When you are defining your healthy diet plan you must take into consideration the foods you are most familiar with then make them more “body friendly.”

Ground beef is popular because it is relatively inexpensive, readily available, easy to prepare, and versatile.

Recipe Preparation Begins In The Supermarket

Good meats cost more. That’s no surprise.

Grass fed beef is much preferable to stockyard fed beef when you want to maintain a healthy diet plan.

Why is grass fed beef better for you?

It is better for you because cattle are grazers designed by nature to consume and digest naturally growing grass. Eating grass keeps them lean. Grass-fed cattle roam freely, which attributes to the lean nature of their meat.

Stockyard Versus Grass-fed Beef

Stockyards feed grain to cattle to increase the amount of fat they carry. Luckily, most ground beef sold today has the percentage of fat listed on the label. It’s a handy tidbit of information.

Stockyard fed beef must have huge amounts of antibiotics added to their feed. This is necessary because the opportunity is great for a diseased animal to infect other cattle in a crowded stockyard.

Antibiotics in your food can cause you many problems when ingested without a medical reason.

Such secondary ingestion of antibiotics is being blamed for creating antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria which makes treating you when you do get ill much more difficult. The unintended antibiotic ingestion also kills beneficial bacteria in your gut. This makes you more susceptible to infections.

Both of these situations can lead to serious health consequences for you and your family.

Easy Recipes For Ground Beef

While you are at the supermarket you may as well buy the other items you will need to make your ground beef dish. The hard part comes in when you have to decide how healthy you want your meal to be.

A raw vegetable diet is fairly healthy. A meal that contains bottled or packaged items will be less healthy but this is a tradeoff you have to make. All packaged foods have higher amounts of salt, sugar, or trans-fats present, which make them less desirable.

For a recipe to be “easy” or “quick” you will have to resolve yourself to using packaged or bottled foods on occasion. It’s the tradeoff you have to make for convenience.

Let’s look at a taco salad recipe that contains a small amount of packaged foods but is based upon a raw vegetable diet. This is a great recipe to prepare in the summertime when you are short on food preparation time yet want a healthy and filling meal for your family or guests.

Organic salad makings are best. However, you may have to compromise to save time and buy a ready-made salad in a cellophane bag. Remember the tradeoffs we discussed? This may have to be one of them.

Taco Salad

Brown ½ cup chopped onions and 1 teaspoon chopped garlic in olive oil.
Remove onions and garlic from heat when onions become soft. Set aside.
Brown ground beef. Drain the fat off the meat.
Add cooked onions and garlic to browned ground beef.
Add Taco Seasoning to beef according to package instructions.
When heated through spoon the seasoned beef over salad greens.
Garnish with grated low-fat cheddar cheese and bottled salsa.

You can serve your taco salad with crusty whole grain bread from the grocery store bakery and a hearty red wine. This adds depth to a simple meal. Both the whole grain bread and red wine are good foods that are good for you.

These are all healthful food choices.

Good health foods are the basis of a natural healthy diet. Healthful food choices are easy to make when you have a good food recipe close at hand. Easy recipes for ground beef are convenient, tasty, and satisfying.

Even guests who are not particularly health conscious about their diet will not feel deprived after feasting on this festive but easy ground beef recipe.