Steak - Mark Schatzker [123]
The human brain is about 12 percent omega-3 fatty acids, which is one more reason it felt good to feed Fleurance to my children. The growing brain of a young child goes through omega-3s the way a car factory goes through steel, and thanks to all that grass, Fleurance’s meat should have been loaded with them. But I began to wonder how much omega-3 was actually in Fleurance. Had the nuts helped raise the level? Or were they fighting for the omega-6 team? For that matter, how saturated was her fat? It wasn’t typical steak fat, being so soft that you could cream it with your tongue. Was I warding off heart disease by eating Fleurance? Or was I guaranteeing I would get it?
I phoned the Department of Nutrition at the University of Toronto, the institution that, years earlier, had granted me a highly unscientific BA in philosophy. I was given the number of one Richard Bazinet, a neuroscientist and nutritionist whose specialty is fatty acids, and who, I later found out, is descended from a fille du roi named Catherine de Seine (who arrived in Quebec in 1671, possibly on the same ship as one of Fleurance’s ancestors). I invited him over for steak and served him grilled beefalo rib eye—hay-finished in Washington, dry-aged five days—because serving Fleurance seemed, somehow, incestuous. Bazinet is a steak lover, but, like many, he is frequently disappointed by the steak he loves. Weeks earlier, he had gone to Chicago to give a talk called “Recent Advances in the Neurochemistry of Brain Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids.” While in town, he visited a famous Chicago steak house for a meal that was, like his research, rich in fatty acids. He liked the shrimp bisque, the creamed spinach, and the shoestring fries, but not the steak.
Bazinet, who also loves wine, was impressed by the beefalo’s depth of flavor and long finish. When he finished the meal, he made the kind of observation only a fatty acids specialist can: “I found it interesting that when the beefalo steak cooled, it remained very tender. I wonder if the unsaturated fats in the phospholipids might influence this?” The steak he ate in Chicago suffered from the opposite condition: when it cooled, it became waxy and firm.
Bazinet, eager to investigate, made a proposal: Let’s run some steak samples through my gas chromatography machine. A few weeks later, I showed up at his lab with four different samples of beef.
The first, which was standard supermarket corn-fed beef, scored pretty much as you would expect. The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio clocked in at a terrible 10 to 1. That was due mainly to a big spike in linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid found in abundance in corn, and there was hardly any alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 found in grass, to balance it out. The beefalo was practically the opposite: less linoleic, but quite the spike in ALA, resulting in an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 2.3 to 1. The corn-fed supermarket beef was 47.5 percent saturated fat—the stuff nutrition scientists are pretty sure clogs up your heart and arteries. The beefalo came in at 43.1 percent—about 10 percent less. That may explain why Bazinet’s beefalo didn’t firm up while he lingered over his wine, because unsaturated fats stay liquid at room temperature. All that ALA likely had something to do with it, too, Bazinet told me, because as unsaturated fats go, ALA is really unsaturated. (It’s missing three pairs of hydrogen atoms, for all you egghead chemists out there.)
Bazinet put the omega-3 findings in perspective. Despite the better ratio in grass-fed meat, the