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Paleovalley’s 100% Grass-Fed Beef Sticks: my favorite antianxiety clean protein snack

By Trudy Scott 13 Comments

I’ve got something great to share with you today… Paleovalley’s 100% Grass-Fed Beef Sticks!

Have you ever been stuck somewhere without a nutrient-dense healthy snack option: in traffic? At an airport? In a work meeting? At your child’s baseball game? At a conference? At the gym?

A healthy snack, gluten-free, quality protein and helps with blood sugar stability

When life gets busy, if we’re not prepared with healthy snacks it’s not very pretty – we can feel irritable and cranky, our focus and energy can take a dip and we can very often feel more anxious. These are all signs of low blood sugar. Low blood sugar can even trigger a panic attack and cause depression!

In fact, for many of my clients these are some of the main ways to keep anxiety and panic attacks at bay:

  • Avoiding gluten
  • Keeping blood sugar steady
  • Eating quality animal protein

Unfortunately, as you know, doing all this is often far harder in the real world than doing this in the comfort of your own kitchen. This is why having high quality snacks on hand are incredibly important. And if you’re like me and are always prepared and take healthy snacks with you, having something that is delicious and healthy is a top priority!  

I have finally found a healthy snack I approve of and so, of course, I want to share them with you!

They are Paleovalley’s 100% Grass-Fed Beef Sticks!

Grass-fed, grass-finished, organic spices, free of dyes, GMOs and gluten

These are not your average beef sticks. These beef sticks:

  • Are made from 100% grass-fed AND grass-finished beef (which is very rare!)
  • Contain all organic spices
  • Are free of all dyes (most casings contain artificial dyes)
  • Are also GMO-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, carb-free, and contain 0 grams of sugar

AND they also help with blood sugar stability!

They are also fermented and free of trans fats!

But the main reason I really want to share these beef sticks with you (other than the yum-factor!) is because they are FERMENTED just like vegetables. Each beef stick contains 1 billion naturally-occurring, gut-healing probiotics! And we know how important good bacteria and the microbiome is when it comes to anxiety and depression.

Chas and Autumn, the founders of Paleovalley, shared this with me:

Most (if not all) other beef stick companies on the market utilize GMO corn and hydrogenated oils (trans fats) to preserve their sticks. It’s often labeled as “encapsulated citric acid” but can also be deceptively labeled as just “citric acid” or “lactic acid.” When the beef sticks are heated, the encapsulated oil coating melts into the beef stick and the citric acid is released for preservation purposes. Which means you’re getting an unhealthy dose of GMOs and hydrogenated oils with every bite.

Instead of using this process, Paleovalley uses natural fermentation to make their beef sticks shelf stable. From what they tell me, the reason that other companies don’t also use fermentation is that it takes about 4-5 times longer and isn’t as profitable.

So, these Paleovalley 100% Grass Fed Beef Sticks are not only free of questionable additives and GMOs, but they’re also nutrient dense AND support gut and brain health due to the fermentation process.

According to the research, high quality, grass fed red meat is strongly correlated with good mental health!

Another reason I love these beef sticks is that Dr. Felice Jacka, nutritional psychiatry researcher and founder of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research, has found that grass-fed red meat lowers the risk of anxiety and depression. In fact, Dr. Jacka went into her research thesis hypothesizing that red meat would be unhealthy, but was surprised to find the opposite. I interviewed Dr. Jacka in season 1 of the Anxiety Summit and she shared this about her research:

In our study, out of every single dietary food grouping that I looked at including vegetables, fruits, salads, beans, etc., the strongest correlate of mental health was red meat intake [grass-fed quality red meat of course]

Dr. Felice Jacka_2

You may also recall my wonderful interview with Autumn on season 4 of the Anxiety Summit. She actually wrote her master’s thesis on dietary strategies for anxiety and shared this (and much more):

I am extremely passionate about mental health and nutrition and have set out to create food products that make it easy for people to eat well on-the-go. Because Dr. Jacka found that grass-fed beef was the most anxiolytic food, we crafted a 100% grass-fed beef stick!

So these nutrient dense 100% grass fed beef sticks not only allow you to avoid substances that are problematic for mental health like gluten, dairy, soy, trans fats, GMOs and sugar but also help you with blood sugar stability (such a big factor when it comes to anxiety). They also provide important key nutrients for mental health such as amino acids, B vitamins, iron and zinc – all needed to make calming neurotransmitters like GABA and serotonin.

Moist, tender, convenient and delicious!

They are moist, tender and have a little snap to them? They are also shelf stable for up to 4 months (much longer if refrigerated or frozen). They are so convenient AND oh so delicious!

And these beef sticks were actually voted #2 best paleo snack of 2014 by Paleo Magazine!

I bumped into Chas and Autumn at a recent conference and they kindly offered to give my community 30% off for a limited time. You’ll also be given first dibs on their brand new, really delicious Garlic Summer Sausage & Summer Sausage flavors (just like healthy, mini hickory smoked sausages)!

Click here to get your fermented, 100% Grass-Fed Beef Sticks for 30% off!… and taste the gut-friendly, fermented, grass-fed goodness for yourself.

