Florida Just Banned Lab-Grown Meat. I Tried to Find Out Why
thefp.com
thefp.com
Now I feel like it's me who's living in a crazy TV show.
Let each state be an experiment, we’ll see who wins
At the same time, it's not like all the funding is actually going towards those who need it: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/us/brett-favre-welfare-mi...
Same energy
In large quantities*. It's still very nutritious and dense in important stuff like iron, protein, so consumption in limited quantities is OK. Eating 500g of it twice a day is not.
To be clear on the quantity, I just checked my latest pork steak package in our fridge. It’s 4.47 pounds, across four steaks. After cooking it probably reduces to about three pounds. 500g is 1.1 pounds, so that’s about two of the four steaks. And eating two pork steaks over the course of a day isn’t uncommon for me.
500g twice a day would be the entire pack of 4 over the course of a day. I could imagine myself eating that much, but it would feel more along the lines of participating in an eating contest than my usual intake.
Is there a scientific way to determine, based on available factual evidence, whether I’m at risk of long term problems from this habit? All in all, I usually order a pack of 4 twice a week, and that’s when I’m only eating pork steaks. I usually get bored and switch to sandwiches, salads, cheeses, and other foods. But again, it’s within a factor of three of your warning level, which prompts me to ask.
As far as I can tell, the current bad stuff is trans fats (hydrogenated oils), followed by processed meat (preservation like smoking, nitrates, high salt), followed by some uncertainty, maybe high temperature grilling. Meat fat itself is a mixed bag; some good stuff, some bad stuff, some neutral stuff.
Some people can make do just fine with that but they're usually burning that off or actually consuming the excess protein from post-exercise recovery, even then, 1kg is still a lot.
A lot by how much, that depends on your body composition and the fat percentage of those steaks.
But anyway, on data: Red meats are classified as <probable carcinogenics> (key: probable). https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...
Quantifying data: "The cancer risk related to the consumption of red meat is more difficult to estimate because the evidence that red meat causes cancer is not as strong. However, if the association of red meat and colorectal cancer were proven to be causal, data from the same studies suggest that the risk of colorectal cancer could increase by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily."
What is not clear to me is if this was measured raw or cooked. Cooked meat will shrink and weigh less.
If I were you, I would just go get some checkups, see if you got any deficiencies or anything wrong that might be caused by your eating habits, and if not, just keep enjoying your 1kg of pork steak a day... anyway, I'm amazed you can eat that much pork in a single day, lol.
Is two pork steaks a day really an amazing amount? Usually it’s one (often none), but if I didn’t eat anything else, two is about how many I’d go through. I honestly had no clue it was far outside the norm… Interesting.
Ironically I’m half Jewish, so maybe there’s a genetic craving after thousands of years of pork denial.
Well, I guess I’ll downshift away from red meats as I push 40. Luckily my other vice is apples (one time I bought so many that the cashier was convinced we were making apple pies, but I told her it’s my standard weekly intake) so the transition won’t be too jarring. Cheers.
If it serves as a guideline, the calorie tracking app I use has a default serving suggestion of 100-150g, raw, for different meats. So even 2 servings of those, twice a day, would still be around half of 2 of those steaks, which happens to be about what I eat in a day, between chicken and lean beef.
Different things come to mind with the size of those steaks but honestly I would just be assuming things and spouting probable nonsense. If they're packaged raw, I would check if they're heavily injected with water to boost the marketable weight. If it's not cheap meat it's probably not an issue.
Out of curiosity, what's the app name?
It is an increase of 17%, not 17% cancer risk.
1.51% cumulative risk of colon cancer among men age 0–74 years, and a 1.12% risk among women. [0]
If you eat 100g red meat daily you increase that risk to ~1.7667% for men and ~1.3104% for women.
The current recommendation is down to 50g a day.
If we look at how prehistoric humans actually lived, we can take a look at today's remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Most of which eat up to 15% of their daily energy intake as meat. The fossil record shows similar patterns since before the emergence of homo erectus, so we can be reasonably sure that this value is relatively consistent over time.
Hunter-gatherers primarily ate meat from small mammals, fish and poultry. If we use the nutrient values of rabbit meat, this would be equivalent to about 200g of meat per day per person, so a rabbit could feed one person for 5 days at least.
Realistically, it would be significantly less than that, as most hunter gatherers had access to fish and poultry.
I'm no nutritionist, but intuition would suggest that it's actually quite healthy to eat the same animals that humans have been chomping on since the dawn of time. Maybe the problem isn't that we eat cows, it's that we eat mutant freak factory-farmed cows that have been pumped full of hormones, raised on diets of toxic garbage and tortured for most of their short lives? I'm only guessing.
