By Gualterio Nunez Estrada, Sarasota, Florida.
It turns out that the sale of hamburgers made with vegetables has become very fashionable in our supermarkets, which when cooked taste the same as meat or almost the same flavor. I was the first to have breakfast with these hamburgers due to my diabetes, at the age of 75, always thinking that what the manufacturer said on the box was true that it was equivalent to meat. A short time later I found it better flavor and I felt that my digestion was better with turkey burgers without additives, completely natural, nothing elaborate.
Now I learn from an investigation by The Duke Molecular Physiology Institute's metabolomics core labđđ that nothing that is said on the box is completely true but that a plant-based hamburger with a meat flavor, due to its additives, is less digestive and less nutritious than a real, be it from a cow, a pig or a turkey, in other words, no one is yet capable of replacing a farmer and his animals with a robot that takes pork ribs from oil or a hamburger made with honeysuckle flowers. No yet we are going to feed by pills as Big Pharma love to may do.đđ
It's the same thing that happens when we replace an Everglades wetland with neighborhood developments and roads that destroy habitats for the species of insects, birds, and butterflies that you rarely see flitting around Sarasota anymore.đ
That is the problem for which doctors are against processed food, the additives that the box that contains it never tells the consumer, rather they hide it and you actually have no idea what you are eating , except that in supermarket produce you buy your vegetables and process them because, for example, mushrooms and other similar mushrooms are equivalent to meat, in addition to the fact that their frequent consumption lowers the cancer rates, which is alleged because the cancer rates of Europeans , avid mushroom eaters, are much smaller than those of us in America.
Lab analysis finds near-meat and meat not nutritionally equivalent
Neither is good or bad, they are just not the same, authors say
- July 6, 2021
- Duke University
- A research team's deeper examination of the nutritional content of plant-based meat alternatives, using metabolomics, shows they're as different as plants and animals. Beef contained 22 metabolites that the plant substitute did not. The plant-based substitute contained 31 metabolites that meat did not. The greatest distinctions occurred in amino acids, dipeptides, vitamins, phenols, and types of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids found in these products.
Plant-based meat substitutes taste and chew remarkably similar to real beef, and the 13 items listed on their nutrition labels -- vitamins, fats and protein -- make them seem essentially equivalent.
But a Duke University research team's deeper examination of the nutritional content of plant-based meat alternatives, using a sophisticated tool of the science known as 'metabolomics,' shows they're as different as plants and animals.đ
Meat-substitute manufacturers have gone to great lengths to make the plant-based product as meaty as possible, including adding leghemoglobin, an iron-carrying molecule from soy, and red beet, berries and carrot extracts to simulate bloodiness. The texture of near-meat is thickened by adding indigestible fibers like methyl cellulose.đđ And to bring the plant-based meat alternatives up to the protein levels of meat, they use isolated plant proteins from soy, peas, and other plant sources. Some meat-substitutes also add vitamin B12 and zinc to further replicate meat's nutrition.
However, many other components of nutrition do not appear on the labels, and that's where the products differ widely from meat, according to the study, which appears this week in Scientific Reports.
The metabolites that the scientists measured are building blocks of the body's biochemistry, crucial to the conversion of energy, signaling between cells, building structures and tearing them down, and a host of other functions. There are expected to be more than 100,000 of these molecules in biology and about half of the metabolites circulating in human blood are estimated to be derived from our diets.
"To consumers reading nutritional labels, they may appear nutritionally interchangeable," said Stephan van Vliet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute who led the research. "But if you peek behind the curtain using metabolomics and look at expanded nutritional profiles, we found that there are large differences between meat and a plant-based meat alternative."đż
The Duke Molecular Physiology Institute's metabolomics core lab compared 18 samples of a popular plant-based meat alternative to 18 grass-fed ground beef samples from a ranch in Idaho. The analysis of 36 carefully cooked patties found that 171 out of the 190 metabolites they measured varied between beef and the plant-based meat substitute.
The beef contained 22 metabolites that the plant substitute did not. The plant-based substitute contained 31 metabolites that meat did not. The greatest distinctions occurred in amino acids, dipeptides, vitamins, phenols, and types of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids found in these products.
Several metabolites known to be important to human health were found either exclusively or in greater quantities in beef, including creatine, spermine, anserine, cysteamine, glucosamine, squalene, and the omega-3 fatty acid DHA. "These nutrients have potentially important physiological, anti-inflammatory, and or immunomodulatory roles," the authors said in the paper.
"These nutrients are important for our brain and other organs including our muscles" van Vliet said. "But some people on vegan diets (no animal products), can live healthy lives -- that's very clear." Besides, the plant-based meat alternative contained several beneficial metabolites not found in beef such as phytosterols and phenols.
"It is important for consumers to understand that these products should not be viewed as nutritionally interchangeable, but that's not to say that one is better than the other," said van Vliet, a self-described omnivore who enjoys a plant-heavy diet but also eats meat. "Plant and animal foods can be complementary, because they provide different nutrients."đ
He said more research is needed to determine whether there are short-term or long-term effects of the presence or absence of particular metabolites in meat and plant-based meat alternatives.đŹ
Story Source:
Materials provided by Duke University. Original written by Karl Leif Bates. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Stephan van Vliet, James R. Bain, Michael J. Muehlbauer, Frederick D. Provenza, Scott L. Kronberg, Carl F. Pieper, Kim M. Huffman. A metabolomics comparison of plant-based meat and grass-fed meat indicates large nutritional differences despite comparable Nutrition Facts panels. Scientific Reports, 2021; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-93100-3
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