Tag Archives: precision fermentation

(Fake) Chicken Anyone?

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Lab-Grown Chicken — The Latest Silicon Valley Mess to Clean Up?

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola 
  • January 10, 2024
lab grown chicken

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S., has failed to scale up its production to produce meaningful amounts of synthetic meat
  • Plagued by contamination issues, Upside had problems with rodent DNA found in one of its chicken cell lines
  • While parading its expensive stainless-steel bioreactors for the press, Upside is actually growing only small amounts of fake meat bits inside small, single-use plastic bottles
  • Fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat
  • Lab-grown meat is often made using animal components, so it’s not really animal-free, and when Upside tested its fake meat for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken

Silicon Valley is banking on cultured meat taking off, providing animal-free “meat” to satisfy the carnivorous appetites of the world’s more than 8 billion people — most of whom eat meat. But what started out with grandiose fanfare and backing from billionaire investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos1 is falling flat.

The dream of creating cultured “chicken” breasts or animal-free “beef” fillets is turning out to be nothing more than a fairy tale. Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S.,2 has resorted instead to “growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh.”3

It’s not only unappetizing. Even if it succeeds, fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat, while presenting consumers with another highly processed food product that may further devastate human health.

What Happens When Silicon Valley Gets Mixed Up in Food Production?

Putting faith in Silicon Valley to produce wholesome food was the first mistake in the race to create cultured food. While regenerative farmers raising grass fed cows and free-range chickens work in concert with nature to provide food in the form humans have thrived on since the beginning of time, Silicon Valley does just the opposite.

In a process completely removed from nature, venture-backed startups are using precision fermentation based on genetically engineered microbes to create synthetic food products in a lab. At Upside, which has received backing from Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk and even meat giants Tyson Foods and Cargill,4 stainless steel bioreactors are paraded as a measure of progress at media events, but it’s nothing more than careful PR.

Inside reports from employees, uncovered by The Wall Street Journal, claim that the bioreactors are plagued by contamination and rodent DNA was once found in a chicken cell line.5 Illustrating the contradiction that is the fake meat industry, the “sustainable” lab-grown chicken is in actuality being grown in two-liter plastic bottles — hundreds of which are required to product a few fillets.6

In the U.S., a limited amount of Upside’s lab-grown chicken is available as part of a tasting menu at Bar Crenn in San Francisco. But even Bloomberg reported this “sustainable” solution makes no sense:7

“The company is growing them in small, single-use plastic bottles, in amounts so piddling that a single night at Bar Crenn, a ‘certified plastic-free’ establishment, according to its website, could require the use of more than a hundred such bottles.”

Upside’s Expensive Fake Chicken Bits Aren’t Made From Muscle Cells

To make fake meat, cell lines taken from a living organism. They’re then manipulated to grow quickly and consistently. While myoblasts are the type of cells that grow into muscle meat, they’re the most difficult for fake meat companies to grow and “immortalize.”

“A regular cell extracted from an animal, known as a primary cell, won’t replicate forever. Eventually it stops, entering a phase known as senescence. If a company wants to grow significant amounts of meat and doesn’t want to have to keep taking cells from live animals or embryos, it needs to turn primary cells into immortal ones,” Bloomberg reports.8

Because myoblasts are difficult to immortalize, fibroblasts, which grow easily, are often used in cultured meat products. “But when it comes to food, they’re not what most people would consider delectable. They can develop into fat and other cells, but they’re most known for their role in making connective tissue, like cartilage or what’s found in skin,” according to Bloomberg’s report.9

Adipocytes, or fat cells, are also sometimes used, often mixed with plant proteins. In a dossier for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Upside named genetically engineered immortalized fibroblasts and a naturally immortalized myoblast cell line as options for its fake meat. But Samir Qurashi, a former Upside employee, shared doubts the company had a myoblast cell line capable of being used in production.

“It’s next to near impossible,” he told Bloomberg, and, indeed, the fake meat Upside is serving at upscale Bar Crenn is made from fibroblasts, the type that typically forms connective tissue. Further, according to Bloomberg:10

“The chicken doesn’t even include immortalized cells; it’s made of primary fibroblast cells that at some point will stop replicating and at best grow only into connective tissue. This means that to make more chicken, scientists will eventually have to go back to an embryo and remove more cells, a process that, even when it works, also kills the embryo. (Bar Crenn didn’t provide comment.)

It’s an admission that has left experts both confused and amused. “I scratch my head,” says David Kaplan, director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. “Why would you ever use primary cells?”

