Aidan:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. My name is Aidan Muir and I’m here with my co-host Leah Higl. And this is episode 99 where we’re going to be talking about mock meats and whether they’re healthier than the real thing or how that fits into everything basically. So obviously this is a topic that you are more of an expert than I am.
Leah:
I talk about this all day every day.
Aidan:
Yeah, whereas I talk about this almost never. we’re going to cover it. I’ve obviously done prep for this as well, obviously familiar with mock meats and everything like that but I think this is going to be the one where you really shine…
Leah:
Oh thank you, yeah I hope I shine in the vegan mock meat space. But we’ll start with something I guess pretty simple in terms of just comparing mock meats to their meat counterparts so starting with something that’s like a fair analysis would be comparing like a high of fat meat product to a mock meat. So often mock meats do have a lot of added oils, particularly coconut oil is used a lot in order to give like a similar texture and taste to the real thing. Because for a lot of companies that make mock meats, the goal is to, for it to taste like meat and for it to taste good more so than guess the nutritional value so there is a lot of added fat.
And because it is typically your coconut oil or sometimes your palm oil that does tend to raise the overall saturated fat content of the product which we know is like the quote on quote bad fats so they can actually like a mock meat and a higher fat meat say let’s take like a beef burger patty they could end up being fairly similar I suppose in their nutritional profile let me just look at calories and macros so a standard beef burger patty so per 100 grams that so the real beef burger patty is around 216 calories 15 grams of protein, 16 grams of fat.
If we compare that to a pretty popular vegan beef patty, the Beyond Patty. Slightly higher calorie amount per 100 grams, but not by much. So 256 calories compared to 216, so relatively similar. 18 grams of protein, so again, relatively similar protein content, and then 20 grams of fat, so slightly higher fat content. But when we’re comparing those two just from a calorie and macro perspective, look, they come out pretty similar at the end of the day. I think that the larger discrepancy comes about if you’re comparing those kinds of more processed traditional mock meats to like a good quality lean meat.
So looking at a like a four star beef mince per hundred grams. We’re looking more at like a hundred and eighty ish calories and so much lower than the 200 to 250 you’re getting from the other like the beef patty products. 23 grams of protein so that protein content is a lot higher and 10 grams of fat. So the fat content is a lot lower. In comparing that to say a mock mince product. So another one is called Naturally. That has around 195 calories, 17 grams of protein and 10 grams of fat. Although that is like a particularly not, I guess, all too bad of a mince product. From a vegan perspective, there are ones like the Beyond mince that are a lot more similar to that patty in terms of being higher calorie and higher fat.
I think we’ll get into this a little bit later, but there’s just such a discrepancy in the world of mock meats. Like there’s such a spectrum. like comparing products to one another can be a bit difficult sometimes. But when you do compare your higher fat meats to your mock meats, they come out pretty similar. But there are cases where meat outperforms. The mock meat and there are cases where the mock meat outperforms the meat product. So it just depends on what two products you’re actually comparing.
Aidan:
Yeah. And if we take it a step further and we look at particularly lean meat, there’s some examples that I think are worth… I don’t know, paying attention to or seeing in this kind of case study kind of comparison, looking at one in particular that I use a lot with clients just in relation to meat, not necessarily in this comparison, but using it here, is that chicken breast per 100 grams is around 104 calories and 23 grams of protein, 1.6 grams of fat.
Insanely lean right if we compared that to that Standard beef burger patty. It’s half the calories. The protein is higher 23 in comparison to 15 and the fat has gone from 16 down to 1.6, dramatic reductions saturated fat and everything like that. Then once again the Beyond burger patty like we’re looking about 2.5 times the amount of calories in that as there is in the chicken breast So huge huge difference once again, not everything’s just about calories and macros, but it is worth while thinking about this through the lens of being like how many calories do I eat in a day how does this fit in?
If we look at it through the perspective of having as much as half a kilo of chicken breast, that’s still less than 600 calories. The reason I use that example is to kind of point out that it’s quite hard to overeat lean meat from a calorie perspective. If somebody was focusing largely on lean meat and vegetables for a large portion of intake, they’re very likely to consume fewer calories than they normally do. Whereas if we use a different meat example, if we use three-star mince, so regular mince, that same half kilo comes out as over a thousand calories. So pretty big difference there. I focus on lean meat there for that portion of the discussion, but there’s also exceptions in other ways when we look at fish intake.
