The manufacturers of plant-based meat substitutes have done quite a bit of work to make their products as meat-like as possible. That includes adding beet or berry extracts to imitate blood and upping the protein content using sources like soy, mushrooms and mung beans.
"But foods are much more complicated than that," said Stephan van Vliet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute. "They contain several thousands of metabolites and nutrients that are potentially capable of impacting human health and metabolism."
Metabolites are substances made or used when the body breaks down things like food or its own tissue, like fat or muscle, in the process known as metabolism.
Van Vliet led a study that compared a popular plant-based meat alternative to ground beef from a ranch in Idaho. The beef contained 22 metabolites that the plant-based substitute did not. At the same time, the plant-based substitute contained 31 metabolites that the meat did not.
Because of that, van Vliet said that consumers should not consider the two products as nutritionally interchangeable and it's still not clear if one is healthier than the other — they're just different.
"The point being here is that if you take a peek behind the curtain of the nutrition facts panels, and look at the expanded nutrition profiles, this is where you see large differences between meat and veggie alternatives," he said.
Vliet said more research needs to be done on both the short-term and long-term health effects of the presence or absence of the metabolites in meat and plant-based alternatives.
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