Plant-Based Meat Alternatives: Are They Part of the Future of Healthy Eating?

August 20, 2024


By Daniel Joyce

Peer Reviewed

I vividly recall my first Impossible Whopper at Burger King after its introduction to the menu in 2019. As I bit down, my taste buds recognized the similarity immediately. Was it the exact same thing? No, but it was pretty darn close. Plant-based meats have received growing praise in the US, particularly due to their role as sustainable, ethical, and tasty alternatives to meat consumption. In the US in 2023, around 9.9 billion commercial farm animals were slaughtered, including 9.5 billion chickens, 128 million pigs, and 33 million cattle.1 Animals are frequently overpacked so they cannot move, spending their lifetimes in concrete pens, pumped with growth hormones.2 Chickens are often de-beaked and cattle de-horned–painful procedures performed without anesthesia.2 The commercial farming industry has significant ethical drawbacks, and consumer habits are changing. The popularity of plant-based meats is increasing. Are there health benefits in swapping such alternatives for meats?

Several tried-and-true dietary recommendations are continually cited as beneficial for weight loss and overall health. The US Dietary Guidelines recommend the Mediterranean diet, DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, and vegetarian diets, all of which have shown considerable health benefits.3 These dietary approaches share a common theme: increasing healthy fruit and vegetable intake; reducing dietary sugars, salt, and saturated fats; and reducing or eliminating non-lean meat. An increase of more than 600% in veganism and vegetarianism has been seen since 1997,4 in part due to the known benefits of such diets on health.

Plant-based meat alternatives are variably designed products, typically made of soy, pea, bean, or wheat proteins with vegetables and preservatives.5 Vegetarian burger patties are often the comparator, but other “veggie meat” alternatives such as sausages, chicken, bacon, and fish patties offer flavor parallels. In the US, the plant-based meat market has increased by over 74% over the last three years to $1.81 billion in 2023, with the companies Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods leading the way.6-8 However, the market makes up just a small share (1.4%) of total meat revenue.6 Efforts are being made to design healthful products that align with a nutrition-focused customer base, providing dietary supplementation meant to mimic vitamins and minerals obtained from meat while retaining similar flavor and texture profiles.7

In nutritional comparisons, plant-based meats were generally found to be lower in calories and saturated fats than their meat counterparts, although there was wide variation.9 Plant-based meats have increased fiber, which has been shown to lower LDL cholesterol and blood pressure, while reducing weight.10,11 Plant substitutes have also been shown to have considerable protein, iron, and vitamin fortification for dietary benefit.9,12 Although it may be too early to project long-term health outcomes, one crossover study looked at the overall health risk reduction in isolated swapping of plant meats for regular meats during eight-week periods.13 The study demonstrated that, while eating a plant-based meat diet, participants had significantly lower levels of trimethylamine-N-oxide, a known cardiovascular disease correlate, with lower LDL and body weight, suggesting that switching to plant-based meats may have early-acting cardiovascular disease benefits.

Despite the potential that plant-based meats show, the same nutritional studies demonstrated that they typically have higher levels of salt and sugar.9,10 One Impossible burger patty contains 370 mg of sodium, 16% of the daily value, while a comparable portion of ground beef contains 66 mg of sodium, roughly 3% of the daily value.14,15 Consumers are likely to add additional salts or sauces to meats, but plant-based meat consumers may salt and sauce their products in the same way, meaning overall sodium and sugar levels could far exceed recommendations. Ultra-processed foods have also been shown to have negative impacts on weight gain and caloric intake, even in just short periods.16 With the American diet often relying on processed products instead of fresh produce, a concern is that consumers may interpret eating such plant products as “getting their daily dose of vegetables” rather than using them to replace meats next to healthy fruits and vegetables on the plate.

However, the health price paid for meat consumption may be far greater than simple increases in sodium or sugar. Red meat is a group 2A carcinogen, correlated with breast, endometrial, colorectal, lung, and hepatocellular cancers.17 Meat production and overuse of antibiotics have also driven concerns about antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, with the potential for easily transmissible, resistant future infections.18 The meat industry is notoriously unsustainable, with greenhouse gas production and enormous energy and water requirements to bring a burger from farm to table.19 Continually unsustainable practices bring the long-term dangers of climate change, including increases in natural disasters, regional infections, and largely uninhabitable climates. To our knowledge, plant-based products do not create the same risks of cancer or antibiotic resistance. A comparative assessment of the Beyond Burger by Thoma and colleagues found that a 4-ounce Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than 4 ounces of US beef.5,19

Reducing red meat intake is a lifestyle intervention that would provide long-term benefits. A balanced, plant-based diet will always be a healthy point of dietary counseling for patients. However, the evidence for long-term health improvements with processed plant-based meat alternatives is minimal, making it difficult to recommend exchanging meat for veggie meat. To the optimist, the rise in such products shows that people may be increasingly willing to make plant-based dietary changes that forego unhealthy meats, and plant-based meats may provide some benefit compared to the health detriments of meat. But to the pessimist, offering processed vegetables detracts from the value of eating cleanly with fresh, healthy foods. Ideally, these products will evolve to provide plant-based vegetable proteins without the added sodium, sugar, and heavy processing that reduce their current nutritional benefit. Despite the negatives, the growth of plant-based options is probably directionally aligned with a sustainable, healthful, and ethical future. We just might not be completely there yet.

Daniel Joyce is a Class of 2026 medical student at NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Reviewed by Michael Tanner, MD, Executive Editor, Clinical Correlations

Image Courtesy of Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

References 

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