The Myth of Animal-Free Meat

One of the foundational principles behind cultured meat is the ability to produce food without killing animals. But fake meat is often made using animal components, negating this principle.

Normally, cells grow in a structure in your body. The cell lines being grown in labs are grown in a thin film or growth medium. In the body, the growth medium is your blood, Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports,11 a complex substance that laboratories try to replicate using fetal bovine serum (FBS) — blood taken from living calf fetuses.

“It’s really gruesome how this is harvested,” she says,12 pointing out that this contradicts the narrative that lab-grown meats are made without animals. FBS is often used to grow cultured cells because of the proteins and vitamins it contains. A 2013 study stated, “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS) …”13

When lab-grown chicken made by U.S. startup Eat Just debuted in Singapore in 2020 — marking the first cultured meat to be sold at a restaurant14 — it was produced using FBS. Upside stated in 2021 that it had developed a way to grow fake meat without animal components, yet its first chicken filets still depended on animal compounds.15

In fact, part of Qurashi’s role at Upside was to harvest cells from crustaceans, a process that killed them. As reported by Bloomberg, “Qurashi had the extremely challenging task of procuring cells from live crustaceans — a job that always led to their untimely demise, costing two or three animals their life each week. ‘Literally, people cried when they saw me,’ Qurashi says of his colleagues.”16

In order to develop synthetic “blood” instead, precision fermentation and artificial hormones may be used. Micronutrients and minerals must also be sourced, making the process “insanely expensive,” van Hamelen says.17

Use of FBS-free medium may cause cultured meat to cost over $20,000 per kilogram.18 A report from the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry,19 suggested that if the cost of FBS-free mediums could be reduced, it would drive down the cost of cultured meat by 90%. This, however, is unlikely.

“[T]he report provides no evidence to explain why these micronutrient costs will fall,” Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat.”20

Fake Chicken Contains More Lead Than Real Chicken

Adding to the controversy over lab-grown meat, when Upside tested its fake meat products for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken, along with about eight times more cholesterol compared to conventional chicken.21

There are other concerns as well. Writing in Frontiers in Nutrition, it’s speculated that “with this high level of cell multiplication, some dysregulation is likely as happens in cancer cells. Likewise, the control of its nutritional composition is still unclear, especially for micronutrients and iron.”22

Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, is also raising concerns about the health risks of fake food. Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet. One analysis revealed 92 mysterious, unknown compounds in fake milk that don’t exist in real milk.23

The Environment Also Suffers From Lab-Grown Meat

The other myth that’s part of the fake meat narrative is that it’s better for the environment than real meat. Even with the use of renewable energy factored in, lab-grown chicken would have the same carbon footprint as conventional chicken, according to a report by CE Delft.24 When global average energy mixes were used, lab-grown meat had a higher carbon footprint than pork and chicken.

A preprint study from University of California, Davis researchers also found that the environmental impact of lab-grown meat is “likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production,”25 again highlighting the myth that fake foods are more sustainable than real foods, especially when they’re produced regeneratively.

The reality is that fake foods are far from sustainable. John Fagan, Ph.D., a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years, explains:26

“The reality is that many of the carbon footprint calculations have been done starting with the fermentation process and going forward, but where did the high fructose corn syrup come from that is the primary energy component that goes into these fermentations?

… And you look at that industrial agriculture and you add that carbon footprint on to what they have been using in their calculations and suddenly it goes way in the wrong direction. And so we can’t even use the sustainability arguments to justify what’s being done. It just doesn’t work.”

This Is About Controlling the Food Supply

Sustainability, animal rights and human health are all buzzwords being floated around fake meat. But this isn’t about saving the planet or animals, and it’s certainly not about making people healthier. The reason why Silicon Valley is willing to invest billions into fake food is because it knows that whoever controls the food supply controls the population.

The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the entire food supply. Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake meat is important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase.

Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake meat and dairy alternatives and opt for real food instead. When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2024/01/10/lab-grown-chicken.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art2HL&cid=20240110_HL2&foDate=true&mid=DM1515011&rid=2015258319

Beware of Fake Milk (BIOMLQ)

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Are You Drinking GMO Yeast Milk?

