Deconstructing Plant-Based Meat Analogues

These days, it seems like you can’t open a menu or browse your supermarket’s frozen food aisle without encountering a plant-based substitute for your favorite meat product. Concerns over the environmental damage caused by the beef industry—as well as continued reminders of the health benefits of a plant-based diet—have resulted in the proliferation of plant-based meat analogues (PBMAs) produced by companies like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and others.

“We have a totally new food category emerging before our eyes,” says Stacy Pyett, program manager of the Proteins for Life Program at Wageningen University and Research (WUR) in the Netherlands. “But there are a lot of questions about these products. They are plant-based, but also highly, highly processed—which raises a lot of questions about how consumers should use them in their diet and the impact they might have on our overall health. There’s a big gap—and a quite urgent one—in our knowledge that needs to be addressed.”

To that end, researchers in Pyett’s program are undertaking a rigorous research program to better understand not only how these plant-based burgers, steak tips, and sausage crumbles may affect human health in the long run—but also how to improve the sensory experience of eating PMBAs to encourage more widespread adoption.

“There is a great argument to be made for these products in terms of sustainability and the well-being of our planet,” says Pyett. “But we need to do quite a bit of research so we can be more transparent on what they offer. That can help us get some design rules on the ground about how to perhaps make them healthier as well as optimized in a way so that more people will want to consume them.”

Impact on the Heart, Mind, and Gut

Edoardo Capuano, an associate professor in Food Quality and Design at WUR, says that while the individual ingredients in PBMAs have been tested and deemed safe by different regulatory agencies, the whole may be different than the sum of its parts. Given that these products boast of their high protein content, one of his priorities is to determine the quality of the protein present in different plant-based meat replacement options.

“There is wide variability in the market of products in terms of source of proteins, how the proteins have been isolated and purified, how they have been converted into fiber structures, what type of oil has been used, and what kind of binding agents have been used,” he says. “It’s possible the different processing in PBMAs could change the amino acid composition as well as [their] digestibility. We plan to study how the body processes these products and whether it can get the protein it needs from them so we can say, with some authority, eating this will satisfy this percentage of your daily requirement for protein.”

Yet Capuano concedes that protein is only one aspect that needs to be investigated in order to understand where, why, and how PBMAs fit in a balanced diet. It’s also important to look at how PBMAs may affect inflammatory processes in the body, cardiovascular health, and the makeup of the microbiome.

“There have been a couple of other smaller randomized, double-blind controlled studies where meat was replaced with a certain amount of PBMAs,” says Capuano. “The results from all of them have been quite modest. We really don’t know much yet about the health effects of these products and with so much variability between the products, it’s hard to generalize whether they are healthy or not.”

A small 2021 study, for example, led by Miguel Toribio-Mateas at London South Bank University, asked 20 volunteers who regularly consumed meat to replace a minimum of four meals a week with a variety of different PBMA offerings from a single commercial brand over the course of a month. When the researchers looked at the participants’ microbiome, they found an increase in the production of butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid that’s been shown to reduce inflammation and improve blood sugar balance, suggesting that regular replacement of meat with PBMAs could be of benefit. But it was a small study with little control over what other foods participants may have been consuming during the trial, making it hard for experts to draw hard-and-fast conclusions.

The WUR team has received funding to do their own randomized, double-blind study to start a more rigorous investigation into the health effects of replacing meat with PBMAs. Capuano says he and his colleagues will have participants under a completely controlled diet where the only difference between the experimental and control groups is that the experimental group will have some amount of their meat consumption replaced with PBMAs.

“We plan to look at cardiovascular health indicators as well as the microbiome,” he says. “It’s challenging to design this kind of study because we must think carefully about what products to use, how much meat to replace, and how to best control the background diet. It’s a challenge to do this kind of investigation—and there’s so much to look at—but we have to start somewhere.”

A Taste of the Future

For her part, Pyett says that it may be that PBMAs are not “healthy,” per se, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be a guilty pleasure with the power to help the environment.

“Consumers should be allowed to have an indulgent moment. Potato chips are not healthy, but I’d be quite sad if we outlawed them,” she says. “But we need to be able to be honest and transparent about the health benefits of these kinds of products so consumers know what it is they are choosing to eat.”

That said, many consumers remain wary of PMBAs, not only because of their highly processed nature, but because of their taste and feel. Markus Stieger, professor in Food Oral Processing at WUR, is currently examining the sensory experience of PBMAs.

“The main issues many people have with these products are the texture, which is different from beef,” he explains. “They also have difficulties with the flavor, which gives off additional flavors from the sauce and materials they are made from. They don’t taste like a regular hamburger.”

Stieger is leading research to understand what properties are responsible for these different sensory experiences, recruiting participants to chew the products and then spit out the masticated food for analysis.

“By doing these studies, we can ask what drives the mouthfeel? How do we sense juiciness? How brittle or smooth they are?” he says. “We look at how the product is transformed by the act of chewing—how it’s being broken down, how saliva is taken up in the mouth. When we analyze the properties of the food after it is spit out, we can see how much water is released, how much oil is released, and how that affects the perception of juiciness.”

He and his team also use special machines to measure the volatile components released when people chew PBMA products so they can better understand what drives the flavors of different PBMA products.

“If we change the structure, if we change the composition of the PBMA, how does it influence the release of those volatiles and the perception of the aroma and the flavor?” he says. “Taken together, product developers can use this data to create PBMA products that people who really enjoy meat will be more willing to eat.”

Pyett says she hopes these two research tracks will provide critical information to help guide consumer expectations about these increasingly popular meatless food items.

“For me, the driver is planetary wellness and finding new options that will help us reduce our consumption of animal-sourced food,” she says. “By doing these kinds of studies, we hope to help consumers move toward a more sustainable diet collectively, and maybe these products can be a small, transitional step so a person who is eating a meat burger today will be more open to eating a PBMA or even a black bean burger tomorrow. Over time, that could make a big difference.”ft