A fascinating new study conducted by Stanford University and published in the American Journal
of Clinical Nutrition, is the first clinical trial of Beyond Meat’s plant-based products.
According to the study's authors, until now, there has been limited evidence of the health
effects of plant-based alternative meats, despite their rising popularity.
So they set out to compare the effect of consuming plant-based alternative meat as opposed to
animal meat on health factors.
This randomized crossover trial had 36 participants follow a diet of either meat or plant-based
alternatives for a total of 16 weeks–eight weeks one way and then they swapped for the
next eight.
Half of the participants ate the plant alternative diet, while the other half ate the meat-based
diet consisting of primarily red meat, although some participants ate some chicken as well.
Then they switched.
Both groups had two servings of meat or plant-based alternatives per day, logging their meals,
receiving dietary counseling, lab assessments, microbiome assessments, and anthropometric
measurements.
Participants had to keep all other foods and beverages as similar as possible between the
two phases and here’s what the researchers found.
They found that when the participants swapped their protein from animal to plant-based meat
their levels of LDL cholesterol dropped by an average of 10 milligrams per deciliter,
which is was said to be 'statistically significant and clinically significant too'.
Participants also lost 2lb, on average during the plant-based portion of the study as well
as Improving several cardiovascular disease risk factors' The modest weight loss observed
when participants substituted the plant-based meats in place of the red meats is an unexpected
finding, since this was not a weight-loss study,” said Anthony Crimarco, the lead
author of the study.
Plant-based meats reduced TMAO (trimethylamine-N-oxide) levels among participants - this appears to
be very significant as this recent study found that people with elevated TMAO had a 60 percent
higher risk for adverse cardiovascular events, such as a heart attack.
Other studies have shown that high levels of TMAO co-exist with inflammation, the build-up
of plaque, and the hardening of the arteries.
In the beyond meat study, participants eating red meat for the first eight-week phase had
an increase in TMAO, while those who ate the plant-based meat in the first eight weeks
did not.
When the groups switched diets and the group that had been eating meat twice a day switched
to a plant-based diet, they showed a decrease in TMAO levels.
However what was most interesting was that when the group that had been eating plant-based
switched to meat, they did not see an increase in TMAO, suggesting that there might be some
lingering protection.
Christopher Gardner, PhD, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center
said “It was pretty shocking.
We had hypothesized that it wouldn’t matter what order the diets were in.
It turns out that there are bacterial species responsible for the initial step of creating
TMAO in the gut.
These species are thought to flourish in people whose diets are red-meat heavy, but perhaps
not in those who avoid meat.
So for the participants who had the plant-based diet first, during which they ate no meat,
we basically made them vegetarians, and in so doing, may have inadvertently blunted their
ability to make TMAO,” This is extremely promising!
Beyond Meat burgers do contain contain relatively high levels of saturated fat and were thought
to contain more added sodium than a regular meat burger which raised the question whether
meat substitutes are in fact any better than meat?
Now we know a diet centred around whole plant foods is the healthiest for humans However
in the study researchers found similar sodium intake and blood pressure levels between the
animal-based and plant-based phases of the study, which appears to 'debunk the myth that
consuming plant-based meats results in higher sodium intake'.
It’s important to note that this Study was funded by Beyond Meat.
But that said the study concluded: “Among generally healthy adults, contrasting plant
with animal intake while keeping all other dietary components similar, the Plant products
improved several cardiovascular disease risk factors, including TMAO; there were no adverse
effects on risk factors from the Plant products.”
This was a quite remarkable study but I think we still need to very cautious over the levels
of sodium in these plant based alternative meat products.
We looked in more detail at the detrimental effects of a high salt intake in this previous
video be sure to check it out.