Why Plant-Based Meats Can’t Completely Replace Beef
Plant-based meats are becoming more popular. The global plant-based meat sector has experienced growth and will still develop in the future. With a 7.4 billion US$ value in the retail market and sales of plant-based food grew 54% compared to 2019 while compared to 2021 plant-based food sales grew 3x faster than total food sales in 2021 in the United States.
Plant-based meats have gained popularity due to various reasons like animal welfare and environmental reasons. But one of the most popular reasons why peoples choose plant-based meat alternatives is health reasons. Plant-based diets is known for lower risk of metabolic disease and higher dietary quality compared to omnivorous diets. Several studies have also pointed out that foods that are plant-based such as legumes, whole grains, and nuts are associated with lower cancer rates, cardiovascular disease risk, and all-cause mortality while red and processed meat particularly the standard American diet is associated with an elevated risk.
But is it true that plant-based meat is a much healthier option rather than red meat? Today we will find out about that. For this comparison, the serving size of beef and plant-based alternatives is 113g.
Beef vs plant-based alternative
Calories: 220 vs 250
Total fat: 14g (with saturated fat 5g and trans fat 0g) vs 14g (with saturated fat 8g and trans fat 0g)
Cholesterol: 60mg vs 0mg
Sodium: 70mg vs 370mg
Total carbohydrate: 0g vs 9g (Dietary fiber 3g and total sugars 0g)
Protein: 23g vs 19g
For the sake of simplicity, I won’t show the micronutrient but you can check it out at my reference at the bottom.
Now from the content of macronutrients it almost looks identical right? Except for cholesterol and sodium of course. But if we look at metabolite level there are around 90% difference between beef and plant-based alternative. With 22 metabolites were either exclusively and 51 metabolites in greater quantities only found in beef such as Omega-3, vitamin B3, glucosamine, hydroxyproline, and anti-oxidants (allantoin, anserine, cysteamine, spermine, and squalene). While 31 metabolites were found exclusively and 67 metabolites in greater quantities were only found in plant-based meat alternatives such as vitamin C, phytosterols, and several phenolic anti-oxidants (loganin, sulfurol, syringic acid, tyrosol, and vanillic acid).
Some of the metabolites in beef such as cysteamine, anserine, glucosamine, hydroxyproline, and creatinine have potentially important roles in immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory. Also, arachidonic acids are found exclusively in beef while docosahexaenoic acids in beef have greater amounts than in plant-based alternatives. Both are essential components of our brain and have important roles in cognition and cell signaling.
Meanwhile, plant-based meat alternatives have a greater abundance and wider variety of phenolic compounds which benefit humans by dampening oxidative stress and inflammation.
Maybe now you are thinking hey both of them got something exclusive which is also important for my body and that’s correct. So the idea is to consume both of them as part of our diet. Research shows that by replacing some of our meals with plant-based alternatives we can achieve positive changes for our gut microbiomes (community of microorganisms in our digestive tract) such as an abundance increase of butyrate-producing microbes and heightened presence of butyrate synthesis pathway. A deficiency of butyrate is associated with diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease
Now hopefully you can understand the reason why plant-based alternatives can’t completely replace red meat. With the difference of metabolite exclusive to either plant-based alternatives or beef, we need to combine both to create a more healthy diet for our body health.
Reference:
Toribio-Mateas, M. A., Bester, A., & Klimenko, N. (2021). Impact of plant-based meat alternatives on the gut microbiota of consumers: a real-world study. Foods, 10(9), 2040.
Van Vliet, S., Bain, J. R., Muehlbauer, M. J., Provenza, F. D., Kronberg, S. L., Pieper, C. F., & Huffman, K. M. (2021). A metabolomics comparison of plant-based meat and grass-fed meat indicates large nutritional differences despite comparable Nutrition Facts panels. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1–13.
