Processed Meat Products: Health Issues and Attempts toward Healthier Food

One of the challenges for the food industry is producing products with high nutritional value and desirable sensory properties. Meat is a food item containing large quantities of available bio-compounds and consumers and has a great passion for its taste. However, several technological problems and health issues have been reported for this category, i.e., meat processed and thus, manufacturers are looking for finding solutions in order to tackle to problems. The example of these attempts are changes in livestock feed and formulations such as reducing the amount of fat and cholesterol, using functional compounds with antioxidant and anti-microbial properties and removing harmful compounds like nitrite. Using protein compounds of plant origin is also another way to respond to the needs of consumers to produce effective products with high nutritional value in physiological systems. This paper tries to provide examples of researches on functional/modified meat products so as to make the reader aware of the progress made and the challenges facing these products.