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by Dr. Joseph Mercola
October 04, 2023
from
Mercola Website
Spanish
version
Story at-a-glance
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An
estimated 99% of the components making up whole food are
a complete mystery. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's
National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference
details 188 nutritional components of food, including 38 flavonoids, yet scientists estimate there are more than
26,000 different biochemicals in our food
-
We
know even less about the constituents of processed foods
and synthetic foods, which falsely claim to be
"equivalents" to whole foods, such as "animal-free
meats" or "animal-free milk"
-
Scientists cannot create equivalence when they don't
even know what 85% or more of the whole food they're
trying to replicate consists of
-
A
paper published in the April 2023 issue of Animal
Frontiers warns that cultured products are not
nutritionally equivalent to the meats they're intended
to replace
-
A
May 2023 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization
concluded there are at least 53 potential health hazards
associated with lab-grown meat, including the
possibility of contamination with heavy metals,
microplastics, nanoplastics and chemicals, allergenic
additives, toxic components, antibiotics and prions
What is the 'dark
matter'
in the Foods
we Eat?
An estimated 99% of the
components
making up real whole foods
are a complete mystery,
so how
can they be replicated in a lab?
It's time to examine
the safety
concerns
of lab-created foods.
Do you know what's in the food you eat?
Remarkable as it may
seem, 99% of the components making up whole food are a complete
mystery...
As reported by New
Scientist in July 2020: 1
"We know next to
nothing about the vast majority of compounds in our diet...
'Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150
key nutritional components,' 2 says Albert-László Barabási at
Harvard Medical School, who coined the term nutritional dark
matter.
'But these represent only a small fraction of the biochemicals
present in our food'...
The idea that food is a rich and
complex mix of biochemicals is hardly news.
Even the well-known macronutrients - proteins, carbohydrates and
fats - are hugely diverse.
There's also a vast supporting cast
of micronutrients:
minerals, vitamins and other biochemicals,
many of which are only present in minuscule quantities, but
which can still have profound health effects."
The official source of
nutritional information is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
(USDA) National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. 3
It lists the composition
of hundreds of thousands of foods, but it's not as detailed as you
might imagine.
In all, it details only 188 nutritional components, including 38
flavonoids, yet scientists estimate there are more than 26,000
different biochemicals in our food. 4,5
As noted by New Scientist, 6
"with the USDA as your guide, 99.5% of
the components in food are a mystery," and as noted by Barabási.
"It would be foolish
to dismiss 99.5% of the compounds we eat as unimportant 7... We
will not really understand how we get sick if we don't solve
this puzzle." 8
Searching for
Nutritional 'Dark Matter'
Disturbed by the information gap, an international team of
researchers started working on a more comprehensive database a
decade ago called FooDB, 9 which as of 2020 contained information on
some 70,000 nutritional compounds.
Yet even this database still has a long way to go.
An estimated 85% of the
nutritional components listed remain unquantified, meaning they know
a food contains a particular component, but they don't know how
much.
The health implications of most compounds also remain largely
unknown.
New Scientist notes: 10
"This is also true of
individual micronutrients.
'Consider
beta-carotene,' says Barabási.
'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'."
Processed
Foods Are an Even Greater Mystery
The reason I started with that background is because 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"...
Food processing alone will often alter the composition of bioactive
molecules in a food, and hence the food's impact on health, 11 but
today, processed foods also contain a wide array of synthetic
chemicals that, prior to the modern era, were never part of the
human diet.
As such,
they pose
incredible risks to long term health and well-being...
Processed foods may also
have intergenerational effects.
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?
In recent years, the idea
that we can simply replace whole foods with synthetic, genetically
modified 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.
Animal-Free
Equivalence Is a PR Fraud
Take cultured meat, for example.
It's said to be
equivalent to real animal meat because it's grown from animal cells.
The cells are then grown in a nutrient solution inside a bioreactor
until it becomes a meat-like slab.
Similarly, Bored Cow 12 animal-free milk is a dairy alternative made
with whey protein obtained through a fermentation process,
plant-based fats (in lieu of milk fats), citrus fiber (for
creaminess) and added vitamins and minerals.
Defenders of cultured meat insist that this product is not "fake
meat" but "actual meat," 13 the only difference being that no animal
had to be slaughtered to create it.
Cultured meat and other
synthetic foods are also said to be more environmentally friendly.
But nothing could be
further from the truth.
Their impact is far more akin to that of the
pharmaceutical industry
than the food industry...
