Know your beef, and you cannot depend on the label either!

When you buy beef from the grocery store, you can usually tell that there's some kind of beef encased in all that plastic and styrofoam.  what those labels won't tell you is whether your meat contains residues of rBGH or rBST growth hormones or whether it contains trace amounts of the 30 million pounds of antibiotics used on livestock every year. They won't give you a good idea of where your meat came from or how the animals were treated prior to slaughter, nor will they tell you about an animal's diet, which can impact the health of the animal as well as whether it's meat is contaminated with E. coli. If you care about all those things—as well as the nutritional quality of your beef—it's best to avoid the supermarket and buy grass-fed beef directly from a farmer, or local natural-food store, such as a co-op, as they who knows how beef is produced, or know the farmer directly. Grass-fed beef has also been found to contain higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids and is typically leaner than it's corn-fattened counterpart behind the market's deli counter (those are some nutrition facts that won't appear on the new labels, either).