Fat Substitution: Some Strategies to Obtain Healthy Meat Products with Improved Technological Characteristics

Abstract

Meat products are an important source of nutrients as they provide high-quality proteins, minerals as iron and zinc, and most of the B-vitamin complex (B1, B2, niacin, B6, and B12). However, these products are also high in energy and fat content, being this fat content and/or the lipid profile often questioned by experts and consumers, since both have been historically associated with the development of various diseases, such as obesity, hypertension, and coronary heart disease. Thus several strategies have been proposed to obtain low-fat products with healthy lipid profiles, being the most widely used the decrease in fat content by partially or totally replacing it with different types of carbohydrates or vegetable and animal proteins to obtain low-fat products; or replacing fat by polyunsaturated oils (raw, emulsified, gelled, encapsulated, etc.) to obtain meat products with an improved lipid profile. However, these strategies generate new technological problems as the modification of textural properties, increased cooking loss and shrinkage, increased lipid oxidation during the processing and/or storage if unsaturated lipids were added, among others. All these problems have implications for consumer acceptance and must be considered in order to obtain meat products with enough quality to satisfy consumers? demands. Consequently, in this chapter we revise some of the most relevant strategies aimed at obtaining meat products with low-fat content and/or with an improved lipid profile, as well as their impact on both technological properties and the acceptance of these products by consumers.