Steak - Mark Schatzker [99]
The secret to José Pordomingo’s good health, according to José Pordomingo, is exercise and a balanced diet. He recommends a lot of fresh fruit and green vegetables. He drinks one or two glasses of milk every day and watches his salt. He cautions against eating too much beef, which he himself consumes only once a day, every day—about half as much as he ate in his youth. His daily intake now stands at about 160 grams, which is more than most Americans eat and equals about a third of a pound, or a smallish steak, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for a yearly total of 130 pounds. His favorite cuts are rib eye and rump, but unlike most of Argentina—including his son Anibal—José Pordomingo prefers it jugoso. His wife, Elda, eats more beef than he does, but, at seventy-three, she is still in the eat-all-the-steak-you-want bloom of youth.
If it seems paradoxical for a man who eats that much beef to be in such fine health at such an advanced age, José is hardly an anomaly in Argentina. The whole country is something of a beef-eating cardiovascular paradox. Just as the French drink wine by the bottle, eat rich food, and seem all the healthier for it, so, too, do Argentines consume raging quantities of steak and yet do not all drop dead of heart attacks—not at the rate you might expect, in any case. In the United States, for every 100,000 men between thirty-five and seventy-four, 169 die of coronary heart disease. In Argentina, the equivalent 100,000 men will eat six million more pounds of beef a year than their American counterparts, but only 120 of them will die from coronary heart disease—30 percent fewer than in the States. In Argentina, the life expectancy at birth is seventy-five. In America—a country that spends vastly more per person on health care—it’s seventy-eight. These numbers seem all the more amazing when you consider that the rate of smoking is almost twice in Argentina what it is in the United States. Roughly one in two steak-loving Argentine men smokes. More than half the population does not have access to adequate health care. Poverty is considered the greatest indicator of heart disease, and there is far more poverty in Argentina than in the States.
This is not to say that Argentina is the Shangri-la of coronary health, for it is anything but. Despite their seeming paucity of heart attacks, many an Argentine artery is stiff and clogged with fatty buildup. More Argentines die of strokes than Americans. But when you consider all the smoking, the poverty, and the poor health care, it doesn’t look as if eating an average of 150 pounds of beef per year is all that deadly. Steak is not what’s killing them.
This may have something to do with the kind of beef Argentines eat. Beef from cattle raised and fattened on grass is considered healthier than beef from cattle fattened on corn. Grass, which is a leafy plant, contains more vitamin E, vitamin B, and beta-carotene than corn, which is primarily rich in starchy carbohydrates (that’s why it gets cattle fat so quickly). Vitamin E and beta-carotene are antioxidants, which neutralize substances called free radicals, and in so doing may help prevent maladies ranging from heart disease to Parkinson’s disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. The most talked-about health advantage of grass-fed beef, however, is its fat.
A discussion of fat as it relates to health invariably revolves around the concept of saturation. Fats, basically, are chains of carbon and hydrogen molecules with a little oxygen at one end. A fat molecule that contains as much hydrogen in it as possible is said to be saturated with hydrogen. Certain fats, however, are missing some hydrogen atoms. A fat missing a pair of hydrogen atoms on each molecule is considered monounsaturated; a fat missing two or more