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You can expect these health effects if you replace meat with meat substitutes
If you replace all meat products in your diet with meat substitutes for 8 weeks, you might expect to become healthier. In that case, you probably won't like the results of this study, which will soon be published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Study
Researchers from the Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation will soon publish a trial in which 89 adults participated. The study participants had more glucose in their blood than is desirable, but they were not yet diabetic.
Half of the test subjects ate meat products [ABMD] that the researchers gave them for 8 weeks. The other ate meat substitutes [PBMD]. The meat products and meat substitutes provided the same amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates.
Results
Over the 8-week period, the researchers saw a limited number of subtle metabolic shifts occur in their test subjects. In the test subjects who were given meat substitutes, the diastolic blood pressure - the blood pressure between two heartbeats - dropped several points.
Click on the tables below for a larger version.
At the same time, there was a tendency that in the group that consumed meat substitutes, insulin sensitivity deteriorated slightly.
Conclusion
The researchers are somewhat disappointed to note that replacing meat with meat substitutes does not improve health. They had expected, based on the scientific literature, that replacing meat products with their vegetable equivalents would make test subjects healthier.
There may be room for improvement when it comes to the composition of meat substitutes, the researchers suspect. The researchers argue for further research in which nutritional scientists specifically look at the nutrients that are - or are not - contained in meat substitutes.
Source:
Am J Clin Nutr. 2024 Apr 8:S0002-9165(24)00396-4. doi: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2024.04.006.
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