Lab-Grown Meat and the Potential to Reduce Food-Borne Illness

Lab-grown meat, cultured meat, or cultivated meat – however you choose to call it – is a rapidly developing discovery of cellular agriculture that aims to produce meat in a laboratory setting using animal cells, rather than slaughtering animals. The sector has met with lots of views, including both positive and negative critics, as well as excitement as to what the future of meat holds with such a wonderful progression in food production.

However, beyond the technological advancement placard cultivated meat raises, its approach has huge potential for positive environmental impact by reducing the environmental footprint of the meat industry, improving food security, and potentially reducing food-borne illnesses.

Lab-grown meat is produced by retrieving living and growth-prone cells from an animal and then growing these cells in the laboratory by feeding them with a combination of nutrients and growth factors. The multiplied cells are then collected and made to grow through processes that conform them to the texture and outlook of the desired meat product, such as a patty or sausage.

What are the Propositions?

How exactly would the future-forward sector achieve this and what challenges would need to be addressed before lab-grown meat can become a viable and scalable alternative to traditional meat?

Controlled and Sterile Environments that Prevent Food Contamination

In Europe, Salmonella and Campylobacter, popular food-borne bacteria, were known to cause infections that cost around 4 billion Euros per year in 2010. According to the CDC, an estimated one in six Americans, amounting to about 48 million people, get sick from food-borne diseases every year. Out of these figures, about 128,000 are hospitalized, and up to 3,000 die from diagnosed food poisoning.

Food poisoning, in all its variations, has remained one of the illnesses that have been hard to curtail, despite the modalities put in place by food producers to bring healthier food products to the table. While a lot of things are still in the theory with lab-grown meat, it shows a huge potential for reducing food contamination and the risk of food poisoning.

Lab-grown meat is produced in high-end laboratories, under very controlled and sterile conditions. This definitely minimizes, if not altogether eliminates the risk of bacterial and viral contamination that arise during the rearing and slaughter of animals for meat production.

Non-Animal Slaughter Procedure that Eliminates Animal-to-Human Disease Transmission

Zoonoses, infectious diseases that spread from animals to humans have always been a concern. Recently, however, with several animal-related epidemics springing up here and there, there has been more tension over animal interaction and its potential for disease spread in humans.

There are several ways through which humans can contract diseases from animals, but the most common remain physical contacts such as when interacting with pets, livestock production and slaughtering, and of course, meat, egg, and dairy consumption, when they are not properly processed.

Lab-grown meat production eludes all of these as the only time contact is made with animals is when the initial cells are extracted. As research progresses, we hope to be more certain of the measures that will be put in place to ensure that the time the production process requires contact with live animals results in cells that are disease and infection free, and will also not have a negative impact on those who interact with animals for the cell extraction process.

Possibilities for Healthier Meat with Lower Risk of Terminal Diseases

As you may have always known, nutrition plays a major role in general well-being. While conventional meat is a key source of protein, fat, and minerals, it may not be totally healthy for some specific sets of people and the whole population at large.

Research has proven that indulging in meat consumption, especially red meat, can increase the risk of diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, thanks to certain components like cholesterol, heme iron, and saturated fat that are contained in meat in high proportions.

Theory has it that there are possibilities to “customizing” cultivated meat to achieve healthier forms of meat. This could either be by biologically manipulating the composition of these risk components or by substituting them with healthier options.

While meat consumption has never been the only risk factor for type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, the availability of healthier meat options in the form of cultured meat provides opportunities for people to intentionally opt for diets that are not only nutritious but also disease-preventing.

Another factor that should not be overlooked is the lack of growth hormones in cultivated meat, which is a very common feature in livestock production. Already, the use of growth hormones on livestock has been banned in the European Union because of some of its detrimental concerns. However, they remain in use in the US, Canada, and many other countries. Research has shown that growth hormones, when ingested by humans from meat, can have neurobiological, carcinogenic, and developmental effects.

From another perspective, lab-grown meat would be free from pesticide residues which livestock tend to pick from their immediate farm environment or directly from their body since farm owners use them to control livestock ectoparasites. Needless to say, such pesticide residues, which were never designed for consumption, would have negative effects on the body if they continue to accumulate.

Potentially Reduces the Risk of Antimicrobial Resistance

Over time, antibiotics have been so used in the prevention and treatment of livestock diseases that the disease-causing microbes have developed resistance to these medicines. This leaves two concerns. First, these same medicines are also used for the treatment of either the same or very similar disease-causing microbes in humans, further contributing to the increase in the lack of response to treatment in the human population. Secondly, anti-microbial resistance makes it harder for livestock diseases to be treated, and humans stand a greater risk of animal-to-human infection when they consume livestock meat.

While cultivated meat production might still require the use of antibiotics to prevent infections, this will be minimal considering the sterile conditions cultured meat is produced in.

Conclusion

Lab-grown meat is an exciting and promising field that possesses the potential to revolutionize the way we produce and consume meat. Their non-animal slaughtering procedure eliminates some of the ethical concerns associated with traditional meat production and reduces the negative environmental impact of meat production. In addition, the controlled conditions under which cell-based meat is produced potentially reduce the risk of foodborne illness. As research and development in the field continue, it would indeed be interesting to observe how the sector evolves over the next years and contributes to food security.