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Tag: Cultivated

  • Chemical Safety, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health 

    Chemical Safety, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health 

    More than 95 percent of human exposure to industrial pollutants like dioxins and PCBs comes from fish, other meat, and dairy.

    By cultivating muscle meat directly, without associated organs like intestines, the incidence of foodborne diseases “could be significantly reduced,” as could exposure to antibiotics, “pesticides, arsenic, dioxins, and hormones associated with conventional meat.” Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved seven hormone drugs to bulk up the production of milk and meat. “In the European Union, there exists a total ban on such use,” however. Even without injected hormones, though, animal products naturally have hormones because they come from animals. “Eggs, example given, contribute more to the dietary intake of estradiol [estrogens] than beef, whether the animal is legally treated with hormones or not.” After all, eggs come straight from a hen’s ovaries, so, of course, they’re swimming with hormones. But if you’re directly growing just muscle meat or egg white protein, you don’t need to include reproductive organs, adrenal glands, or any of the associated hormones.

    “Chemical safety is another concern for meat produced under current production systems.” There are chemical toxicants and industrial pollutants that build up in the food chain, such as pesticides, PCBs, heavy metals, and flame retardants, but there is no food chain with cultivated meat. We could produce all the tuna we wanted, with zero mercury.

    When the World Health Organization determined that processed meat was a known human carcinogen and unprocessed meat a probable human carcinogen, it wasn’t even talking about the carcinogenic environmental pollutants. When researchers tested retail meat for the presence of “33 chemicals with calculated carcinogenic potential,” like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), organochlorine pesticides like DDT, and dioxin-like PCBs, they concluded that, in order to reduce the risk of cancer, we should limit beef, pork, or chicken consumption to a maximum of five servings a month.

    Why cultivate meat at all when you can just buy organic? Surprisingly, “consumption of organic meat does not diminish the carcinogenic potential associated with the intake of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).” A number of studies have recently compared the presence of environmental contaminants in organic meat versus conventional meat, and the researchers found, surprisingly, that organic meat was sometimes more contaminated. Not only organic beef either. Higher levels were also found in pork and poultry.

    If you look at the micropollutants and chemical residues in both organic and conventional meat, several environmental contaminants, including dioxins, PCBs, lead, and arsenic, were measured at significantly higher levels in the organic samples. As you can see below and at 2:56 in my video, The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Chemical Safety, the green is organic meat, and the blue is conventional. 

    Cooking helps to draw off some of the fat where the PCBs are concentrated, as shown here and at 3:01.

    Seafood seems to be an exception. Steaming, for example, generally increases contaminant levels, increasing contaminant exposure and concentrating mercury levels as much as 47 percent, as you can see here and at 3:15 in my video. Better not to have toxic buildup in the first place.

    More than 95 percent of human exposure to industrial pollutants like dioxins and PCBs comes from foods like meat, including fatty fish, and dairy, but the pollutants don’t appear magically. The only way the chicken, fish, and other meat lead to human exposure is because the animals themselves built up a lifetime of exposure in our polluted world, from incinerators, power plants, sewer sludge, and on and on, as you can see here and at 3:40 in my video.

    Unlike conventional meat production, a slaughter-free harvest would not only mean no more infected animals, but no more contaminated animals either. In terms of pollutants, it would be like taking a time machine back before the Industrial Revolution.

    Doctor’s Note:

    Cultivated meat means less contamination with fecal residues, toxic pollutants, antibiotics, and hormones; up to 99 percent less environmental impact; and zero pandemic risk. Cultivated meat allows people to have their meat and eat it, too, without affecting the rest of us.

    This is the final video in this cultivated meat series. If you missed the first two, check out the videos on Food Safety and Antibiotic Resistance.

    I previously did a video series on plant-based meats; see the related posts below.

    All videos in the plant-based meat series are also available in a digital download from a webinar I did. SeeThe Human Health Implications of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat for Pandemic Prevention and Climate Mitigation.



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  • Antibiotic Resistance, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health 

    Antibiotic Resistance, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health 

    Medically important antibiotics are being squandered by animal agriculture to compensate for typical factory farming practices.

