What are the potential strategies to achieve potentially more healthful meat products?

Abstract

SummaryIn recent years, much attention has been paid to the consumption of meat and processed meat, and their relationship with a healthy diet. This review provides an overview of the potential strategies, which can be used to provide the implications for producing healthy, wholesome and consistently high‐quality meat products. Genetic selection, nutrition and feeding management, and gene manipulation techniques have been used as the main strategies to induce beneficial changes in meat and meat composition. Besides, the incorporation of ingredients that play a technological role and are potentially health‐enhancing, such as fibre, fat substitutes, natural antioxidants and the reduction of sodium and nitrites, has a high potential in the development of healthier meat products. In this review, we have observed that many strategies have been successfully used to obtain products with low fat, reduced sodium and nitrite content, low cholesterol and absence of synthetic antioxidants. Another point to be highlighted is that some of these strategies also allow obtaining products with positive health effects that can be potential alternatives to improve consumer acceptance.