Ground Beef vs Plant-Based Meat
This week starts a 14-part series on animal proteins versus the plant-based alternative! Over this series, we will cover ingredients, calories, nutrition facts and other details, as well as looking at what people say about the two products! This week we start with the common debate-Ground beef vs plant-based ground beef.
Ingredients
**As a note, there will not be a comparison of every ingredient in the long ingredient list of plant-based meats, or sometimes, even animal protein products. Also, this article will be a sum of all types of plant-based ground beef because of the number available on the market. Later on in the series, it will be more product specific because of the far fewer number of options.**
Main source of Protein
- Ground Beef 's protein is totally from the animal muscle-which is what meat is
- Plant-based meat is typically based on soy, wheat, or pea proteins, with the rare potato protein base.
Number of Ingredients
- Ground Beef has 2 ingredients-meat and water, though some might consider fat to be an ingredient too, but it is part of the animal muscle
- Plant-Based meat have an average of 20-30 ingredients, per product
Customer Opinions
- Customers typically assume that plant-based meat in nutritionally better for you than ground beef because it's from plants and not animals.
- Under the same point of nutrition, Duke compared cooked ground beef and plant-based beef patties and while main nutrition facts, such as protein, fat, calories, etc, in the same serving size were very similar, when they compared metabolites, they were not so similar.
- Metabolites are small differences in food-such as quantity of Vitamin B12, amino acids, etc.
- They compared 190 metabolites between the two products and they found that 171 of the 190 had differences. Consumers typically don't talk about these differences because they are so small and aren't all shown on nutrition labels.
As always, thanks for reading, and come back next week for more "All About Ag with Esther" content!