For example, if we’re looking at higher fat fish such as salmon, we do not get that benefit from the calorie macro perspective because the fat content is so high. But it does come alongside the well documented benefits of omega-3s and other benefits from there too. Like if we look across a broad range of studies and we look at things like if people replace high fat meats with a higher fish intake including salmon. Almost always there is health benefits that come from making that kind of switch as well, which is part of why I don’t want to be just calories and macros because we do have some other aspects there.
As you kind of mentioned, like, mock meats aren’t necessarily trying to replace super lean meat. Although it is an interesting gap in the market because when I’ve been looking into this topic, like I learn a lot by doing and I rarely eat mock meats just because I’m like, I also rarely eat high fat meat to start off with anyway. And I don’t want to really change my diet just to experiment with something that, I don’t know, that’s what I look at.
Leah:
I mean it’s often more expensive as well so if you’re not like doing it for a specific reason like ethical it just doesn’t make much sense really but we’ll get into that. So going from I guess a calorie and macro level and taking it down to a micronutrient level so obviously micronutrients are important and it’s an important part of this discussion to talk about the vitamins and minerals we are getting from real meat versus mock meats.
So due to the goal of replacing like more so the taste and texture of meat, a lot of mock meats are pretty highly processed and not super nutritious. Although we’ll talk about there kind of being a spectrum to that. A lot of the I guess the popular brands like Beyond, Veef, et cetera. They do tend to be quite highly processed and they’re often based on either textured pea protein or soy protein and then a mix of like oils and gums and thickness and flavours and stuff to get that like replication of taste and texture of meat. The issue with that is
Okay, we know that pea and soy are quite nutritious, but when they’re processed quite heavily, a lot of the time it can lose a lot of its nutritional value from a micronutrient point of view. So whilst soy might be in its whole more whole form, be a great source of iron and other vitamins and minerals in its more processed form, we are often losing a lot of that. Some products on the market are fortified so they end up adding in like more iron, zinc, B12, so things that are that are maybe not naturally occurring in that more processed product. But obviously not all products are fortified where like red meat on the other hand, and well real meat in general does contain a lot of micronutrients naturally. Like that’s all still just naturally existing in there. So like I said, iron, zinc, magnesium, your B vitamins that are just not contained in a lot of those really highly processed mock meat products.
Aidan:
Yeah. If you listen to a lot of people in the carnivore space, one of the interesting angles that is taken is just how high in micronutrients red meat in particular is. It’s higher than even chicken and stuff like that. But sometimes people use it in comparison to vegetables and the common comparison is uses per hundred grams. And it actually stacks up quite well in terms of being micronutrient rich in comparison to vegetables. Obviously the part where that analysis kind of falls apart a little bit is the rather than per 100 grams if we compare per calorie, because vegetables just have like no calories, they’re so micronutrient rich per calorie. But the fact that somebody can even kind of like put an argument out there from that angle kind of shows how micronutrient rich like meat is basically.
Leah:
Yeah, absolutely.
Aidan:
From the opposite angle, looking at cancer risk associated with red and processed meats, I’m going to give a broad overview and then add a little bit of nuances. So red meat and processed meats are consistently linked with an increase in cancer risk. In particular, the risk of bowel cancer is the strongest one. Starting with processed meats, because obviously you differentiate between processed meats and red meat. One relevant line from an article that I’ve linked in the show notes is that an analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of bowel cancer by about 18%. So that’s a pretty clear cut thing.
Another one is on red meat being from that same article is if the association of red meat and bowel cancer were proven to be causal, data from those studies suggests that the risk of bowel cancer increases by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily. Once again, that’s pretty clear cut. I want to add some nuance to that though, which I think is tough. Like firstly, we have a bit of an issue where it’s like all lumped in together. And is one person eating, I don’t know, like say sausages, for example, versus another person eating a lean cut of steak, are they going to get the same outcome on their cancer risk? There is a bit of differentiation there that’s worth being aware of.
Another example that I think is worth looking at when you’re looking at this research, even though I personally started a broad overview, is the concept of healthy user bias, which I’ll add even more nuance to. But the concept of user bias is this concept of if people eat more red meat, do they do other things. Are they more likely to smoke? Are they more likely to drink alcohol? Are they less likely to eat more fruits, vegetables, have a good fibre intake, etc. etc. We know that if somebody follows a very plant-based diet, they’re probably more likely to be eating more fruits, vegetables, have a high fibre intake, less likely to drink a lot of alcohol, etc. etc. One of the tricky things of interpreting nutrition research is that I’ve highlighted a very obvious thing, but researchers are aware that this problem exists.
