Functional Meat Products 429
functional foods (Arihara 2004, 2006a ).
However, to date, functional meat products
with bioactive peptides, including ACE
inhibitory peptides, have not been
developed.
Generation of Peptides from
Meat Proteins
Most food proteins, including meat proteins,
contain bioactive sequences. However, those
bioactive sequences are inactive within the
parent proteins. Peptides with respective bio-
activities are generated from native proteins
by pro teolytic digestion. Processes of protein
digestion for generation of peptides from
meat proteins include gastrointestinal diges-
tion, aging, fermentation, and protease treat-
ment (Fig. 24.5 ).
Meat proteins are attacked by proteolytic
enzymes (e.g., pepsin, trypsin, chymotripsin,
elastase, and carboxypeptidase) during gas-
trointestinal digestion (Pihlanto and Korhonen
2003 ). Although there has been no clear evi-
dence that bioactive peptides are generated
from meat proteins in human intestinal tracts,
their generation has been shown in several
in vitro studies. For example, some gastroin-
testinal digestive enzymes generated ACE
chicken muscle (e.g., 980 mg/kg in skeletal
muscle). These peptides have been reported
to play roles in wound healing, recovery from
fatigue, and prevention of diseases related to
oxidative stress. Since anserine is more resis-
tant to digestion than is carnosine, the physi-
ological function of anserine would be more
effective than carnosine in the human body.
For this reason, functional food ingredients
with high concentrations of anserine (approx.
98%) purifi ed from fi sh extracts have been
developed in Japan.
Park et al. (2005) demonstrated the bio-
availability of carnosine by determining its
concentration in human plasma after inges-
tion of beef. Also, increasing attention to
these meat - based bioactive compounds has
resulted in the development of a new sensi-
tive procedure for determining these com-
pounds (Mora et al. 2007 ).
Utilization of Meat
Protein - Derived Peptides
Bioactive Peptides Generated from
Food Proteins
Carnosine and anserine are attractive bioac-
tive peptides in meat as described above. In
addition to these peptides, meat protein -
derived peptides are another group of bioac-
tive components of meat (Arihara 2006a ;
Arihara and Ohata 2008 ). It has been reported
that numerous bioactive peptides are gener-
ated from food proteins, such as milk, soy,
fi sh, and meat proteins (Korhonen and
Pihlanto 2003, 2007 ; Pihlanto and Korhonen
2003 ; Mine and Shahidi 2005 ; Gobbetti et al.
2007 ). Representative bioactivities of such
peptides are summarized in Table 24.4.
Of such bioactive peptides, angiotensin
I - converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitory pep-
tides have been studied most extensively
(Vermeirssen et al. 2004 ; Meisel et al. 2005 ).
Since some of these peptides have antihyper-
tensive effects by oral administration, they
have been utilized for pharmaceuticals and
Table 24.4. Representative functions of bioac-
tive peptides derived from food proteins
Body systems Bioactive peptides
Cardiovascular ACE - inhibitory
Antihypertensive
Antioxidative
Antithrombotic
Hypercholesterolemic
Digestion Antimicrobial
Mineral binding
Prebiotic
Immune Immunomodulatory
Cytomodulatory
Nerve Opioid agonist
Opioid antagonist