When someone orders a burger at a restaurant or picks up some beef at a meat market to make a burger at home, they’re most likely not thinking about where the meat came from and how the cow was treated. Understanding where and how that beef was made can be instrumental in choosing the right meat for your burger. You may have heard the term “grass fed beef” before, and once you understand the potential health benefits associated with grass fed beef, you might look at a the burger you’re eating a little differently.

To help you become aware of these health benefits, this article delves into a few of the many upsides that come with eating grass fed beef.

For starters, grass fed beef is more likely to be free of hormones and antibiotics. A large portion of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to livestock like cows. Even worse, many of these antibiotics are not strictly necessary for the cow’s health, and the use of antibiotics in animals can contribute to antibiotic resistance in humans as well. Cows that are fed diets of grain can also be given hormones to unnaturally increase their weight. With grass-fed cows, unnatural weight gain is not as high because of their healthier, low calorie diet.

In order to keep blood sugar at a healthy level, it’s important to have a diet full of healthy fats. A study published in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2016 studied the effects of a healthy fat called CLA on insulin sensitivity in obese children. Research found that 37% of the patients treated with CLA showed improvements in insulin sensitivity. With that in mind, the benefits of grass-fed beef, which is full of these healthy fats, have been found to be crucial for both adults and children in keeping their blood sugar at a healthy level. Since grass fed beef is leaner than other meat, it’s healthier too. In fact, the amount of protein content in lean, cooked beef can be between 26% and 27%.

As previously mentioned, CLA provides many health benefits. In fact, there are 16 different types of CLA, each providing a different and highly important health benefit. Since 1994, CLA has been shown in numerous animal studies to help fight health conditions and diseases. That’s why CLA is being promoted worldwide as an essential aspect of every diet. Additionally, these fatty acids have been researched for their ability to prevent and treat conditions and diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

In addition to being shown to help prevent and treat health conditions, CLA has also been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease. With grass-fed beef consisting of less overall fat, less unhealthy fat, lower levels of cholesterol, higher levels of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, and more antioxidant vitamins, grass-fed beef can significantly benefit heart health in a variety of ways, especially if you eat a lot of beef.

By looking at all of these health benefits grass-fed beef can offer humans, and then thinking about how much better a grass-fed diet can be for cows and animal welfare, it’s easy to see why many people prefer grass-fed beef. Now that you know all of the health benefits you can receive from eating grass-fed beef, you might think twice about where your meat packages for your next burger came from.