Thursday, May 31, 2012

Horsemeat: The Way of the Future?


            Walking through the streets of Venice, Italy, I knew I’d eventually find a surprising difference between the Italian and American cultures.  Little did I know it would come by walking in front of a meat store and stumbling upon a depiction of a horse made using window marker.  After a careful inspection, I determined it was actually horse meat being sold on the other side of the window, something I’ve never seen in the states.  It’s just something I had never been exposed to in my life.  After more research, it turns out that horse meat is not as unusual in diets as I previously believed.  Although it’s considered taboo to eat horse meat in some cultures, the Dutch MMA star Alistair Overeem contributed his fifty pound weight gain of muscle to a diet in which horse meat was essential (1).


            From a purely medical standpoint, the consumption of horsemeat is highly endorsable.  This stems from the fact that horse meat helps prevent artery illness and cardiovascular diseases due to the low ration of fat to protein in horsemeat compared to that of beef.  The average horsemeat contains only 2.7 percent of the fat required in an average daily diet, while encompassing 20.6 percent of the recommended protein intake.  The average beef contains 22.1 percent of the fat required for an average day, while only providing 17.2 percent of protein nutrients.  The high protein to fat ratio places horsemeat as one of the healthiest types of meat (2).

            In 2002, a study was performed to determine the technological feasibility of using horsemeat to replace some of the beef in an average human diet.  Similar to how we have learned in our classes that olive oil must be robustly tested to pass as “extra virgin olive oil”, this paper dealt with comparing horsemeat to regular beef.  For comparing these two meats, many tests were run and analyzed.  First, the pH of a sample of each meat was sampled over fifteen days in storage.  To determine the hydroxyproline content (which corresponds to the collagen content) in both horsemeat and beef, a sample of each was prepared and read using visible spectroscopy.  The data collected was transformed into a standard curve to determine the hydroxyproline or collagen content of each meat.  Another test implemented by the research group dealt with the sensory analysis of the meats.  A group of panelists was selected to compare samples of the horsemeat and beef against controls of the raw meat color.  The panel also judged flavor, juiciness, and tenderness of the horsemeat and beef samples on a 10-point scale.  After all of the data from these tests and others not listed was collected, the research group performed statistical analysis on the gathered data.  Concluding the work done by the research group, horsemeat seems to be a possibility for replacing beef in a human diet if certain additives were incorporated into the horse meat to account for discrepancies with the quality of the meat (3).  How hard it would be to mass produce horse meat is still unknown.  Even if a method to mass produce horsemeat was discovered, whether or not cultures would adapt to eating horsemeat after considering it to be taboo is another obstacle horsemeat would have to overcome to be a substantial portion of any diet.

References:
(1) Alistair Overeem
(2) Horsemeat as Precious Nutrition
(3) Physicochemical, Sensory, Functional, and Microbial Characterization of Horse Meat

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