Meat from all lambs in the present experiment delivered more than
30 mg of health claimable n−3 fatty acid per standard serve of lamb
(135 g portion), which is considered the cut-off point to claim lamb as
a source of n−3 (Williams, 2007). Through inclusion of 1.8% algae in
the Basal annual pasture hay diet, the EPA + DHA levels were elevated
in the muscle tissues to more than 115 mg/135 g serve. The latter confirms the recent findings reported by others (Hopkins et al., 2014)
that EPA + DHA concentration was increased more than two fold,
when 3-month old weaned lambs were supplemented with 2% algae
in a grain based concentrate diet. The EPA + DHA concentration was reduced when flax was added to algae (FlaxAlgae), but was still high at 90
mg/135 g serve. The increase in total long chain PUFA concentration in
meat with the Algae and FlaxAlgae diets was mainly due to an increase
(P b 0.001) in DHA (C22:6n−3), but not due to EPA (C20:5n−3) or
DPA (C22:5n−3). Supplementation of flaxseed at 10.7% DM of the
diet in the current study failed to increase muscle EPA or DPA content
compared to Basal group indicating that there was no further
desaturation and elongation process taken place even though ALA, the
precursor was substantially increased in the muscle. In contrast when flaxseed was partially replaced corn at 8% of the diet on DM basis,
Maddock et al. (2006) observed a significant increase in muscle EPA
and DHA content through desaturation and elongation process of ALA.