That's totally not what happened with food.
What happened in the update is, if you eat food and you're under 10 hearts, it's gonna regen you (at a very expensive cost of saturation) and the regen is based on how much saturation you have. Steaks have a really high saturation, so your food bars can last long if you do normal activities, and regen you fast and consistently on the go. But the fact with steak is, you can only fully regen once, and just by hitting the enemy once you make them lose that extra bit of saturation spent on regen, so they can't fully regen while getting hit.
Golden apples, though, even though having a slightly lower saturation they also have Regeneration II which gives a massive regen boost. This enables the player to regen slightly faster than with just normal food-regen and also keep the regen while the player is being hit, because it's not driven by food saturation, lost in amounts x time, but just the Regeneration II effect, that is only based off of time, and also has absorption.
While Golden apples might seem OP, they leave the player un-defended (they can't attack while eating, unless they have an hacked client) so when the enemy is off guard, you keep critical-hitting. This will put pressure on the enemy, and it will either end with:
1) The enemy runs out of Gapples and dies
2) You deal way more damage than Gapples can regen so they die
3) You're bad at PvP, miss a hit or two, and get rekked, so you die.
So if you need to quickly regen mid-fight, Golden Apples are always the best, and if you only have steak, make sure to take cover to regen, or just avoid losing any health.
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Hunger#Mechanics
Here you can see a table of Food points and saturation.
Cooked food is most of the time way more saturated than raw food.
Golden carrots are basically the best food in the game, so it's reasonable to take some gold blocks from mid when you get the chance to to get both some of those and golden apples if you lack any. This way, you can run for a long amount of time, and won't need to eat in fight as much.
Yeah sorry for the long wall of text lel I like this sorta stuff