest "meat causes cancer" scare. I believe this is probably more of a concern to we here (diabetics using LCHF for glycemic control) than it is most people. So it's definitely something I'd like to see discussed.

First up it's important to realize that the main culprit in the report is preserved meats, with other red meats being implicated to a far less extent. If you buy plain cuts of meat fresh meat then these should not have been processed or contain preservatives etc.

So according to the report the main ones implicated are the things like sausages and bacon etc. Though there are other prepared meat products that might also be undesirable, so I'd also look out for things that are vacuum packed in plastic with various flavorings or marinades added. The basic plain cuts of meat however, things like the various cuts of steak and chops etc, these should be completely free of additives.

Having said all that, there is still a big question mark over just how scared we should all be about this. For many years there have been health warnings about possible undesirable effects of eating too much preserved meat, so I've been only eating these once or twice a week anyway. Maybe I'll cut down even more, though I'll probably look over the evidence a bit more first. Looking at fresh cuts of meat that are not processed or preserved however, I'm not changing my eating habits on these. At least not at this stage.

There's one final point that I'd like to make about the implications of this latest meat scare to LCHF. Remember that these results are based on statistical (epidemiological) studies. So it's quite possible for confounding factors, like the propensity for high meat eaters to also eat less fresh vegetables, to skew the results. This point may be particularly relevant to we LCHF adherents, as many of us do indeed eat quite a large amount of precisely the type of low carb vegetables that are often reported to lower the risk of the very diseases implicated in the red meat scare. To be honest this point does put my mind to rest somewhat. :)
 
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Personally I think its a pile of old cobblers. If they stopped messing with our food that would be a start.
Coffee was out as were eggs, they were full of salmonella, gm food well nuff said.
 
For welfare and quality reasons, I try to buy wild caught meat. There are various companies that sell it. You have to buy in bulk to avoid high delivery costs, so I order on behalf of a few of us and then freeze it. The company I've recently found supplies venison, wild boar, rabbit and game birds, all wild caught. They've lived a free life, are not filled with antibiotics and added hormones like most farmed animals and haven't been through a slaughterhouse, either. Just my preference anyway.
 
My own view is, that we are born and we die. Its what we do in between that's important. Don't waste your time worrying about it.
 
I think these figures need to be looked at in perspective.

According to data on the Cancer Research website, the incidence rate in males is less than 60 cases of bowel cancer per 100,000 people, in women the numbers are lower.

They are claiming that eating bacon etc increases your risk by 18%.

So in the grand scheme of things you may have an 18% more chance of being one of those 60 of the 100,000.

As in most cases of these diseases it will be your genes that determine how you are affected by exposure to certain things.

On a lighter note, In a couple of weeks I am booked in to have a part of my body nobody should ever see looked at, using something that should never be shoved into me.
 
Just because meat comes from a butcher and isn't labelled, doesn't mean it isn't chock full of preservatives and chemicals.

I used to live in rural Wales and we had a fab butcher, who made his own bacon the proper old fashioned way. It was totally different from ANYTHING I have seen in butchers, or supermarkets, or markets since, which suggests that they all use similar modern chemical methods.

In case you are interested, his bacon was a huge slab of pork, hanging on a hook behind the counter. It was dry, the meat was wine red, the fat was cream coloured. So it was neither pink, white, wet or shiny. He would lift the slab down and use the slicing machine to give you exactly the number of slices you wanted. They were 2-3mm thick, firm, with rind, and were best baked in the oven. I have never tasted bacon like it since.

I believe he used to make it by just rubbing in salt and hanging it, but I am not sure of the details. All commercially produced bacon is created by soaking in chemical and salt baths.
 
As a recent diabetic, my new attitude to food is if it doesn't mess with my glucose levels, I'm gonna eat it! I've had to stop eating so much stuff (I'm grain free, sugar free, potato free, low carb) that I'm going to enjoy whatever else I can eat! The weight is gradually coming off, so that's all good.
 
I have been reading 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low Carbohydrate Revolution' by Dr Richard David Feinman PhD, a biochemist. He writes about bad research sensationalising risk because results use statistical modelling and are extrapolated. Dr Feinman talks about a previous meat scare and when analysed properly the risk was miniscule.

Game is effectively farmed, whether on an estate in Scotland, a farm in Hampshire or New Zealand. Deer can be slaughtered in abattoirs now but they have to be specially licensed to do so and there are quite strict rules from DEFRA. It is becoming much more available and it's a growth market.
 
Deer CAN be slaughtered in abbatoirs, but the venison I buy isn't, and it isn't farmed. Take your point about game birds, although much of the game available on the site I'm talking about is wild (the geese, ducks, and woodcock for instance). Other game animals - hares for example, aren't farmed either.
 
I think the thing here is 'all things in moderation' - just don't eat processed meats everyday and it will probably have no or minimal effect on you.
 
As serena51 says -I'd add that buying meat without preservatives and other chemicals whenever possible will help.
 
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