Innovations for healthier processed meats
Introduction
Meat and meat products are generally recognised as good sources of high biological-value proteins, group B vitamins, minerals and trace elements as well as some other bioactive compounds. However, the image to consumers is relatively negative due to their content in fat and saturated fatty acids, cholesterol, sodium and any other substances that somehow can be involved in most prevalent diseases of Western societies like cardiovascular diseases and diabetes mellitus (Micha, Wallace & Mozzaffarian, 2010) and cancer (Cross et al., 2010, Santarelli et al., 2010). In fact, epidemiological data suggests a relation between meat consumption or dietary heme and risk of colon cancer (Bastide et al., 2011, Cross et al., 2010). Health and well-being aspects are of outmost importance for the European consumers and this fact has driven relevant food research efforts within the EU. Meat industry has introduced several strategies in recent years addressed to improve the nutritional properties by reducing the content of the unhealthy substances and promoting the presence of other substances with healthy benefits.
This manuscript is presenting recent innovations in the meat field with the aim of obtaining healthier processed meats. Several examples of recent developments for improving the nutritional quality or reducing adverse effects of processed meats are reported, especially taking into account the origin and types of processing that can induce relevant differences in composition. These strategies include fat reduction, the improvement of the fatty acids profile, salt reduction, the incorporation of functional ingredients, among others. Other strategies that will be discussed in this manuscript are related to enhance the presence of certain bioactive compounds (i.e. bioactive peptides) which are naturally generated during meat processing. These innovative strategies, that are resulting in healthier meats and processed meats, are briefly described in this manuscript.
Section snippets
Incorporation of functional ingredients
A large number of functional ingredients have been assayed during the last decade and added to different foods to increase its functional value for consumers. The effect of these ingredients added to meat products may vary depending on the type of animal species and processing. Some of these substances are added to feeds in order to get them accumulated into the animal and then, present in the resulting meat. This is the case of specific fatty acids like omega-3 fatty acids, or other
Probiotics
Many attempts have been performed in recent years for the development of probiotic fermented meat products that do not experience further heat treatment as is the case of dry-fermented sausages. The main goal is to obtain a dry-fermented sausage containing viable probiotic bacteria and thus achieve positive health effects for consumers like modulation of intestinal flora, diarrhoea prevention, modulation of immune responses, among others (Arihara, 2006). Thus, there is a strict criteria for the
Generation of bioactive compounds
The proteolytic activity during meat processing generates a large amount of peptides and free amino acids through proteolysis mechanisms by calpains, cathepsins and peptidases (Toldrá, 1998, Toldrá et al., 2000).
The most interesting peptides are those that can be considered as bioactive peptides because they can exert different types of bioactivity like antihypertensive activity, antioxidant activity or antimicrobial activity among others, with a clear healthy contribution to the consumer (
Salt reduction in processed meats
The intake of salt in Western societies is very high and constitutes a major risk for certain sectors of salt-sensitive population prone to get increased blood pressure and, thus, subject to serious diseases like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and kidney disease (Doyle and Glass, 2010, He et al., 2010; ). Hypertension, that affects more than 25% of the adult population in the world, is considered as the major risk for cardiovascular disease (Adrogué & Madias, 2007). A recent survey showed
Nitrate/nitrite reduction in dry-cured ham
The use of nitrite in cured meats experienced a serious drawback in the late 1960s in the USA due to the N-nitrosamines scare. The nitrosamines formation reaction needs the presence of secondary amines and nitrous acid in its dissociated form and is specially fast at pH 3.5 but decreases as pH increases (Pegg & Shahidi, 2000). An effective way to prevent nitrosamines generation consists of the addition of ascorbic acid because it ensures the reaction of nitrite to nitric oxide and thus reduces
Acknowledgements
Grant AGL2010-16305 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Madrid, Spain) and FEDER funds and grant from Vaquero Foundation for R+D on Pork Meat (Madrid, Spain) are acknowledged. Work prepared within the Unidad Asociada IAD (UPV)-IATA (CSIC) framework.
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Functional meat products
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