Les protéines végétales : contexte et potentiels en alimentation humaine

The Western-style food systems and their extent around the world are not sustainable. The experts' proposal for the OECD countries is to better balance in our diet the consumption between animal and plant proteins. Plant proteins are found in traditional foods, like products derived from pulses and cereals, but also in enriched protein materials, extracted from grains, leaves or tubers. These vegetable proteins enriched products are used as ingredients in foods for their functional and/or nutritional properties. Plant proteins are characterized by a great diversity according to their structure and properties, depending on their botanical origin, their localization in the plant organs and from the applied technological treatments. The working group of Allenvi experts identified innovation potentialities for increasing their uses in human foods. Margins of progress could be reached by more systematic studies of plant resources for their protein potential, by some improvements in the extraction processing, by a better exploitation of the complementarities between different protein sources and last by a better knowledge of the functional and nutritional properties of plant proteins.