Abu Dhabi: Eating beef burgers without fearing cholesterol and related heart diseases will be possible if the research on laboratory-grown beef burgers progresses further.
Culturing beef in a laboratory is a fully controlled process, which enables removing fatty contents from it, the scientist who developed the world’s first lab-grown hamburger told Gulf News yesterday.
Removing cholesterol and other elements causing cardio-vascular diseases from meat will be one of the major advantages of cultured meat in a laboratory, Dr Mark Post, Professor of Physiology at Maastricht University, said in an interview at the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture in the capital.
He has developed an innovative approach to creating genuine meat from animal stem cells rather than vegetable substitutes.
Explaining the process, he said a small piece of muscle taken from a live cow by administering local anaesthesia can be grown into thousands of kilograms of meat in a laboratory.
“Instead of growing the whole animal, we grow just muscles at a laboratory.”
A few grams of a sample muscle are enough to produce up to 40,000 kilos of meat that is enough to feed 300 people for a year.
Stem cells from the sample muscle are fed by sugar, amino acids, lipids and other nutrients in the limited space of a laboratory.
An amount of 25,000 litres of water with nutrients is enough to produce meat for 40,000 people. Traditional livestock farming requires millions of litres of water to produce the same amount of meat. “We can save 95 per cent of water by culturing the meat.”
Post and his team started the related research in 2005. They started working on laboratory-grown burger in 2011 and made the first product in 2013. Now the laboratory-grown beef costs around $65 (Dh238.55) per kilo. With technological evolution within five to seven years, lab-grown beef is expected to become cheaper than natural meat.
Currently, 70 per cent of arable land is used for growing livestock and fodder. With increased demand, the world cannot afford to grow more animals. So the prices of natural meat are expected to increase in the coming years.
The livestock contributes to climate change by emitting 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
“We don’t employ genetic engineering but depend on natural tendencies of muscles to multiply.”
Nevertheless, nothing comes free. He foresees the risks of generating weak cancerous cells during the production of millions of new cells. But a cancerous cell is killed in a normal digestive system. Otherwise, too, samples of cells can be randomly checked to detect the unstable cells, which can be removed.
He is confident of overcoming such risks involved in the process.
“It will be totally safe,” he said. Moreover food and drug administrations in the US and Europe have stringent norms to approve any food product for marketing.