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
gmo yeast milk

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are being touted as environmentally friendly health foods that should replace real milk from cows and other animals
  • Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet
  • Ninety-two mysterious, unknown compounds were detected in the fake milk that don’t exist in real milk
  • None of these compounds have been tested for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
  • Tech oligarchs and venture capitalists are funding most fake food technologies, which gives globalists unprecedented power and control over human health

Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are being touted as environmentally friendly health foods that should replace real milk from cows and other animals. But this deceptive greenwashing is putting human health at risk, according to Dr. John Fagan, a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years.

Fagan is cofounder and chief scientist at the Health Research Institute (HRI). He spoke with Errol Schweizer for an episode of his podcast, “The Checkout,” detailing concerning new findings about “animal-free” dairy. Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk — which Fagan and others refer to as a “synbio milk-like product” — contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet.

“It’s really strikingly different. It just shows that this is not like milk. You can’t say that this is nutritionally like milk in any way,” Fagan says.1

Full-Spectrum Analysis Reveals Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk

At Fagan’s HRI, they use “cutting-edge mass spectrometric and molecular genetic approaches to make the invisible visible.”2 This full-spectrum analysis is capable of revealing so-called “nutritional dark matter,” even in foods as mundane as wheat. The fact is, an estimated 85% of the nutritional components in common foods remain unquantified. The health implications of most compounds also remain largely unknown. New Scientist notes:3

“This is also true of individual micronutrients. ‘Consider beta-carotene,’ says [Albert-László Barabási at Harvard Medical School, who coined the term nutritional dark matter] … ‘It tends to be positively associated with heart disease, according to epidemiological studies, but studies adding beta-carotene to the diet do not show health benefits.

One potential reason is that beta-carotene never comes alone in plants; about 400 molecules are always present with it. So epidemiology may be detecting the health implications of some other molecule.’ Another probable cause is the effect of the microbiome on dark nutrients, says [FooDB founder David] Wishart. ‘Most dark nutrients are chemically transformed by your gut bacteria.

That’s probably why studies on the benefits of different foods give relatively ambiguous results. We don’t properly control for the variation in gut microflora, or our innate metabolism, which means different people get different doses of metabolites from their food.’”

We know even less about the constituents of processed foods and synthetic foods that ignorantly claim to be “equivalents” to whole foods, such as “animal-free meats” or “animal-free milk.”

At HRI, Fagan and colleagues are using their full-spectrum analysis for a new category in the food industry — synbio milk-like product. For a bit of backstory, in 1994 Fagan returned close to $614,000 in grant money — and withdrew a request for an additional $1.25 million — to protest genetic engineering and the release of GMOs into the environment.

At the time, he said, “The benefits of genetic engineering have been oversold, and the dangers have been underrepresented.”4 His efforts to advocate for food purity and safety, nutrition and food security have continued via HRI.

FDA Hasn’t Tested the 92 Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk for Safety

As Fagan explains to Schweizer, one form of synthetic biology involves bacteria, yeast or fungus cells genetically engineered to produce another compound, in this case cow milk proteins. The idea is once you have milk proteins, you can make something from that that supposedly is milk, he says. But Fagan and colleagues used a mass spectrometer to chart the differences in composition between synbio milk-like products, biodynamic milk and organic milk.

While important micronutrients exist in organic and biodynamic milk, they’re missing, or very low in, synbio milk. Further, mysterious, unknown compounds were detected in the fake milk that don’t exist in real milk. Fagan says:5

“These are small compounds, and they include things like … fungicide and other really weird compounds … These are huge amounts of these compounds that are present in synbio milk and not present in real milk. Literally, I counted and there are 92 different compounds.

Most of them are so uncommon that we don’t even have names for them. And so we can say with good confidence that these compounds have never been part of the human food supply before, and yet they are the predominant small molecules in synbio milk.”

None of these compounds have been tested for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.6 “This product has been put on the market without any safety testing, and your FDA — the FDA that you are paying taxes to watch and make sure your food is safe — looked the other way,” Fagan says.7

The proteins in synbio milk are also different from proteins in real milk. “Most of the protein that they’re putting into this synbio milk-like product is not milk proteins from cows, but it’s fungus and yeast proteins … we don’t know which, because that’s one of their trade secrets.”8

In recent years, the idea that we can replace whole foods with synthetic, genetically engineered or lab-grown alternatives that are wholly equivalent to the original food has taken root. In reality, that’s simply impossible.

How can scientists create equivalence when they don’t even know what 85% or more of the whole food they’re trying to replicate consists of? Common sense will tell you they can’t. It might look, smell and even taste similar, but the micronutrient composition will be entirely different and, as a result, the health effects will be incomparable as well.

