Issue #68 | Franken-chicken: free from human proteins (phew) | Is it or isn't it - TiO2 confusion | Golden Wind Awards |
2022-12-12
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Titanium dioxide (E171) safety
Cultured chicken meat - why it contains cow hormones and blood products from foetuses, but no human cells (!)
The Golden Wind Awards for misleading food products
News and Resources Roundup with lots of free resources
Food fraud news, incidents and updates
Hi there, Happy Monday,
Welcome to Issue 68 of The Rotten Apple. This week is the last week of our cultured meat learning series. Thanks for indulging my fascination with all things bio-reactor 😊. My favourite cultured chicken fact this week is that the recently approved (sort of) US-made cultured chicken meat doesn’t/won’t contain human cells. And the manufacturer felt the need to spell that out in their FDA submission? Okayyy.
Also this week, an update on the titanium dioxide safety saga - is it cancerous or not? The European Union just changed its mind. We learn what that means for the future regulatory status of every confectioner’s favourite white colouring agent.
Voting time! Back in July, I asked you, dear readers, whether you are interested in live events and forty per cent of you said “yes”, with live events especially appealing to paying subscribers. This week I need your help to design one or more live events for 2023. Please click the buttons in the poll to make your voice heard.
By the way, 👏 94% of respondents of the last survey said they enjoy this newsletter 😊 Results of that survey, including reader demographics, can be found in Issue #51.
Our ‘Just for Fun’ topic this week is a Dutch consumer group’s end-of-year round-up of misleading food products.
As always, this issue ends with food fraud incidents and food fraud updates behind the paywall. You can check it out - and all the other benefits of a paid subscription - with a free 7 day trial, just click the green button on the paywall.
Thank you for reading, and have a lovely week,
Karen
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Cover image: Arib Neko on Unsplash
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Is it or isn’t it? What’s going on with Titanium dioxide
Last month, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled to overturn the European Commission’s 2019 classification of titanium dioxide (food additive E171) as a carcinogen.
What wait, the popular white food colouring agent titanium dioxide (E171) is cancer-causing? Yes! Or maybe, no. It’s complicated.
Background
In 2019, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) ruled that titanium dioxide is cancerous. To breathe in. If your lungs were already ‘overloaded’.
This prompted the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to look at titanium dioxide, and they decided there was not enough scientific evidence to confirm it is safe in food. They said there has not been enough research to be able to rule out genotoxicity when consumed and as a result, they could not set a limit for ‘safe’ exposure. Titanium dioxide particles have been shown to accumulate in the body, although at low levels.
Titanium dioxide consequently got banned for use as a food additive in Europe.
The ban, which came into effect in August 2022, after a six-month transition period, was enacted as a ‘regulation’ in the EU, rather than a ‘directive’, meaning the ban took immediate effect and did not first have to be added into each country’s local laws.
It was also banned as an animal feed additive by the European Commission in November 2021.
It was not banned in most other countries, including Britain, Canada and the USA. It is allowed at levels up to 1% in foods in the USA.
The cancer-decision annulment
The European legal system annulled the decision that made titanium dioxide a cancerous-classified chemical because they said it had been based on insufficient evidence:
“The requirement to base the classification of a carcinogenic substance on reliable and acceptable studies was not satisfied.”
The court found that the risk assessment process used to classify titanium dioxide as a carcinogen did not take all the relevant factors into account, particularly that titanium dioxide particles are only carcinogenic to breathe when they are in a particular form, physical state and size. And only when the lungs are already overloaded.
So is it allowed in food?
The annulment doesn’t affect titanium dioxide’s status as a food additive. The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) has not changed its decision and the additive is still banned in food in Europe. It is still allowed in other countries.
Where might you be exposed to titanium dioxide?
In Europe, the EFSA listed the main sources of dietary exposure as fine bakery wares, soups, broths, sauces, salads, savoury-based sandwich spreads and processed nuts.
In America, you will find titanium dioxide in coffee creamer, salad dressing, candy and sweets, chocolate, chewing gum, snacks, sauces and vitamin supplements.
But is it safe or not?
