If you’ve spent any time at the grocery store or looking over a restaurant menu recently, you might notice plant-based “meat.” These can also be in the form of emerging brands like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, Boca Burger, and more.
Quite simply, these products were created from plant-based ingredients to mimic the look, feel, and taste of their meat counterparts.
Centers Choice Home Care has a look at three things toknow about these plant-based products over their meat counterparts.
- Taste Is Comparable
If you’ve had these type of products several years ago, you would probably disagree that they resembled the taste of the meat they were trying to duplicate. Now, however, there have been advances in this process. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods use pea or soy protein that more closely resembles the flavor and texture of regular meat.
Other ingredients include vital wheat gluten or seitan, coconut oil, beans, spices, beet juice extract, and rice.
- Plant-Based Is Generally Healthier
Outside of a lot more sodium, plant-based meat stacks up as healthier than its meat counterparts. For instance, a 4-ounce ground beef patty has 340 calories and 95.2 milligrams of cholesterol, while a Beyond Meat burger has 260 calories and zero cholesterol. As far as sodium goes, the ground beef contains 75 milligrams, while the Beyond burger has 350 milligrams.
- Whole Foods Are Still Better Sources of Protein
Because of the high sodium levels and abundance of processed ingredients, dieticians say that you should not exceed eating plant-based meats no more than two times per week. They advise sticking to whole foods instead, so if you’re not a meat eater, that means foods like chickpeas, lentils, other nuts and seeds, tofu, and quinoa.
To learn more about Centers Choice Home Care and all the services they offer, visit CentersChoice.com.
