Plant-Based Meat Alternatives
Health /Safety Specifics/Considerations
Plant-Based Meat Alternatives
Health /Safety Specifics/Considerations
by Peter Friedland, 10/1/22
“Unintended Consequences”?
Safety and Nutritional Risk Issues Associated with “PBMA”’s (Plant-Based Meat Alternatives)
“Beyond* Nutrition”?
“Impossible*” Salt, Sugar and Missing Vitamins and minerals?
*Word plays on two of the biggest brands of these ‘New’ (“Software”?) Foods
Along with the excitement of exploring a new frontier with huge dimensions in many directions/aspects, the investigative journalism experience/ strand in my professional/persona history prompted ‘an Online Search’*
*(I try to avoid using ‘Google’ as a verb if a more reality-based non commercial name/term is accessible!)
…Which landed these 2 articles that seem important, maybe even ‘Very Important’?)
These 2 reports are packed with important and complex points which at times seem as challenging as the pursuit of Methane (all Climate?) Truths…
… And with the added Caveats that this is Food and Health, so also Very Personal!
And this is Big Food, even if it’s ‘New” Food or ‘Alternative” and in some ways, at least for some of these products, (keeping track of this burgeoning field looming as a Full Time Job!) …‘Alternative/New Junk Foods’—but with another important caveat that in many ways they—or some of them?—could be considered a form of ‘Junk Food’ but with presented /marketed (“Halo’d”)with the label ‘Plant Based’.
Still another caveat that could go in these Big Foodies’ favor: these reports are from some time ago, so that some of what they cite as Issues could well have been by now, at least 1-2 years later, somehow addressed (though How and to what Extent among the Challenges of tracking down and figuring out)
… by these very ‘nimble’ (and High Tech and Very Monied!) ‘New Food’ Practitioners/Entrepreneurs, given how quickly* and hugely* this is all happening?
(*Inserts from Gilding/XChange)
One possible example is that among the nutrition concerns in these studies, vitamin and mineral shortfalls in the PBMA ingredients compared to meat and dairy that could in turn contribute to or even cause serious health issues/illnesses? (And all the more so for Seniors?)
A few hours after I found this article and these two studies, and started writing this, I stopped in at my local Shaw’s market and checked out the labels for Beyond Meat and sure enough there were (I think) a bunch of vitamins and minerals listed?! Maybe because of these studies?!
So it could well be that those nutrition criticisms of these products may at least in some instances need to be ‘taken with a grain of salt’…
(Pun intended!? Who said there can’t be any Fun and Laughter in this Race to Save the Planet!?
In fact all the more Necessary given how Heavy All This is?!)
But to at least get started on what would seem to be an ongoing Saga, here are:
- An article from the journal FOOD SAFETY
- Abstracts from these
2 studies:
- Unintended Consequences: Nutritional Impact and Potential Pitfalls of Switching from Animal- to Plant-Based Foods
- Association between Unhealthful Plant-Based Diets and Possible Risk of Dyslipidemia
Rachel Tso 1 and Ciarán G. Forde 1,2,3,*
Citation: Tso, R.; Forde, C.G.
- Unintended Consequences: Nutritional Impact and Potential Pitfalls of Switching from Animal- to Plant-Based Foods.
Nutrients
2021, 13, 2527. https://doi.org/10.3390/ nu13082527 Academic Editors: Winston Craig and Ujué Fresán Received: 30 June 2021 Accepted: 20 July 2021 Published: 23 July 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Clinical Nutrition Research Centre (CNRC), Singapore Institute for Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore 117599, Singapore; rachel_tso@sifbi.a-star.edu.sg 2 Department of Physiology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117593, Singapore 3 Sensory Science and Eating Behaviour, Division of Human Nutrition and Health, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 17, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands * Correspondence: ciaran.forde@wur.nl Abstract: Consumers are shifting towards plant-based diets, driven by both environmental and health reasons. This has led to the development of new plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) that are marketed as being sustainable and good for health. However, it remains unclear whether these novel PBMAs to replace animal foods carry the same established nutritional benefits as traditional plant-based diets based on pulses, legumes and vegetables. We modelled a reference omnivore diet using NHANES 2017–2018 data and compared it to diets that substituted animal products in the reference diet with either traditional or novel plant-based foods to create flexitarian, vegetarian and vegan diets matched for calories and macronutrients. With the exception of the traditional vegan diet, all diets with traditional plant-based substitutes met daily requirements for calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, iron and Vitamin B12 and were lower in saturated fat, sodium and sugar than the reference diet. Diets based on novel plant-based substitutes were below daily requirements for calcium, potassium, magnesium, zinc and Vitamin B12 and exceeded the reference diet for saturated fat, sodium and sugar. Much of the recent focus has been on protein quality and quantity, but our case study highlights the risk of unintentionally increasing undesirable nutrients while reducing the overall nutrient density of the diet when less healthy plant-based substitutes are selected. Opportunities exist for PBMA producers to enhance the nutrient profile and diversify the format of future plant-based foods that are marketed as healthy, sustainable alternatives to animal-based products. Keywords: flexitarian; vegetarian; vegan; plant-based meat alternatives; nutrient intakes
- Association between Unhealthful Plant-Based II. Diets and Possible Risk of Dyslipidemia Sujin Song 1,† , Kyueun Lee 2,†, Soim Park 3 , Nara Shin 2 , Hyunju Kim 4,5 and Jihye Kim 2,*
Citation: Song, S.; Lee, K.; Park, S.; Shin, N.; Kim, H.; Kim, J. Association between Unhealthful Plant-Based Diets and Possible Risk of Dyslipidemia. Nutrients 2021, 13, 4334. https://doi.org/10.3390/ nu13124334 Academic Editor: Winston Craig Received: 10 November 2021 Accepted: 29 November 2021 Published: 30 November 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Food and Nutrition, Hannam University, Daejeon 34054, Korea; sjsong@hnu.kr 2 Department of Medical Nutrition, Graduate School of East-West Medical Science, Kyung Hee University, Yongin 17104, Korea; kyueun07@khu.ac.kr (K.L.); snra9498@khu.ac.kr (N.S.) 3 Department of Internal Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; soim.park@jhu.edu 4 Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; hkim25@jhu.edu 5 Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA * Correspondence: kjhye@khu.ac.kr; Tel.: +82-31-201-3497 † These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract: The relationship between the various types of diets derived from plants and vulnerability of dyslipidemia has rarely been investigated, and limited data exist in Asians whose dietary pattern is fairly different from that of the Western population. We aim to analyze the relationship between three plant-based diet indices (PDI) and the risk of dyslipidemia. Participants included 173,209 Korean adults who were aged ≥40 years from the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study_Health Examination (2004–2013). A food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was used to assess dietary intake. Three PDI were quantified for the study: overall PDI, healthful PDI (hPDI), and unhealthful PDI (uPDI). Among the 147,945 included, 48,166 (32.6%) of participants had dyslipidemia. Great adherence to uPDI was related with 15% greater odds of having dyslipidemia (OR: 1.15; 95% CI: 1.11–1.20, p-trend < 0.0001). No significant association was observed between PDI, hPDI, and dyslipidemia.
- The association between uPDI and dyslipidemia was significantly stronger among participants aged ≥55 years when compared to participants aged insert
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