With that being said, the thing that concerns me most about lab-grown meat isn't whether it's healthy, it's that if it ever gets popular then it's going to be controlled by a tiny handful of multinational megacorps who'll use it to crush independent food producers worldwide and enforce a brutal centralized control of something as basic to human survival our everyday protein consumption. They're the last people on earth we should trust to keep us healthy and satiated, and their claims that they're doing it for our or the environment's benefit (and not just their own greedy empowerment and profiteering) should be treated with extreme scepticism.
When life expectancy is no more than 40, you don't care about getting cancer at 60. When it's 80+, that's more of a problem. Moreover in traditional societies people have grown-up children long before they get cancer in average, so there's very little selective pressure on that front.
But that's why I added the second sentence: from an evolutionary perspective it actually doesn't matter if you die from cancer at 60 when you're close to being great-grand father, you've done your job of reproducing and raising your kids well enough and as such it's a good time to go.
People often don't get this, but from a biological perspective death is not actually a bad thing, the only thing that matters is that you leave descendants bearing your genes behind you.
aside from quality there is also quantity, which the quantity of red meat consumed in modern meat eaters' diets as I understand it is significantly higher than that of a few hundred years ago.
(Not disputing the idea that how the meat was grown matters, though.)
There is no way in hell these would be approved today, but outlawing them because they are dangerous is not up for discussion. Once approved, always approved. Aspirin's approval, specifically, is centuries old.
Red meat is not bad for you. Now that's hilarious. Several animals live off red meat alone. They seem to be doing okay.
Sounds more like a little person crying that people are doing what they have done for ages. If you want to cry about environmental aspects of red meat, sure, do it. Most agree with that, but don't collate it in with your emotional falsehoods.
Florida Is on Its Way to Banning – and Criminalizing – Alternative Meat
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39712071
Sell lab-grown meat in Tennessee, pay a $1M fine
It's prudent to remember we're usually slow on the uptake when it comes to safety. Cigarettes were thought to be benign for decades, as was asbestos, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats and non ha bit forming pain killers. And now it looks like the ungodly concoction that is canola looks like it's not great for us as well.
So with that in mind, what are the odds that 50 years from now we look back and realize, yes eating artificial tumorous animal flesh was a good idea?
Plenty of ideas are abhorrent when they’re proposed but are obvious in hindsight. For example, Ignaz Semmelweis was ridiculed for proposing that surgeons wash their hands before surgery.
> There are several methods for generating immortalised cell lines:
> 1. Isolation from a naturally occurring cancer. This is the original method for generating an immortalised cell line.
Conceptually, there isn't much difference between an immortalized cell line and a tumor cell line, except by definition cancer must have a host. They probably both share features like too many and weirdly shaped mitochondria.
The overall question is still an interesting one intellectually. Would it even be bad for you to eat an actual tumor from a patient? Is there buildup of toxins?
And for lab grown meat, do we really know what the long term impact is of eating pure protein? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning
There is no fat (which normally stores many vitamins), no innervation, no extracellular matrix I presume, no immune system. Who knows if lab grown meat is really a pound for pound nutritional replacement for real meat. There is a difference between "safe to eat" and nutritionally equivalent. And if it's not equivalent, then what other supplements are you supposed to take if you're eating it?
Also, what if there is a viral or fungal outbreak in the lab, what tests are they running? Is it grown in a medical grade facility? How expensive is that? Is it actually worth it long term, or should we just reform how animals are raised?
On the other hand, research should continue, maybe there is the opportunity to engineer lab grown meat to express whatever antigen you want (or remove foreign antigens like sialic acid) and maybe use it as a way to induce tolerance for people with autoimmunity, as a type of food based therapeutic.
Oral tolerance to food protein https://www.nature.com/articles/mi20124
A red meat-derived glycan promotes inflammation and cancer progression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299224/
> 1. Poisonous mushrooms
Like… shut up. That’s just a pathetically obvious cherry pick.
> Also, what if there is a viral or fungal outbreak in the lab, what tests are they running? Is it grown in a medical grade facility? How expensive is that? Is it actually worth it long term, or should we just reform how animals are raised?
