4 ms·

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't lab grown meat literally tumors? Like we're eating tumors? It's prudent to remember we're usually slow on the uptake when it

by bko 3y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't lab grown meat literally tumors? Like we're eating tumors? 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?

JSR_FDED 3y ago
Let’s see, the FDA approved it, and the people opposed are an industry lobbying group…
- ipaddr 3y ago
  The people for tumor meat are also industry lobbying groups. What the FDA deems safe today will change tomorrow.
amingilani 3y ago
Why would you claim they’re tumours? Is there evidence showing that it’s unsafe? 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.
- cout 3y ago
  The article says the meat is grown from immortalized cells. Immortality is a feature common to many cancers and tumors (and some would call it a defining characteristic). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    Something tells me we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the original poster had used the term “long-lived” instead.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Read your own link
    - pazimzadeh 3y ago
      Per the article: > 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 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 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299224/
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Why would you claim they’re tumours? Is there evidence showing that it’s unsafe? 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-meat-grows-like-a-tumor-a-new-ad-campaign-targeting-the-cultivated-meat-industry-criticized-as-deceptive-and-unscientific/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/01/26/cell-based-mea...
jfengel 3y ago
As opposed to eating a chunk of an animal's ass? 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.
gopher_space 3y ago
As someone who's been around livestock in various modes I'd rather eat lab tumor than anything from a factory farm. If you're worried about meat quality you really need to grab a chest freezer and buy only from 4H auctions. 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.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Could you help me understand your comment? What’s a 4H auction? What do little girls have to do with factory farming? It sounds interesting, but it’s easier to ask you than to research it at 3am after feeding my own little girl.
  - Zenzero 3y ago
    In rural areas of the US it is common for children to enroll in 4H which includes lessons in animal husbandry. Children can show various livestock at fairs and they conclude with auctions of said pets for consumption. Comparing it to factory farming is a stretch but to a little kid that gave a name to their chicken it might as well be.
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    Sure! 4H is a program in America with the goal of teaching animal husbandry to children. A big event in rural areas is the 4H auction of animals raised within the program. Since these animals are hand-raised they attract premium prices. 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!
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Thank you very much! I had no idea that this existed. Those kids are lucky; I’ve always wanted to do something like that, but the closest I got was to be adjacent to a horse farm when I was growing up. I wish that there was some equivalent that I could get our daughter into. We live in Lake Saint Louis, which is about a 7 on a rural-to-city scale of 1 to 10. I wonder if there’s anything within driving distance… 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.
phantomathkg 3y ago
Even if it is a tumors, once that's properly cooked it is still a lump of protein/fat, no?
- ericpruitt 3y ago
  I don't share the OPs reservations, but cooked lumps of protein can still be dangerous i.e. prions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion).
fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
When I first read this comment my immediate reaction was that it was probably baseless fearmongering. After a bit of googling, I feel more ambivalent. 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.
- tomohelix 3y ago
  Nothing is absolute in biology. Your edge case can happen, but the chance it happens is so low that it might as well be your body naturally created the tumor in the first place. 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.
Daz1 3y ago
No because meat is muscle tissue and cancer doesn't grow in muscle cells
- Zenzero 3y ago
  The poster above you is incorrect in many respects, but your statement that "cancer doesn't grow in muscle cells" is also misguided. 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.

by bko 3y ago

JSR_FDED 3y ago

Let’s see, the FDA approved it, and the people opposed are an industry lobbying group…

ipaddr 3y ago
The people for tumor meat are also industry lobbying groups. What the FDA deems safe today will change tomorrow.

amingilani 3y ago

Why would you claim they’re tumours? Is there evidence showing that it’s unsafe? 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.

cout 3y ago
The article says the meat is grown from immortalized cells. Immortality is a feature common to many cancers and tumors (and some would call it a defining characteristic). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Something tells me we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the original poster had used the term “long-lived” instead.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Read your own link
  - pazimzadeh 3y ago
    Per the article: > 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 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 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299224/
autoexec 3y ago
> Why would you claim they’re tumours? Is there evidence showing that it’s unsafe? 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-meat-grows-like-a-tumor-a-new-ad-campaign-targeting-the-cultivated-meat-industry-criticized-as-deceptive-and-unscientific/ https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/01/26/cell-based-mea...

jfengel 3y ago

As opposed to eating a chunk of an animal's ass? 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.

gopher_space 3y ago

As someone who's been around livestock in various modes I'd rather eat lab tumor than anything from a factory farm. If you're worried about meat quality you really need to grab a chest freezer and buy only from 4H auctions. 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.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Could you help me understand your comment? What’s a 4H auction? What do little girls have to do with factory farming? It sounds interesting, but it’s easier to ask you than to research it at 3am after feeding my own little girl.
- Zenzero 3y ago
  In rural areas of the US it is common for children to enroll in 4H which includes lessons in animal husbandry. Children can show various livestock at fairs and they conclude with auctions of said pets for consumption. Comparing it to factory farming is a stretch but to a little kid that gave a name to their chicken it might as well be.
- gopher_space 3y ago
  Sure! 4H is a program in America with the goal of teaching animal husbandry to children. A big event in rural areas is the 4H auction of animals raised within the program. Since these animals are hand-raised they attract premium prices. 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!
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Thank you very much! I had no idea that this existed. Those kids are lucky; I’ve always wanted to do something like that, but the closest I got was to be adjacent to a horse farm when I was growing up. I wish that there was some equivalent that I could get our daughter into. We live in Lake Saint Louis, which is about a 7 on a rural-to-city scale of 1 to 10. I wonder if there’s anything within driving distance… 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.

phantomathkg 3y ago

Even if it is a tumors, once that's properly cooked it is still a lump of protein/fat, no?

ericpruitt 3y ago
I don't share the OPs reservations, but cooked lumps of protein can still be dangerous i.e. prions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion).

fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago

When I first read this comment my immediate reaction was that it was probably baseless fearmongering. After a bit of googling, I feel more ambivalent. 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.

tomohelix 3y ago
Nothing is absolute in biology. Your edge case can happen, but the chance it happens is so low that it might as well be your body naturally created the tumor in the first place. 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.

Daz1 3y ago

No because meat is muscle tissue and cancer doesn't grow in muscle cells

Zenzero 3y ago
The poster above you is incorrect in many respects, but your statement that "cancer doesn't grow in muscle cells" is also misguided. 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.