Selling Precision Fermentation as ‘Natural’

Fake food companies want you to believe their products are natural because they’re made with components of plants, yeast or fungus, even though nothing like them exists in nature. Be on the lookout for their industry buzzwords like precision fermentation, a term the biotech industry is using to piggyback off the popularity of truly health-promoting natural fermentation.

Precision fermentation, however, is nothing like its natural counterpart. It’s a form of synthetic biology that’s been around for at least 20 years. It uses genetically engineered microorganisms, such as yeast and bacteria, that are fermented in brewery-style tanks under high-tech, pharmaceutical grade sterile conditions. This is because these cultures are highly susceptible to contamination that could ruin the entire batch.

And, contamination can happen easily, so billions of dollars have been poured into this technology, which is using biological pathways that have never before existed in nature. Biotech firms have obliterated the precautionary principle, as the long-term outcomes are completely unknown, to produce fake meats, fake fats and fake milk.

But it’s all serving the underlying agenda, which is total control and world domination. There’s no easier way to achieve this than by taking control of the food supply. These fake, ultraprocessed foods give the globalists unprecedented power and control over human health, and they’re using stealthy marketing techniques. As Schweizer wrote in Forbes:9

“The biggest set of questions here revolves around ownership, governance and social equity considerations. Just about all of this new food technology is heavily funded by tech oligarchs, venture capitalists, or the occasional celebrity. Bill Gates is just one such example. He made his fortune by enclosing, privatizing and scaling what had previously been mostly an open-sourced, common-pool resource: software.

The investor model here is very Silicon Valley: identify a particular market sector or category and its sales potential, fund the company to offset large losses as it scales, and compete aggressively with the goal of cornering this market as a monopoly or a duopoly. Think: Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Amazon. The investors throwing billions of dollars at such enterprises are not altruists …”

Bill Gates’ startup company BIOMILQ, announced in June 2020, is one such example. It’s using biotechnology to create synthetic lab-made human milk for babies. Using mammary epithelial cells placed in flasks with cell culture media, the cells grow and are placed in a bioreactor that the company says “recreates conditions similar to in the breast.”10

Aside from Gates, BIOMILQ investors include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Masayoshi Son, Jack Ma, Michael Bloomberg and Marc Benioff.11

Metabolic engineering is another major subset of precision fermentation, which involves methods such as next-generation sequencing, high-throughput library screening, molecular cloning and multiomics “to optimize microbial strains, metabolic pathways, product yields, and bioprocess scale-up.”12 Sounds just like something down on the farm, doesn’t it?

Whether it’s called precision fermentation, gene editing, GMO or something else, don’t fall for the hype that it’s good for you, for society or for the planet.

Is Synbio Milk Better for the Environment?

The idea that animal-free milk is “carbon neutral” and environmentally friendly is another marketing tool being used to promote this inferior product. In Forbes, Schweizer raises a host of important questions that consumers should be asking to get to the bottom of fake foods’ true environmental impacts. Among them:13

  • Is the nutrient bath derived from corn or soy, typically genetically modified to withstand high dosages of herbicides?
  • What is the caloric conversion and nutrient uptake efficiency of the microbes compared to animal livestock?
  • How much farmland acreage would be impacted?
  • How much waste material is produced by such microorganisms relative to sellable product?
  • What kind of testing has been done to understand the potential environmental impact for if and/or when the microbes escape the confines of a fermentation plant, particularly as the technology scales?

When these types of inputs are factored in, fake foods are far from sustainable. Fagan explains:14

“The reality is that many of the carbon footprint calculations have been done starting with the fermentation process and going forward, but where did the high fructose corn syrup come from that is the primary energy component that goes into these fermentations?

… And you look at that industrial agriculture and you add that carbon footprint on to what they have been using in their calculations and suddenly it goes way in the wrong direction. And so we can’t even use the sustainability arguments to justify what’s being done. It just doesn’t work.”

Real Food Is Best

Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake foods, including synbio animal-free milk, is important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase. Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support human health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake food alternatives and opt for real food instead.

When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population. As Fagan puts it:15

“The biggest thing to keep in mind … we need to trust Mother Nature and go with what she has developed. Her R&D stretches back billions of years. So, there’s a lot of deep knowledge there that’s optimized for life. We should be putting our attention on maximizing that and creating an environment that supports that. So, purity of food and simplicity, all of these things are really important.”

