Seaweeds as promising resource of bioactive compounds: Overview of novel extraction strategies and design of tailored meat products

Abstract

Background Meat and meat products have been recently perceived by consumers as unhealthy foods. To avoid this drawback, the reformulation is a feasible approach that allows obtaining custom meat-based products that incorporate compounds with certain beneficial properties for health and remove other attributes considered negative. In this framework, the edible seaweeds have been proposed to offer interesting possibilities in the meat sector to develop functional foods as they are an excellent natural source of nutrients and biocompounds with myriad functionalities.

Scope and approach This review collects aspects related to the recent technologies employed to obtain and isolate biocompounds from seaweeds. The use of whole seaweeds and their bioactive extracts to develop meat foods that confer them health properties while simultaneously reducing components considered unhealthy in meat are reviewed. Furthermore, the prevention of oxidation events was also described.

Key findings and conclusions Several studies have demonstrated that the incorporation of whole seaweeds and their bioactives to reformulate meat products is an excellent approach to improve certain nutritional aspects considered “bad”. However, there are still some challenges regarding the organoleptic and sensory properties of the resulting products that affect the consumer acceptability. In conclusion, more research is necessary to overcome these gaps allowing put in the market seaweeds -based meat products.