The challenge with safety risk assessments for titanium dioxide is that the size of the particles affects what happens to them when eaten. Particles of titanium dioxide do accumulate in the body, but it’s not known exactly how bad that might be.
Smaller particles of titanium dioxide have different technical characteristics to larger particles, and it is thought that modern titanium dioxide food additives might have much smaller particle sizes than they did in the past.
The problem is that much of the safety data about titanium dioxide in food was collected decades ago when the particles were (probably) bigger.
Nanoparticles generally possess dramatically different physicochemical properties compared to fine particles of the same chemical compound and there is evidence that nanoparticles are more toxic than larger particles. For example, nanoparticles of titanium dioxide that are injected in high doses can induce pathological lesions of the liver, spleen, kidneys, and brain. In another study, nanoparticles were 40 times ‘better’ at inducing lung damage than fine particles.
The pharmaceutical research industry has been investigating the use of nanoparticles of titanium dioxide to deliver oral drugs effectively. In their studies, it has been found to be effective at moving from the gut into other tissues in rats.
While eating small amounts of titanium dioxide is probably harmless, we don’t know how much is too much. There is not enough data to set a safety limit and this is the basis of the EFSA ruling that banned its use as a food additive.
Skittles Lawsuit
A man sued Mars Wrigley in the USA claiming that their candy, Skittles contains a “known toxin” (titanium dioxide) that makes it “unfit for human consumption”. Skittles in Europe don’t contain the additive.
What can you use instead of E171?
This article describes a new additive that works as a “natural whitening agent”. It’s based on calcium carbonate and rice protein encapsulation and “provides excellent opacity”. Other alternatives to E171 are based on corn starch, calcium phosphate and proprietary emulsion technology and rice starch.
Are there other additives banned in Europe but allowed in the USA?
Yes, including azodicarbonamide, a whitening agent used in the US in bakery foods like breads, bagels, pizza and pastries. Azodicarbonamide has been banned in Europe for more than a decade. The clean food movement calls it the ‘“yoga mat chemical” because it is used in consumer plastics. It has been linked to cancer in mice.
Sources:
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-titanium-dioxide-banned-food-additive-eu
https://www.webmd.com/diet/titanium-dioxide-in-food
Scientific opinion on the safety assessment of titanium dioxide as a food additive (E171)
🍏 Learn more about how US and EU food additive safety assessments are done in this The Guardian article. 🍏
More surprising facts about cultured chicken meat
Okay okay, I promise this is the last post about cultured meat for a while….
If you missed the previous few issues, here’s a quick recap. Last month the US FDA declared cultured chicken meat ‘safe’, and shared details of the specific manufacturing process that was the subject of the ‘safe’ ruling, including plenty of technical insights.
The technical document contained some facts that were surprising (to me). I’ve been learning more and writing about them in this newsletter ever since.
Last week I wrote about how this particular cultured meat process makes use of genetically engineered ‘immortal’ chicken cells. This week, I address the slightly icky facts around foetal bovine serum and growth hormones in cultured meat production.
Cultured meat production can require a not-insignificant, ongoing supply of fresh cow foetuses
Getting animal cells to grow outside the body is a tricky business. Without blood vessels and other structures that usually deliver nutrients and remove waste, free-floating animal cells need to be bathed in a rich liquid that promotes their growth and helps them flourish.
The liquid used in cultured cell production processes contains a mix of rich proteins and growth promoters, usually derived from the non-haemoglobin parts of animal blood: serum. The best animal serum contains the most efficient growth-promoting elements and is derived from the blood of foetuses, usually bovine (cow) foetuses.
Yup, baby cows ‘excised’ from their pregnant mothers at slaughter are drained of their blood to produce the cultured meat industry’s miracle grow juice, foetal bovine serum (FBS).
Foetal bovine serum supplies are dependent on the slaughtering of cows, which goes against the cultured meat industry’s stated goal of improving animal welfare and reducing our reliance on farmed animals. It is also outrageously expensive. One cultured meat expert estimated (in 2018) that it takes 50 litres of serum to make a single cultured beef burger. At a cost of hundreds of dollars per litre of FBS, the cost is so prohibitive that the authors of this paper state that “a serum requirement for [the cultured meat manufacturing] process would render it completely infeasible at scale”.