Grab some today so that you can stay calm, cool and collected no matter what life throws your way.

ps. Right now these are only available in the USA but I’m looking into options for similar products in Australia, Canada and the UK.  I’ll share once I have sourced something. If you happen to have a great resource please share in the comments.

 

The Anxiety Summit – Anxiety: Grass-fed beef, fermented foods and healthy snacks the Paleovalley way

By Trudy Scott 16 Comments

Autumn Fladmo Smith_Anxiety4

Autumn Fladmo Smith, co-founder Paleovalley, is interviewed on the Anxiety Summit by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.

Anxiety: Grass-fed beef, fermented foods and healthy snacks the Paleovalley way

  • can dietary intervention reduce anxiety?
  • how the health of the mother affects the child’s mental health
  • nutritional and mental health benefits of grass-fed beef vs. conventionally raised beef
  • benefits of fermented foods for mental wellbeing
  • healthy snacks for blood sugar control and anxiety
  • GMOs, the shikimate pathway and serotonin
  • Paleovalley’s mission, 100% grass-fed beef sticks, why they are fermented, and how/why GMOs and hydrogenated oils were avoided

Here are some gems from our interview:

What happened in around 2009, although the link between diet and mental health was rarely investigated prior to that time, a researcher from Deacon University named Dr. Felice Jacka came on the scene and she did her dissertation exploring dietary patterns.  So not only taking those dietary triggers, which were just really specific foods, but also seeing what were people eating as overall dietary patterns that was making a difference?  And when she did that research she kind of noted two different diets emerging.  And that’s the traditional diet with high intakes of grass fed meats, fish, vegetables and fruit and then our all too familiar SAD diet, the American standard diet.  And what she found was that there were very, very different outcomes, mental health wise, for people who were eating the traditional versus the processed diet.  And in fact her dissertation elucidated that if you were eating higher amounts of processed food or a standard American diet you had a 50 percent greater incidence of depression and anxiety.  So that was really an important finding for my thesis. 

Here is a link to Dr. Felice Jacka’s interview on season 1 of the Anxiety Summit: The Research – Food to prevent and treat anxiety and depression?

It was in this interview that Dr. Jacka said this:

“In our study, out of every single dietary food grouping that I looked at including vegetables, fruits, salads, beans, etc the strongest correlate of mental health was red meat intake,” grass-fed red meat of course.

felice jacka red meat

This blog discusses Dr. Jacka’s current SMILES study on diet in anxiety and depression – A RCT of a dietary intervention for adults with major depression (the “SMILES” trial): study protocol.  We should see published results shortly.

Autumn shares these benefits of grass-fed red meat:

Grass fed red meat is different in two main ways.  And that’s because it has higher and a different fatty acid profile, especially omega-3 fatty acid.  There seems to be more, I think three to five times more than conventional raised beef.  And that’s important because omega-3 are known to be very therapeutic for mental health and a number of other health issues.  So as many of those omega-3’s as we can get is a good thing.  But what it also does is there’s omega-3 fatty acid and there’s omega-6 fatty acid and it improves the ratio.  It has kind of a perfect ratio.  Our ancestors had a ratio between these two fatty acid’s of about one to one and the common American today has a ratio of about 20 to one, which they hypothesize, and a lot of research suggest, leads to inflammation in the body, which is the root of basically all degenerative diseases.  So grass fed beef has a ratio of about 1.5 to one, which is almost perfect compared to one to 7.5 in conventionally raised beef.  So that’s just a huge difference. 

And then there’s also something called CLA, which is another fatty acid known to have cancer fighting properties.  One study showed that the women who ate the most CLA had a lower risk of breast cancer.  And it’s also known to optimize the deposition of fat in the body so that’s really important.  But the other major benefit of grass fed beef is its antioxidant profile.  There’s higher levels of glutathione, which is our bodies master antioxidant.  There’s I think seven times more vitamin A or beta-carotene, the precursors to vitamin A.  And I think three times more vitamin E.  There’s also higher levels of B vitamins, which are so critical for mental health, and minerals, especially zinc and iron and magnesium, which are also really, really important for mental health.  But the other side of the coin is, like Trudy said, what we’re not getting that conventionally raised beef has to offer and that is the hormones, the antibiotics and the pesticides, which just wreak havoc on our health.  And toxins are stored in fat as well, which is a really, really important thing to remember.  So when you’re eating the fat of a conventionally raised animal that fat is actually storing up all of those toxins and then you’re getting a healthy dose in every bite.  So basically grass fed beef is allowing us to only put into our body what’s going to allow us to thrive and none of what won’t, which is why I’m so passionate about it.

Here is Autumn’s digital gift: her antianxiety protocol based on her thesis 

You can use this link to get 30% off Paleovalley’s 100% grass-fed beefsticks 

If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here: www.theAnxietySummit.com

Missed this interview or can’t listen live? Or want this and the other great interviews for your learning library? Purchase the MP3s or MP3s + transcripts and listen when it suits you.

You can find your purchasing options here.: Anxiety Summit Season 1, Anxiety Summit Season 2, Anxiety Summit Season 3, and Anxiety Summit Season 4.