Meat protein

Meat is defined as the edible portions, obtained from domestic animals including caprine, bovine, ovine and porcine, including the poultry meat, farmed and wild animals. Meat is an excellent source of high biological value protein, vitamin B12, niacin, vitamin B6, iron, zinc and phosphorus.

Meat proteins have three groups: myofibrillar proteins (50–55%, mostly myosin and actin), sarcoplasmic proteins (30–34%, mostly enzymes and myoglobin) and connective tissue (10–15%, mostly collagen and elastin fibres embedded in mucopolysaccharides).

The percentage of meat protein component varies extensively in different types of meats. In general, the average value raw meat contains around 20–25 g protein/100 g but it could range from high protein value of 34.5% in chicken breast to as low as 12.3% protein in duck meat.

Proteins must be broken down into amino acids or small peptides before passing through the small intestine wall and entering the bloodstream and, therefore, nutritional quality of meat proteins is largely dependent on their digestibility.

The protein is highly digestible, around 94% compared with the digestibility of 78% in beans and 86% in whole wheat. The protein digestibility-corrected amino acid scores (PDCAAS) which depict the protein digestibility reveals that animal meats like beef have a score of approximately 0.9, compared with values of 0.5–0.7 for most plant foods.

The beef meat appears to have higher contents of valine, lysine and leucine as compared to lamb and pork. Studies have revealed that main reason of the difference in essential amino acid proportion lies with the breed, animal age and muscle location.
Meat protein