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/12/20/gmo-yeast-milk.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20231220&foDate=true&mid=DM1506245&rid=1997362811

Meat Matters

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Fake Meat Dangers With Dr. Joseph Mercola

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • I spoke with “Tea Time,” a program by Children’s Health Defense, about the dangers of fake meat products to help raise awareness about this latest assault on human health
  • Fake food — including lab-grown meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat — is the globalists’ latest attempt to control the food supply
  • The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the human population
  • The idea that animals must be removed from agriculture to save the planet is flawed; animals are an integral, and necessary, part of the restorative process
  • Fake meat is an ultraprocessed mixture of chemicals, GE ingredients, pesticides and toxic linoleic acid that will promote chronic disease

At face value, fake meat sounds like the perfect solution to end world hunger, protect animal welfare and save the planet from environmental destruction. Even a brief look below the surface reveals a much more nefarious reality, however.

To help raise awareness about this latest assault on human health, I recently spoke with host Polly Tommey on “Tea Time,” a program by Children’s Health Defense, about the dangers of fake meat products.1

Fake Meat Is All About Controlling the Food Supply

Fake food — including lab-grown meat, animal-free dairy and plant-based meat — is the globalists’ latest attempt to control the food supply. Former U.S. Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger once said, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.”2 Controlling people is their whole agenda.

The globalists have long held a monopoly on the grain industry with their patented genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In the early 2010s, not many people knew about GMOs. In 2011, we started to educate the public about their dangers, as they posed a major threat to public health and the environment.

In 2012, a ballot initiative was launched in California to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods and food ingredients. The initiative was narrowly defeated due to massive donations from multinational corporations, but we won in the long term because awareness of GMOs in the food supply significantly increased. Now, most health-conscious people avoid GE/GMOs.

A similar trend is now occurring with fake food. The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the entire food supply.

Fake Meat Is Even Worse Than CAFOs

Many people are aware of the pitfalls of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — unnatural diets of GMO grains, crowded conditions, inhumane treatment, excessive pollution and rampant spread of disease. CAFOs are bad — but the new fake food era is going to be even worse.

With their patented fake meat products, the globalists will have unprecedented control over people’s health.3 It sounds noble to try to provide for the entire world’s population using animal-free methods, but it’s a deception.

Will Harris is a regenerative farming pioneer who runs White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. He produces high-quality grass fed products, including beef and other animal products, in a way that’s good for consumers, the environment and the financial health of his business. While the globalists are spinning the idea that animal foods are destroying the planet, when raised regeneratively the way Harris does, this is far from the truth.

It’s the fake foods that will ultimately jeopardize the environment. “We are sequestering 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent for every pound of grass fed beef we sell. Ironically, the same environmental engineers did an analysis on Impossible Burgers,” Harris said on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “They’re emitting 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent.”4

gra

Regenerative Farming Beats Fake Foods

Impossible Foods, along with Beyond Meat, is a major player in the fake meat marketplace. It claimed to have a better carbon footprint than live animal farms and hired Quantis, a group of scientists and strategists, to prove its point. According to the executive summary, its product reduced environmental impact between 87% and 96% in the categories studied, including land occupation and water consumption.5

This, however, compares fake meat to meat from CAFOs, which are notoriously destructive to the environment and nothing like Harris’ farm. Harris commissioned the same analysis by Quantis for White Oaks and published a 33-page study showing comparisons of White Oaks Pastures’ emissions against conventional beef production.6

While the manufactured fake meat reduced its carbon footprint up to 96% in some categories, White Oaks had a net total emission in the negative numbers as compared to CAFO-produced meat.

Further, grass fed beef from White Oak Pastures had a carbon footprint that was 111% lower than a typical U.S. CAFO, and its regenerative system effectively captured soil carbon, which offset the majority of emissions related to beef production.7

“The WOP [White Oak Pastures] system effectively captures soil carbon, offsetting a majority of the emissions related to beef production,” the report stated. “In the best case, the WOP beef production may have a net positive effect on climate. The results show great potential.”8

So, the idea that animals must be removed from agriculture to save the planet is entirely flawed. In fact, animals are an integral, and necessary, part of the restorative process.

What Is Fake Meat?

Fake meat is marketed as a health food, but it’s nothing more than a highly ultraprocessed mixture of chemicals. Impossible Foods, for instance, uses genetic engineering to insert the DNA from soy plants into yeast, creating GE yeast with the gene for soy leghemoglobin.9

Impossible Foods refers to this compound as “heme,” but technically plants produce non-heme iron, and this is GE yeast-derived soy leghemoglobin.10 Heme iron only occurs in meat and seafood. Impossible Foods’ GE heme is used in their fake meat burgers as a color additive that makes the product appear to “bleed” like real meat.

