Here’s what we found when we sent some of our steaks to a nutritional lab.

We fuss quite a bit over the cows to make sure they have the best forage, water, and minerals around.  It stands to reason that the meat should be healthy.  How healthy?  That’s what we wanted to find out, so we sent a few pounds of New York Strip steaks to a food lab for analysis.  The lab couldn’t run every test we wanted, but we got quite a bit done.  The results didn’t really surprise us – they did give us some good numbers for comparison.

Our average strip steak is about 1/2 a pound (227 grams).  The total calories for the steak were 476, compared with 594 for the average USDA strip (that’s 20% less calories!).  Our steak had 46 grams of protein. 

Total fat was 15% less than the USDA strip.  Within the fat, there was 590 mg of CLA (30% of daily recommended intake and you won’t really get any from a grain-fed steak) and a healthy 1:2 Omega 3 to Omega 6 fat ratio. 

Minerals give food its taste and this is where we saw the best results.  The steak had 2.8 mg of iron (about 35% of daily recommended – that’s over 1.6 times the average USDA steak!).  Magnesium was 45 mg or 15% of daily recommended intake, phosphorus was 385 mg or 55% of daily recommended, and potassium of 726 mg or about 24% of daily recommended.  The lab was also able to test for selenium at 118 mcg and zinc at 8 mg (nearly 100% of daily recommended).  

Here’s the math:

Lower calories, lower fat, plus way more minerals = healthy, tasty beef!

Happy Cows!