Handbook of Meat Processing

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