The cultured meat industry is working hard to find alternatives to FBS for its culture media, and at least one company has declared success in removing the need for FBS in its process. As for the company that achieved safety approval from the FDA last month, Upside Foods, it is “currently optimizing its process to phase out the use of whole animal serum, as well as animal serum constituents, during the meat production phase.”
But they are clearly not able to phase out FBS yet, which means that their cultured meat still relies on the slaughtering of animals.
Cultured chicken meat is likely to contain bovine (cow) ‘growth factors’ (hormones) – but (good news!), no human protein
Getting chicken cells to grow outside a chicken body is difficult, but growth-promoting chemicals help. In fact, such chemicals are a necessary ‘ingredient’ in the production of cultured meat. There are many different compounds that can promote growth, including hormones, small biological molecules that can interact with receptors inside cells.
You might imagine that chicken cells would grow best with chicken-specific growth promoters, but the Upside Foods process makes use of bovine (cow) ‘growth factors’, not chicken growth factors, at least for now. For as long as their culture media contains foetal bovine serum, it also contains bovine growth factors.
It isn’t clear how much of these cow-derived hormones will end up in the final chicken meat – perhaps not much – but this mixed-species growing system makes the meat seem perhaps a little more ‘Frankenstein’ and a little less ‘clean and green’ than their marketing department might like.
The good news? No human proteins. Well, that’s comforting! Upside Foods explains, in its response to the FDA’s requests for clarification (p 12), that the company does not use “human cell culture systems” and that “human recombinant growth factors are avoided.” Glad we got that cleared up! (But can’t believe they had to spell it out in their submission)….
Growth factors are not explicitly approved as novel food ingredients but they are naturally present in conventionally raised meat. The company assured the FDA that it “only uses growth factors with protein sequences that are 100% homologous to those from agriculturally important animals with a history of safe consumption (e.g., bovine, porcine, chicken)”. Porcine?! I wonder what the Kosher authorities would say about that…
Sources:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/scaling-clean-meat-serum-just-finless-foods-mosa-meat
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369703X1830024X
https://www.fda.gov/media/163262/download
By the way, is it ‘cultured’ or ‘cultivated’ meat?
The Upside Foods FDA submission uses the term ‘cultured meat’. But in Asia-Pacific, a group of stakeholders recently agreed to use the term ‘cultivated’ meat, rather than cultured meat when using the English language. That decision also needs to be translated into Asian languages. The group comprised cellular agriculture companies from China, Korea, Japan and Australia. The agreement was reached in Singapore which is the world’s first market for cultured meat, with approved cultivated chicken and a microbial-sourced protein ingredient.
More reading…
This fascinating scientific paper describes how cultured meat bioreactors might work at scale and discusses the cost of setting up and running a full-sized production facility for cultured meat. The writers estimate that (optimistically), American-grown cultured meat could be produced for $63 per kg, if technology improves and if the cost of growth media can be reduced.
🍏 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154322000916?via%3Dihub 🍏
News and Resources
Click the link below for a carefully handcrafted selection of food safety news and resources from around the globe. It’s been expertly curated (by me! 😎) and is free from filler, fluff and promotional junk.
Just for fun – Dutch Consumer Group Laughs Ruefully At Misleading Products
Nominations for this year’s Het Gouden Windei (Golden Wind Egg) award include
a Kellogg breakfast cereal that has had 25% shrinkflation - there is less product in the box, but it’s not much cheaper to buy;
iced teas that claim to provide ‘Inner Beauty’ and ‘Feel Immune’ but are mostly sugar and water; plus
an ‘artisan’, ‘grandma’s’ salad that contains artificial preservatives and sweeteners.
Vote now:
What you missed in last week’s email
· Surprising facts about cultured chicken
· Lessons from a Hep A outbreak
· News and Resources Roundup - with three weird recalls
· Not for fun: the ugliness of food fraud up close
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