According to a recent "cradle-to-gate life
cycle" analysis, 14,15,16,17
the
lab-grown meat industry produces
anywhere from 4 to 25 times more CO2 than traditional animal
husbandry...!
Based on this assessment, each kilo of cultured meat produces
anywhere from 542 pounds (246 kilos) to 3,325 pounds (1,508 kg) of
carbon dioxide emissions,
making the climate impact of cultured meat
4 to 25 times greater than that of conventional beef...
And this information is
only provided to refute those who believe
the global warming
fallacy.
As noted by the authors,
investors have poured billions of dollars
into animal cell-based meat (ACBM) sector based on the theory that
cultured meat is more environmentally friendly than beef.
But according to these
researchers, that hype is based on flawed analyses of carbon
emissions.
Cultured meat is also the epitome of ultraprocessed food 18 and
therefore likely to cause health problems like those caused by other ultraprocessed foods, such as,
...and
increased all-cause mortality. 22,23,24,25,26
A paper 27 published in the April 2023 issue of Animal Frontiers also
warned that,
there are several implications of cell-based meat that
need to be considered, but aren't, including the fact that cultured
products are not nutritionally equivalent to the meats they're
intended to replace...
The claim that no animals are killed in the process is also
false.
At present, most cultured
or cell-based meats are created by growing animal cells in a
solution of fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is made from the
blood
of unborn calves.
In short,
pregnant cows
are slaughtered to drain the unborn fetus of its blood...!
Is It Safe to
Eat Tumors?
There are also many unanswered questions surrounding safety.
For example,
to get the
cell cultures to grow, some companies are using immortalized cells,
which technically speaking are precancerous and/or fully
cancerous. 28
(Other companies use embryonic stem cells or cells from
living animals.) 29
The reason for using immortalized cells is because normally behaving
cells cannot divide forever. Most cells will only multiply a few
dozen times before they become senescent (old) and die.
This won't work when your intention is to grow thousands of pounds
of tissue from a small number of cells, hence they use immortalized
cells that have no off switch for their replication and can divide
indefinitely.
Meat substitutes cultured in this way could therefore be thought of
as tumors, seeing how the flesh is entirely made up of precancerous
or cancerous cells.
Is it safe to eat tumors...?
We don't know...
MIT biologist Robert Weinberg, Ph.D., has proposed that humans can't
get cancer from these cells because they're not human cells and
therefore cannot replicate inside your body. 30
However, there's no
long-term research to back this theory...
Dietary
Headaches to Come
It's also important to realize that the nutritional composition and
safety of synthetic foods will vary depending on the brand.
When you're dealing with beef, for example,
the meat from one cow
will be relatively identical to that of any other cow (one major
exception being the way they're raised and fed).
One wild-caught salmon is
comparable to any other wild-caught salmon, and each russet potato
is more or less identical to every other russet potato.
But since each synthetic food brand uses proprietary ingredients and
processes, no two will have the identical composition or safety, so
even if one is eventually proven safe and nutritious, those results
cannot be applied to any other brand.
This variance has the potential to create major problems in the
future when all sorts of foods have been replaced with synthetic
non-equivalents.
How do you determine
which cultured beef, chicken or salmon brand might be best for
you...?
How will you devise a
sensible diet plan when every food comes in myriad variations of
varying composition and safety...?
Synthetic
Foods Pose Unique Food-Safety Hazards
Many
synthetic food proponents claim lab-created food will bypass a
host of food-safety problems, but the converse is far more likely to
be true.
Sure, beef, for example,
can be contaminated
during processing, packaging, transport or storage, or during
the cooking process...
But in
cultured meat,
every ingredient and processing step brings with it the potential of
contamination, and any of the hundreds of ingredients could have
toxic effects, alone or in synergy.
Indeed, an in-depth analysis 31,32 of the available evidence by the
Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations (FAO) and a
World Health Organization (WHO) expert panel, published in May 2023,
concluded,
there are at least
53 potential health hazards associated
with lab-grown meat...
Among them are the possibility of contamination with,
heavy metals,
microplastics, nanoplastics and chemicals, allergenic additives,
toxic components, antibiotics and
prions...
What's more, some of the ingredients that go into synthetic biology
like cultured meat are regulated as "non-detectable manufacturing
aids," and you won't even know what they are.
Israeli startup Profuse
Technology, for example, has developed a growth media supplement
that massively encourages protein growth.
As reported by Food Navigator Europe in an article titled
"Cultivated Meat 'Breakthrough' - Media Supplement Achieves Full
Muscle Maturation on Scaffold within 48 Hours," 33 the supplement
reduces the time to grow filets and steaks by 80% and augments the
protein in the final product by a factor of five.
