Abstract
Cattle meat provides essential nutrients necessary for a balanced diet and health preservation. Besides nutritional quality, consumers' preferences are related to specific attributes such as tenderness, taste and flavour. The present study characterizes the fatty acid composition of beef, which is an important factor in both nutritional and quality values, in 15 European cattle breeds fed a similar diet and reared in five countries (United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Italy and Spain). The effect of possible slight differences on diet composition which might have occurred between countries were included in the breed effect which confounds country, diet, slaughter house and slaughter day as all individuals of a same breed were managed simultaneously. The wide range of breeds studied and the significant differences on lipid profile described here provide a broad characterization of beef meat, which allows giving a better response to the variety of consumers' preferences. Regarding meat health benefits, the groups that stand out are: the double-muscled animals, which displayed lower total fat, lower proportion of saturated (SFA) and monounsaturated (MUFA) fatty acids, and a higher proportion of polyunsaturated (PUFA) fatty acids; and Limousin and Charolais breeds with a significantly higher conversion of 18:3n-3 PUFA to the long chain 22:6n-3 PUFA.
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