    Cultivating muscle meat directly from cells instead of raising and slaughtering animals would reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses “due to fecal contamination during slaughtering and evisceration of carcasses” because there would be no feces, no slaughter, and no carcasses to eviscerate. In addition, cultivating meat would also reduce the threat from antibiotic resistance.

    To compensate for overcrowded, stressful, and unhygienic conditions on factory farms, animals are typically dosed en masse with antibiotics. A lot of antibiotics. About 20 million pounds of medically important antibiotics a year, as you can see here and at 0:57 in my video, The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Antibiotic Resistance. 

    In the United States, for example, farm animals are given about 2 million pounds of penicillin drugs and 15 million pounds of tetracyclines annually. This is madness. 

    Antibiotic drugs important to human medicine go right into the feed and water of animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, by the ton and by the thousands of tons, as shown below and at 1:02 in my video. And that is all without a prescription.

    Ninety-seven percent of the tens of millions of pounds of antibiotics given to farm animals in the United States are bought over the counter—without a prescription or even an order from a veterinarian, as seen here and a 1:24. To get even a few milligrams of penicillin, we need a doctor’s prescription, because these are miracle wonder drugs that can’t be squandered. Meanwhile, farmers can just back their trucks up to the feedstore. 

    Now, half the Salmonella in retail meat—chicken, turkey, beef, and pork—is resistant to tetracycline, as shown below and at 1:50 in my video. About a quarter of the bugs are now resistant to three or more entire classes of antibiotics, including some resistant to “cephalosporins such as ceftriaxone [which] are critically important drugs we use to treat severe Salmonella infections, especially in children.” 

    Such agricultural applications for antimicrobials are now considered an “urgent threat to human health.” “The link between antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic resistance in humans is unequivocal.”

    As shown here and at 2:20 in my video, it all starts with the poop. 

    Antibiotic-resistant bugs are selected for and then can spread via meat or produce contaminated by poop or they can spread through the wind, the air, or the water, or be carried by insects. There are many pathways by which resistant superbugs can escape. So, even if you don’t eat meat, you can be “put at risk by the pathogens released from stressed, immunocompromised, contaminant-filled livestock” dosed with antibiotics. That’s one of the reasons the American Public Health Association called for a moratorium on factory farms, due in part to all the pollution from concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) to the surrounding communities. 

    Every year, more than five tons of animal manure are produced for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Again, it all starts with the poop. But cultivated meat means no guts, no poop, no fecal infections, and no antibiotics necessary. It also means no fecal or antibiotic residues left in “foodstuffs such as milk, egg, and meat” that can potentially cause a variety of side effects beyond just the transfer of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans.

    And, as you can see here and at 3:30 in my video, things are getting worse, not better. U.S. animal agriculture is using more antibiotics now than ever.

    This isn’t only because more animals are being raised for food, either. Antibiotic sales in the United States are outpacing meat production. Yes, meat production is going up, but there is a serious rise in antibiotic sales for meat production, as shown below and at 3:46.

    With the combined might of Big Ag and Big Pharma (who profit from selling all the drugs), it’s hard to imagine anything changing on the political side. The only hope may be a change in the production side.

    “The unstoppable rise of super-resistant strains of bacteria is a serious worldwide problem, resulting in 700 000 deaths every year,” and the projections for global antibiotic use in the production of farm animals are “ominous,” estimated to exceed 100,000 tons of antibiotics pumped into animals raised for food by 2030. Quite simply, we may be “on the path to untreatable infections” by using even some of our “last resort antibiotics,” like carbapenems, just to shave a few cents off a pound of meat.

    And it’s not just foodborne bacteria. Mad cow disease, swine flu, and bird flu have the potential to kill millions of people. Skeptical? I’ve got a book for you to read, whose author’s “superb storytelling ability makes every page of the book interesting and fascinating for both specialist and layperson.” (Thanks, Virology Journal, for the wonderful book review and calling my book “a must read.”)

    Given the threat of the chickens coming home to roost, an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health thought that “it is curious, therefore, that changing the way humans treat animals—most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten—is largely off the radar as a significant preventative measure. Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic…Yet humanity does not consider this option.”

    That may be moot, though, because we could cultivate all the chicken we want, without guts or lungs.

    It’s hard to stress the importance of that American Journal of Public Health editorial. As devastating as COVID-19 has been, it may just be a dress rehearsal for an even greater threat waiting in the wings—the wings of chickens.