The health effects of GE heme are unknown, but this didn’t stop the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from approving soy leghemoglobin in 2019. The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a lawsuit challenging the approval, which they called “unusually rapid”11 and risky for public health.

In their lawsuit, CFS points out that soy leghemoglobin is produced using synthetic biology, or “genetic engineering on steroids,” which does not shuffle DNA pieces between species but instead constructs new biological parts, devices and systems that do not exist in the natural world:12

The reason why Impossible Foods turned to synthetic biology to produce GE soy leghemoglobin is because it couldn’t extract enough of the substance directly from soybean roots to produce its fake meat products on an industrial, mass-produced scale. The FDA GRAS for soy leghemoglobin is 526 pages long, if that gives you any idea of the industrialized complexity of this so-called GRAS “health” food.13

Beyond Meat is similarly industrially processed. Beyond Burger patties contain 22 ingredients. Among them are expeller-pressed canola oil, pea protein isolate, cellulose from bamboo, modified food starch and methylcellulose14 — hardly “health” foods. To morph these ingredients into a patty that resembles meat require further processing.

It’s revealing, too, that while truly natural foods cannot be patented, Impossible Foods holds at least 14 patents, with about 100 more pending.15

Impossible Foods’ Fake Meat Is Loaded With Glyphosate, LA

Considering that many ingredients in fake meat products are made from GE soy,16 it’s not surprising that they’re also contaminated with the herbicide glyphosate. Consumer advocacy group Moms Across America (MAA) commissioned Health Research Institute Labs (HRI Labs), an independent laboratory that tests both micronutrients and toxins found in food, to determine how much glyphosate is in the Impossible Burger and its competitor, the Beyond Burger.

The total result of glyphosate and AMPA, the main metabolite of glyphosate, in the burgers was 11.3 parts per billion (ppb) in the Impossible Burger and 1 ppb in the Beyond Burger.17

When the concerning results were revealed, Impossible Foods engaged in a smear campaign to try and discredit MAA, labeling the group of moms “an anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, anti-science, fundamentalist group that cynically peddles a toxic brew of medical misinformation and completely unregulated, untested, potentially toxic quack ‘supplements’ …”18

The glyphosate in fake meat is one issue. The excess amounts of omega-6 fat in the form of linoleic acid (LA) are another. In my opinion, this metabolic poison is the primary contributor to rising rates of chronic disease. It’s important to realize that fake meat alternatives do not contain healthy animal fats. All the fat comes from industrial seed oils like soy and canola oil, which are top sources of LA.

Eliminating ultraprocessed foods from your diet is essential to keeping your LA intake low, and this includes fake meat.

‘Precision Fermentation’ Isn’t Natural Either

Fake food companies want you to believe their products are natural because they’re made with components of plants, even though nothing like them exists in nature. Precision fermentation is another term used by the biotech industry to piggyback off the popularity of truly health-promoting natural fermentation.

Precision fermentation, however, is nothing like its natural counterpart. What is perhaps most disturbing about the use of precision fermentation is that companies are allowed to claim that it’s natural.

Metabolic engineering is a major subset of precision fermentation, which involves methods such as next-generation sequencing, high-throughput library screening, molecular cloning and multiomics “to optimize microbial strains, metabolic pathways, product yields, and bioprocess scale-up.”19 It sounds just like something down on the farm, doesn’t it?

Whether it’s called precision fermentation, gene editing, GMO or something else, don’t fall for the hype that it’s good for you or the planet.

Where Should You Get Your Meat?

If fake meat isn’t healthy, and CAFO meat isn’t a good choice either, a reasonable question is where can you find meat that’s beneficial for your health and the planet? The answer is to get to know a farmer in your area. Visit the farm and view how the animals are being raised.

Get to know the resources available to you within your local community. The community will naturally validate the vendors who are raising food the right way. If you can’t find a local farm for ruminant animals like cows, buffalo or lamb, look for certified organic options at your local grocery store. However, it’s best to stay local and find a source of real, whole food near you.

As much as you can, plant a garden for vegetables, grow fruit trees and even raise chickens if it’s allowed in your area. For the food you can’t source on your own, lean on your community to fill in the gaps.

Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake meat is also important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase. Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake meat alternatives and opt for real food instead.

When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/03/12/fake-meat-dangers.aspx