Modern nutritional ingredients no longer contain only natural substances, and most additives are untested.
"The European Commission is banning titanium dioxide (E171) as a food additive in the EU, starting with a six-month phasing out period as of February 7, 2022, until August 7, 2022, after which a full ban applies. Following the publication of Commission Regulation (EU) 2022/63 in the EU’s Official Journal (OJ) on January 18, 2022, Annex II and III to Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 on food additives will be amended accordingly. The Regulation also includes a commitment to review the necessity to maintain or delete titanium dioxide (E171) from the EU list of food additives for exclusive use as a color in medicinal products. On November 30, 2021, the Commission had already published Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/2090 in the OJ, denying the authorization of titanium dioxide (E171) as a feed additive for all animal species."
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-titanium-dioxid...
in 2000, E171 was considered safe, but now it is not. Generally, it can be concluded that the half-life of food additives' safety is quite short.
"Although the evidence for general toxic effects was not conclusive, on the basis of the new data and strengthened methods we could not rule out a concern for genotoxicity and consequently we could not establish a safe level for daily intake of the food additive."
So EU took the "better safe than sorry" approach which actually is sensible.
Just because a little dirt ends up on an apple doesn’t make that dirt food, it’s a contaminant. Similarly people have been adding preservatives, poison, dyes, pesticides, etc to food for ages that doesn’t make that stuff food.
I would be very concerned about the artificial meats growth medium ending up in the end product.
75% of people in the US are overweight or obese, do you really believe that we are doing a good job with what we are putting in our bodies?
Now, I am not saying nutrition is ignorable you need to do more than say it was alive and now it’s in my tummy so everything is fine. However, you can pick a safe organism, stick it in a growth medium, let it sit for a while, and then eat it. That’s how we get cheese, beer, bread, soy sauce etc.
Calling it lab grown meat evokes an image that’s different from what’s being proposed. They aren’t synthesizing every individual molecule they are simply feeding cells.
That's a very simplified and misleading stance. We already have problem with normal grown foods for various reasons, including unexpected and harmful outcomes of breeding. Food is complex, and handling of food is even more complex. And research is limited in what it can find, and if there are financial interests, it will limit itself even more in what it communicates.
We managed to fuck this up without going that far for vegetables and there's no considering additives or lab grown differences there. It's definitely all cells and dna.
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
Yeast requires a huge range of chemicals to grow, but we mostly ignore all the details when we mix flower, water, and starter because flower is already a really complicated thing.
Basically all foods are cells so they contain all the normal cellular machinery like DNA. As long as lab grown meat is just normal animal cells nothing new is going on.
Where you need to care about each individual molecule is if we where creating food one molecule at a time via a replicator or something so we could have wildly unusual ratios of these individual components. In that context sugar is actually less “natural” than lab grown meat because it’s so concentrated.