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Comment by akrymski | Hacker News Reader

Is nobody else seriously worried about the safety of lab grown food in general?

It took us decades to realise that cigarettes are in fact harmful. Medicine takes years to get approved. Who really understands the long term impact of fake meat on human body? Why aren't regulators requiring long term trials of these products before allowing them to market?

As a complete outsider looking in, this trend is very worrying. Am I missing something?

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My guess is they are slipping in under the guise of "on a molecular level we already know what all these things do in the human body and eating protein is safe" and they will argue on a molecular level yes that is just protein matter. I am undecided on the matter. I think responsible farming practices is the way to go.

I mean, it's not fake meat. It's meat. Same fundamental ingredients humans have been eating since they became a species (and long before).

Except it is fake meat.

It’s lab grown. Are plants grown in a lab fake plants? Bacteria cultured in a Petri dish fake bacteria?

If you only create a fruit without a full grown plant to have produced it, yes.

If you want to prove that eating fake meat has no additional adverse side effects to real meat, there would need to be studies. Have there been studies? No, there haven't. You can't assert that the two are the same because of a lack of evidence if there has been no attempt to find evidence. Until you have controlled experiments where people are exclusively fed both (preferably for at least a year, IMHO) you can't just conclude that 'well they seem the same so they must be'.

Why aren't regulators requiring long term trials of these products before allowing them to market?

I'm not an expert of fake meat, but perhaps it's too soon for all of that. You have to have a product first before you can test/regulate/tax/ban it.

I suspect it would be the exact opposite. E-coli insulin is safer than butchery pancreas byproduct insulin - far lesser risk of contamination.

The biggest possible weakness I could see would maybe be nutritional/absorption inadequacy and that should be evident pretty quickly.

but trans fat is more harmful than naturally occuring saturated fat.

It really depends on the compound/molecule. I imagine that if we need to "fortify" meat somehow, i.e. unless we're able to grow everything from a single stem cell + natural substrates (i.e. plant amino acids, fats, vitamins), we're very likely to get something wrong with such a complex product as meat.

I once watched a talk by someone running a startup creating artificial cheese and it sounded like the FDA was very interested in what they're doing and they hat a close look on the safety. You can expect that this stuff won't go into supermarkets without some testing.

The comparison to smoking is a poor one, because this was in another era with a lot less developed scientific methods. The comparison to medicine is closer, but you're looking more to something like testing generics. If you have lab-grown meat that's chemically almost identical then the concerns are much smaller.

You're missing the fact that lab grown meat isn't available to the public.

I am, but I'm more worried about the direct unnecessary cruelty applied to millions of animals today. To me, it's easily a risk worth taking, though I understand that not everyone would agree with that assessment.

I worry about this with gene editing. You could possibly be affecting something else that doesn't even get triggered until later stages of life.

I also worry about GMO foods in the same way.

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Oops, we're sorry! When we changed this gene to be able to make certain people be able to see again, we didn't realize it would also cause the recipient to contract ALS by age 30. We studied it for 5 years with human trials and there were no adverse reactions! None! /s

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