Elevating meat products: Unleashing novel gel techniques for enhancing lipid profiles

Abstract

Rising health concerns and the diet-health link drive demand for healthier foods, prompting meat manufacturers to reformulate traditional products. These manufacturers have reduced fat content to enhance nutritional quality, which is essential for maintaining desired product features. As a result, numerous strategies have emerged over recent decades to decrease fat and enhance the lipid profiles of meat products. Among these strategies, using hydrocolloids, emulsification, encapsulation, or gelation of oils to produce fat substitutes stands out. Using gels allows fat replacers with characteristics similar to animal fat (similar rheological, physical, or appearance properties) but with a much healthier lipid profile (by incorporating highly unsaturated oils). Therefore, this manuscript aims to comprehensively describe the main fat replacers used to prepare meat products. In addition, an in-depth review of the latest studies (2022-2023) that use novel gels to reform meat products has been made, indicating in each case the implications that the reformulation produces at a physicochemical, nutritional, and sensory level. Given the reported results, it seems clear that the strategy of using bigels or emulgels is very promising and allows obtaining nutritionally highly improved meat products without affecting their sensory or physicochemical properties. However, the best conditions to obtain a novel gel suitable for use as a fat substitute for each meat product still need to be studied and correctly defined. Moreover, these advancements can pave the way for more extensive studies on using novel gel techniques in other food industries, expanding their applicability and leading to healthier consumer options across various food categories.

Keywords: Bigels; Emulsion gels; Fat replacers; Food lipids; Healthy meat; Meat products.