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SoylentRox t1_itamong wrote

Reply to comment by TorchOfHereclitus in 3D meat printing is coming by Shelfrock77

Remember those biology classes they made you take when you trained to be a nutritionist?

I mean you do have a degree, right?

Well in those classes they probably taught you that cells grow together into organs. A chunk of 'steak' from a cow is part of a muscle organ.

So if you grew the same cells in a vat, probably in separate vats, one for each cell type - and assembled the cells into the same geometric shape as the organ - then the nutritional value will be the same.

Or slightly better - you can manipulate very easily the kind of fat the adipose cells make, right. Cows don't make enough omega-3 fatty acids but there is no reason your lab grown version has to work that way. Just edit the genes slightly so you get the fat ratio you want.

This would be better then. As a nutritionist you'd have to start putting people on a fish/lentils/lab grown beef diet.

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TorchOfHereclitus t1_itanrmi wrote

That's an interesting theory. Not so certain that the nutritional value would be the same if it just had the same cells and same geometric shape, but I get where you're going with it. There's just something about an organ or tissues in the body that are grown and developed that we haven't nailed down yet in replicating it, but we'll get there eventually. I'm also deeply interested in genetic engineering, and hope to see the day where we could make superior meat artificially, among other leaps and bounds we could make.

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SoylentRox t1_itav3hc wrote

>that we haven't nailed down yet in replicating it, but we'll get there eventually

So that's not how this works. You can grind up the real muscle tissue and the fake muscle tissue and assay out how much of each amino acid and how much of each lipid type is in the sample.

At this point you can modify the genes for the lab grown cells until it has the nutritional profile you want. If it exactly matches the beef steak sample, it is nutritionally the same. It doesn't matter the path taken to grow it.

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