Importance of Rabbit Meat as a Functional Food

People give more importance to healthful nutrition beside of adequate and balanced nutrition parallel to the socio-cultural and economic developments day by day. Functional foods appear in order to raise the quality of the life with the aim of taking preventive cautions against the health problems. Functional foods also offer additional benefits for human physiology and metabolic functions beyond the basic requirements of the body, enabling them to prevent disease and achieve a healthier life. Functional foods can be natural nutrients that have never been processed, or they might be enriched with different foods or modified by genetic studies. Rabbit meat contains high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids, omega 3 fatty acids and essential amino acids, which are important for human health. Compared with cattle and sheep meat, low cholesterol and saturated fatty acids content come into the forefront. Rabbit is an alternative meat product with low fat content and high muscle rate when the carcass composition is evaluated. Low sodium and high phosphorus contents are important for the chemical composition of the meat. Rabbit meat is considered as an important functional food due to its protective effect on cardiovascular diseases such as cholesterol and blood pressure and metabolic problems like diabetes and obesity. In recent years, various studies have been carried out in order to increase the rabbit meat nutrition value by adding some functional components like as conjugated linoleic acid, vitamin E, omega 3 fatty acids and iron into the ration. Considering that rabbit’s short generation range and number of offsprings obtained at birth is high; it can be said that rabbit breeding might provide a new alternative for the red meat sector