Animal performance and meat characteristics in steers reared in intensive conditions fed with different vegetable oils.

Enhancing the quality of beef meat is an important goal in terms of improving both the nutritional value for the consumer and the commercial value for producers. The aim of this work was to study the effects of different vegetable oil supplements on growth performance, carcass quality and meat quality in beef steers reared under intensive conditions. A total of 240 Blonde D' Aquitaine steers (average BW=293.7±38.88 kg) were grouped into 24 batches (10 steers/batch) and were randomly assigned to one of the three dietary treatments (eight batches per treatment), each supplemented with either 4% hydrogenated palm oil (PALM) or fatty acids (FAs) from olive oil (OLI) or soybean oil (SOY). No differences in growth performance or carcass quality were observed. For the meat quality analysis, a steer was randomly selected from each batch and the 6th rib on the left half of the carcass was dissected. PALM meat had the highest percentage of 16:0 (P<0.05) and the lowest n-6/n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) ratio (P<0.05), OLI had the highest content of t11-18:1 (P<0.01) and c9,t11-18:2 (P<0.05) and SOY showed the lowest value of monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) (P<0.001), the highest percentage of PUFA (P<0.01) and a lower index of atherogenicity (P=0.07) than PALM. No significant differences in the sensory characteristics of the meat were noted. However, the results of the principal component analysis of meat characteristics enabled meat from those steers that consumed fatty acids from olive oil to be differentiated from that of steers that consumed soybean oil.