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading candidate for the next pandemic is a bird flu virus known as H7N9, which is a hundred times deadlier than COVID-19. Instead of 1 in 250 patients dying, H7N9 has killed 40 percent of the people it infects.

    The last time a bird flu virus jumped directly to humans and caused a pandemic, it triggered the deadliest plague in human history—the 1918 pandemic that killed 50 million people. That had a 2 percent death rate. What if we had a pandemic infecting billions where death was closer to a flip of a coin?

    The good news is that there is something we can do about it. Just as eliminating the exotic animal trade and live animal markets may go a long way toward preventing the next coronavirus pandemic, reforming the way we raise domestic animals for food may help forestall the next killer flu. The bottom line is that it’s not worth risking the lives of millions of people for the sake of cheaper chicken.

    If you missed the previous video, see The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Food Safety. Up next is The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Chemical Safety. 



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  • Food Safety and Cultivated Meat 

    Food Safety and Cultivated Meat 

    What are the direct health implications of making clean meat—that is, meat without animals?

    In a 1932 article in Popular Mechanics entitled “Fifty Years Hence,” Winston Churchill predicted that we would one day “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Indeed, growing meat straight from muscle cells could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 96 percent, lower water usage by as much as 96 percent, and lower land usage by 99 percent.

    If we are to avoid dangerous climate change by the middle of the century, global meat consumption simply cannot continue to rise at the current rate. And there have certainly been initiatives like Meatless Mondays to try to get people to cut down, but so far, “they do not appear to be contributing in any significant way to the translation of the idea of eating less meat into the mainstream.” So, “in the light of people’s continued desire to eat meat, it seems the problems associated with consumption are unlikely to be fully resolved by attitude change. Instead, they must be addressed from an alternate perspective: changing the product.”

    From an environmental standpoint, it seems like a slam dunk. From an animal welfare standpoint, it could get rid of factory farms and slaughter plants for good, and I wouldn’t have to stumble across articles like this in the scientific literature: “Discerning Pig Screams in Production Environments.” I mean, what more do we need to know about modern animal agriculture than the fact that, “in recent years, a number of so-called…‘ag-gag’ laws have been proposed and passed…across the USA,” banning undercover photographing or videotaping inside such operations to keep us all in the dark.

    What about the human health implications of cultivated meat? I get the animal welfare, environment, and food security benefits, but what about “the potential for cultured meat to have health/safety benefits to individual consumers”? Nutritionally, the most important advantage is being able to swap out the type the fat. Right now, producers are growing straight muscle tissue, so it could be marbled with something less harmful than animal fat, though, of course, there’s still animal protein.

    When it comes to health, the biggest, clearest advantage is food safety, reducing the risk of foodborne pathogens. There has been a sixfold increase in food poisoning over the last few decades, with tens of millions “sickened annually by infected food in the United States alone,” including hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of annual deaths. Contaminated meats and other animal products are the most common cause.

    When the cultivated meat industry calls its products clean meat, that’s not just a nod to clean energy. Food-poisoning pathogens like E. coli, Campylobacter, and Salmonella are fecal bacteria. They are a result of fecal contamination. They’re intestinal bugs, so we don’t have to worry about them if we’re making meat without the intestines.

    Yes, there are all sorts of “methods to remove visible fecal contamination” in slaughter plants these days and even experimental imaging technologies designed to detect more “diluted fecal contaminations,” but we are still left at the retail level with about 10 percent of chicken contaminated with Salmonella and 40 percent of retail chicken contaminated with Campylobacter. What’s more, most poultry and about half of retail ground beef and pork chops are contaminated with E. coli, an indicator of fecal residue, as shown here and at 3:47 in my video The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Food Safety. We don’t have to cook the crap out of cultivated meat, though, because there isn’t any crap to begin with.

    Doctor’s Note:

    This is the first in a three-video series on cultivated meat. Stay tuned for The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Antibiotic Resistance and The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Chemical Safety.

    I previously did a video series on plant-based meats. Check them in the related posts below.

    The videos are also all available in a digital download from a webinar I did: The Human Health Implications of Plant-Based and Cultivated Meat for Pandemic Prevention and Climate Mitigation.



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