2 hours agoShareSaveDr Alicia Graham has a similar story. Working at Imperial College’s Bezos centre in west London, she has found a way to grow an alternative to sugar. It involves introducing a gene found in a berry into yeast. This process enables her to produce large amounts of the crystals that make it taste sweet. It doesn’t make you fat, she says, and so is a potential sweetener and healthy substitute in fizzy drinks.In this case I am allowed to taste it. It was incredibly sweet and slightly sour and fruity, reminding me of lemon sherbet. But Dr Graham’s firm, MadeSweetly, is not allowed to sell it until it gets approval.”The path to getting approval is not straightforward,” she tells me. “They are all new technologies, which are not easy for the regulator to keep up with. But that means that we don’t have one specific route to product approval, and that is what we would like.”The FSA says it will complete a full safety assessment of two lab-grown foods within the next two years and have the beginnings of a faster and better system for applications for approvals of new lab-grown foods. Prof May of the FSA says the purpose of working with experts from the companies involved as well as academics is to get the science right.”It can be quite complex, and it is critical that we understand the science to make sure the foods are safe before authorising them.”But Ms Thomas says that these high-tech foods may not be as environmentally friendly as they are made out to be as it takes energy to make them and that in some cases their health benefits are being oversold.”Lab-grown foods are ultimately ultra-processed foods and we are in an era where we are trying to get people to eat fewer ultra-processed foods because they have health implications,” he said.”And it is worth saying that these ultra-processed foods have not been in the human diet before.” …
