The Growth Of Scientific Meat: Is It Good Or Bad?
Thanks to technology, we get to have all the stuff we want, and we are accustomed to new, unique situations all the time. Nowadays, you can find more and more products that are grown in a lab, so this leads to a question, is the lab-grown meat good for you or not? Let’s find out.
There’s no secret that animal farming leads to methane pollution and it harms the environment hugely. But the problem is that our planet hosts 7 billion people, and the number will grow for many years to come. And since meat demand is growing all over the world, food companies have to find a way to deal with that demand. Many times, you just can’t offer the huge amount of organic meat that the world wants. So, growing it into the lab can be the right option for these companies.
Creating something like the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat where you have only vegan, plant-based ingredients while also getting the same taste and look that you receive from meat can indeed be the answer. The challenge here is that you will require a lot of time and effort to create this sort of burgers, and creating meat replacements at a large scale can be very hard to do.
But, is scientific meat healthy or not? There are obviously some benefits that come from growing meat into the lab. You start from scratch, so you choose to remove some of the unwanted compounds from regular meat and replace them with things that can suit even the vegan lifestyle.
Some companies that create this type of meat stated that saturated fats are the ones problematic for our body. That being said, lab-grown meat can have omega 3 fatty acids, which are a lot healthier here. The same goes for iron. You will note that there’s a dark side to using heme iron because it can lead to some issues like heart disease or even some cancers.
No matter how much you work on creating the best scientific meat, in the end, you still get to deal with issues that would appear in the case of regular meat too. So, you won’t be able to avoid any health problems anyways, although you may have some ways to postpone their negative effects for a little while.
However, the fact that creating meat in the lab doesn’t cause that much methane pollution and can help us stay away from some infections that come from natural meat is indeed a good idea. Yet you can deal with some issues like listeria, toxoplasmosis and so on.
No matter what type of meat you eat, it’s still meat, and it has its downsides. Scientific meat is no different. Yes, it can be an alternative when we run out of food for the growing population, that’s true. But it’s not the ultimate solution, and it’s certainly not healthier when compared to a vegan lifestyle!