You’re acting like you’re posing these questions as if nobody has thought about them before. Bioreactor contamination is a significant problem that needs to be heavily monitored. You can go read about this rather than saying “I don’t know, ergo we might not know”
> “I don’t know, ergo we might not know”
Never said that. I'm saying until proven otherwise, I would prefer my meat to have had an immune system, to have experienced sunshine and contain vitamin D in the fat, and to have been stimulated by nerves during its lifetime. The onus is not on me to prove that lab grown meat is equivalent or better. How long has someone survived by exclusively eating lab grown meat?
You're not providing any evidence that all the important questions have been answered.
Considering that we are just now coming around to appreciate the nutritional value of fat (thanks, big sugar) I'm not going to trust quick studies that could be funded by vested interests. Vegans are not immune to capitalism. If there's a study you want to talk then like, send it over.
https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/anger/the-anger-management...
Intentional or otherwise they are just spreading disinformation put out by the meat industry to scare people away from a threat to their profits. All the talk about tumors and cancer comes from their PR scare-campaign.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/01/26/cell-based-mea...
It's not a tumor. It doesn't grow out of control. It is carefully managed to grow as much like natural tissue as they can manage. The result isn't real muscle, but then, "real muscle" doesn't sound all that appetizing either.
Some wizened monk might have massaged the cow you're currently eating, but the hard truth is that top quality meat is raised by little girls who'll be destroyed that you had the highest bid.
One of the "difficulties" with this program is that it's very easy for children to get attached to the animals they raise, and the tears flow when the animals are auctioned off. It's an important, formative time in the life of anyone who might raise livestock.
Most of the children involved are girls, for whatever reason. Could just be my own regional, temporal experience though!
She’s 7 months, so it’ll be a year or two before we’d be able to pursue it seriously, but one can dream. (I don’t know why I like goats so much.)
Anyway, thanks again. Have a good night.
4H is around here as well but from random other activities we've taken our son to we found a nature society close to us owns a small farm and allows kids to come in and help with the chickens and couple cows they have (weekend, summer programs). Not exactly the same but maybe works for your family.
Seems very West Australian Wheat-belt to me .. probaly quite Greek to someone from that part of the world.
1. It’s illegal to sell cancerous animal meat.
2. Even if a cancer was capable of living in a human host, cooking and digesting it should neutralize it.
3. Cancer is generally not considered to be contagious, but there are specific cases where cancers actually can move from one host to another. Tasmanian devils spread facial tumors to one another by fighting and exchanging fluids. A lab worker got a tumor in her hand after accidentally injecting herself with colon cancer cells. Cancer can spread during organ transplants.
I wouldn’t be at all worried about catching cancer from eating lab-grown meat. But I do wonder about some edge cases, like what if you cut yourself while you were chopping the raw meat and it got in your bloodstream? That sounds kind of like the case with the Tasmanian devils, or the injected colon cancer. However, I’m not sure if there’s any known case of a tumor from one species spreading to another.
Anyway, this sounds more like a freak event than a pandemic. We’d probably figure it out if it happened to a decent number of people, it’s not like we’d realize after 50 years that millions have died that way. The downside risk doesn’t seem so great that we should avoid developing lab-grown meat. There’s probably a lot of things in your kitchen that could kill you if injected into your bloodstream.
Also, the parent comment was flagged. I don’t find it to be rule-violating, so I vouched for it.
As someone who handle cells on a daily basis, I can confidently say these things are the most fragile things ever. You look at them wrong and they will be hurt, literally. What's that? Somebody forgot to feed me today? Welp, time to die. Oh wait, you actually fed me a day earlier? Well, dying time I guess. Hmm, you fed me on the right day but the feed was not warmed up? You guess it, straight to the grave.
For them to be frozen, put in a plastic bag, thawed out, left out for an hour, then exposed to your immune system who gonna be overzealous in killing them and asking them to survive and grow into a tumor is like asking is there a chance a cosmic ray gonna flip a bit in my hard drive and completely corrupt all my data.
The ECC RAM crowd is quite the vocal audience, to be fair.
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/17/cosmic-ray-flips-bit-assists...
And you shouldn't. Cooked or not, the cells are not cancerous https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-lab-meat-cancer-animal...
There are numerous muscle and muscle adjacent tumors that arise at various levels of differentiation, ranging from those that literally mean "muscle cancer" such as myosarcomas or leiomyosarcoma (smooth muscle), to those affecting adnexa such as fibrosarcomas or chondrosarcomas, or less differentiated mesenchymal neoplasms, depending on how far you want to zoom out on a whole realm of oncology. Even fat cells can become cancerous (liposarcoma).
In essence any cell type you can stick in a burger has a cancerous correlate, but again the idea of cultured cells being equivalent to eating tumors is incorrect as much as it is amusing.