Nutritionists and Beef

Traci Bracco of the Idaho Beef Council talks beef education. “More and more consumers want to know the story about their food, where it comes from, and in particular, health professionals are no different, they want to understand the entire farm to fork process so that they can better communicate it to their clients and their patients. So earlier this month we joined together, Washington and Idaho state beef councils to host 40 registered dietitians during the Idaho Washington State Dietetic Association Conference which was held up in Spokane in mid April. We took these individuals on a tour of a cow- calf operation so that they could better understand the journey of producing delicious, nutritious beef. These tour participants got to meet and engage with the actual ranching owners, they got to see the different types of foodstuffs that are fed to our cattle, some of which are very unique to those of us in the Pacific Northwest because we have such an abundance of food items that are produced in the Washington State area. Such things as Apple peels and the leftovers from the potato processing plants, many people don’t realize that french fries are fed to cattle in feed lots. So they got to see how their diets are perfectly balanced with the help of cattle nutritionists and we actually had cattle nutritionists there to talk about the various rationing and feeding. They were able to ask questions that are on a lot of consumers minds such as antibiotics and hormone use.