And they have gone through and tried to account for as many variables as possible, just like everything I just talked about and more, to then come to the conclusion of being like, is this still a risk factor? Is this something that’s still a relevant link? And if you looked at it without doing any of that kind of analysis that I just talked about, red meat is linked with a lot of stuff. It’s not just linked with bowel cancer. It’s linked with most health conditions under the sun, but it has all the issues I just talked about. When researchers have tried to go through and account for every single variable that they can, it’s still linked with bowel cancer. It’s still a bit of an increased risk of bowel cancer, both red meat and processed meat.
Difficult to interpret, but it’s like no matter how you look at it, you probably can’t really fully ignore that component as well. It’s worth being aware of that when researchers have gone through and done that, although the more variables you try to account for, the more even that model falls apart as well as flaws and everything. But that’s a bit of an overview of the kind of state of the research on that topic.
Leah:
Perfect and I think we’ll get into now just in terms of the what I briefly mentioned in terms of not all mock meets are the same like I’ll often get clients talking like just they’ll come and ask me like, are mock meats good? And I feel like that’s such a loaded question because I have a more nuanced answer than like yes or no. It can be very context dependent. But also not all mock meets are created equal and then like even considering like well what what is considered a mock meat? Is textured vegetable protein or mock meat because it kind of emulates mince to a certain extent but a lot of people would not consider that a quote-onquote mock meat and that’s just textured vegetable protein is basically just like soy that has been dehydrated. So it’s actually really nutrient rich.
But I kind of explain mock meats on a spectrum. So you have the ones that we’ve spoken about in terms of being more highly processed, more added oils, less nutrient dense options that tend to be higher calorie, higher in saturated fat, low in vitamins and minerals that yeah, probably not best to have super often and maybe aren’t a great replacement for the real thing. But then you also have your mock meats that are made from really nutritious ingredients, low in added oils and fats, low in saturated fat, and that are really nutrient dense. So like a common comparison I’ll make is like something like a brand called Sunfed, which is just textured pea protein, but it’s quite like it’s it’s just not very processed. So it’s maintaining a lot of its naturally occurring iron and zinc from from the pea protein.
Very low in fat very protein efficient Super awesome option and but that is definitely not equal to something like the Beyond Beef patty that we talked about that has those other issues. So I think it’s just an important distinction to say like, just don’t group all mock meats together. It’s more like you take product to product and then compare them individually. It’s kind of like we can’t lump all meat in together and say is meat good or bad for you, right? It’s like, well, there’s leaner meats, there’s higher fat meats, there’s red and processed meats versus white meats and fish. Like it’s a mixed bag.
Aidan:
Yeah and even going back to a little bit I was talking about with like the cancer risk and stuff like that, that’s where it starts to become interesting, like what if somebody had a really high intake of red meat and processed meats and they did replace some of that with mock meats that are roughly equivalent nutritional value in many other ways, does that reduce the risk a little bit?
Whether we classify TVP, textured vegetable protein, as a mock meat or not, an example that I’ve thrown out previously on Instagram and stuff like that is like say somebody’s making spaghetti bowl and they’re using X amount of beef mince. If they replace half of that with TVP, if they use regular mince to start off with, it dramatically improves the nutritional profile. If they use lean beef mince, but then we come back to that topic about does this have any impact on cancer risk or anything like that?
If we came to the conclusion that if we believe, it does, then it’d be from the perspective of improving that as well to a certain degree. Without much downside, it’s increasing the fibre intake, it’s still keeping protein high and everything like that. And it also feeds into another topic that I think is interesting to think about being like, a lot of people look at it through the perspective of either I am exclusively plant-based or I’m not plant-based at all. And I have made it in every single meal. It’s like, there could be benefits to if somebody was not plant-based at all to potentially reducing in some cases as
Leah:
Yeah finding that kind of middle ground. Because if you’re someone who really likes red and processed meats like if you really love salami and you’re having that four or five times a week. Okay, we know that that’s probably not like awesome if that’s real meat that often. But then what if you took that and replaced it with a plant-based alternative? Maybe it’s not the most nutritious thing in the world Maybe it is slightly higher calories slightly higher fat but maybe it doesn’t come with the kind of those risks associated with a high intake of processed meat. there could be times where it’s beneficial to swap and times where it is not so beneficial to swap.
Aidan:
Sounds good to me. Easy. Well, this has been episode 99 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. If you haven’t already, if you could please leave a rating or review, that would be greatly appreciated.