Protein oxidation in meat and meat products. Challenges for antioxidative protection

Abstract

Protein oxidation in meat has, through the last decades, received increasing attention from the meat industry and meat scientists. Consumers have also noted negative effects of protein oxidation following changes in packaging practices in the meat industry in many countries. Compared to lipid oxidation, the degradation of proteins by oxidants seems to be more complex and to produce an even greater multiplicity of reaction products. While oxidation processes related to lipids, proteins, and heme proteins may individually be relatively well understood, the coupling between degradation processes in meat has not been investigated in detail. Understanding protein oxidation in biological systems, however, seems to hold the key to also understanding the connection between degradation of hydrophilic and lipophilic meat components, since certain protein oxidation products may be active at water–lipid interfaces in meat (Skibsted 2011a).