An
Unsustainable Model
The cultured meat process also produces toxic biowaste - a problem
that doesn't exist in conventional agriculture and food processing.
In the video above, Alan
Lewis, vice president of government affairs for Natural Grocers,
reviews what goes into the making of synthetic biology.
The starting ingredients are typically cheap sugars and fats derived
from genetically engineered corn and soy, grown in environmentally
destructive monocultures with loads of herbicides, pesticides, and
synthetic fertilizers.
As a result, they're loaded with chemical residues...
Hundreds of other
ingredients may then be added to the ferment to produce the desired
end product, such as a certain protein, color, flavor or scent.
The most-often used
microorganism in the fermentation process is
E. coli that has been
gene-edited to produce the desired compound through its digestive
process.
The microorganism must also be
antibiotic-resistant, since it needs
to survive the antibiotics used to kill off other undesirable
organisms in the vat.
As a result,
antibiotic-resistant organisms also become integrated into the final
product, and the types of foodborne illness that might be caused by
gene-edited antibiotic-resistant E. coli and its metabolites are
anyone's guess.
In addition to the desired target metabolite, these gene-edited
organisms may also spit out non-target metabolites with unknown
environmental consequences and health effects.
But that's not all...
Once the target organisms
are extracted, what's left over is hazardous biowaste.
While traditional fermentation processes, such as the making of
beer, produce waste products that are edible by animals, compostable
and pose no biohazard,
the biowaste from these synthetic biology
ferments must first be deactivated, and then must be securely
disposed of...!
It cannot go into a
landfill.
Protect Your
Health by Avoiding Frankenfoods
Making food that requires
GMO inputs and produces more CO2 than
conventional farming and hazardous biowaste to boot is hardly a
sustainable model.
But then again, synthetic
biology and processed foods are not being pushed out of true concern
for sustainability.
If that was the goal, everyone would be looking at
regenerative
agriculture where every part of the system supports and sustains
other parts, thereby eliminating the need for chemical inputs,
radically reducing water needs while optimizing yields.
No, synthetic biology is pursued because it is a formidable control
mechanism.
Those who own all the synthetic food production will
control the world in a very literal sense...
To learn more about this
plot for control, see "The Fake 'Food as Medicine' Agenda."
In short,
the globalists already own and control most of the
carbohydrates grown in the world today.
By replacing real animal
foods with patented lab-made protein alternatives, they'll have
unprecedented power to control the world's population.
It'll also grant them greater control over people's health.
It's
already known that the consumption of ultraprocessed food
contributes to disease, and the benefactor of ill health is
Big Pharma.
The processed food industry has spent many decades driving chronic
illness that is then treated with drugs rather than a better diet.
Synthetic foods will
likely be an even bigger driver or chronic ill health and early
death...
The fact is, fake meat
and dairy cannot replace the complex mix of nutrients found in grass
fed beef and dairy, and it's likely that consuming ultraprocessed
meat and milk alternatives may lead to many of the same health
issues that are caused by a processed food diet.
So, if you want to really
protect your health and the environment, skip pseudo-foods that
require patents and stick to those found in nature instead...
Sources and
References
1, 6, 7, 10 New
Scientist July 22, 2020 (Archived)
2, 4 Nature
Food 2020; 1: 33-37
3 National
Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (Archived)
5 Afekta
February 26, 2020
8 Inside
Science December 9, 2019
9 FooDB
11 Knowable
Magazine September 20, 2023
12 Bored
Cow Animal-Free Milk
13 Food
Safety News September 19, 2023
14 BioRxiv
April 21, 2023
15 New
Scientist May 9, 2023
16 Interesting
Engineering May 14, 2023
17 Watts
Up With That? May 12, 2023
18 Friends
of the Earth, From Lab to Fork, June 2018 (PDF)
19 Cell
Metabolism, 2019; doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008
20 BMJ
2018; 360:k322
21 Advisory
UPF Dangerous for Your Brain
22 JAMA
Internal Medicine February 11, 2019;179(4):490-498
23 BMJ
February 14, 2018; 360
24 JAMA
2017;317(9):912-924
25 BMJ,
2019;365:I1451
26 BMJ,
2019;365:l1949
27 Animal
Frontiers April 2023; 13(2): 68-74
28, 29, 30 The
Fern February 7, 2023
31 FAO.org
Food Safety Aspects of Cell-Based Food
32 ISAAA.org
May 10, 2023
33 Food
Navigator Europe September 26, 2023
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