Carbon monoxide keeps meat looking red longer

Carbon monoxide keeps meat looking red longer

Shoppers who judge the freshness of meat by its color may be deceived by a relatively new industry practice of treating meat with carbon monoxide, critics say.

The meat industry defends the use of carbon monoxide to help meat retain its pink hue, saying large sums of money are wasted when sellers throw away meat that is still safe to eat but is not as attractive because it is slightly brown.

"Color is the number one indicator that's used" in selecting meat, said Don Berdahl, vice president of Kalsec Inc., a maker of natural food extracts in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In November, Kalsec filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration seeking a ban on the use of carbon monoxide in meat packaging.

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Bet you didn't know about this! I sure didn't. Yikes!

:shk:

What would be the physiological implications of eating meat treated with carbon monoxide? Could it cause damage as CO is more readily absorbed by the haemaglobin in the blood than oxygen?

and just when you thought that there were too many hazardous additives in our foods

bright red rotten meat, yummy!

I hear they use a similiar technique to keep white meat tuna looking white. Thinking about it, is there anything that's safe to eat or not tainted?

Nitrosamides are also used to keep meats red longer, especially hot dogs. Nitrosamides are chemicals specific granular lymphocytes (I want to cay it's neutrophils) use in your body. It's a carcinogen. Yum!

~MGP

Nitrosamides are also used to keep meats red longer, especially hot dogs. Nitrosamides are chemicals specific granular lymphocytes (I want to cay it's neutrophils) use in your body. It's a carcinogen. Yum!

Wow....if you were here bsl, I'd attempt to give you a hug. You have actually agreed with someone else's post and even mentioned the use of a carcinogen......I'm feeling verklempt....talk amongst yourselves.

Its just another marketing ploy to make the food look better than it actually is. The absolute worst trick they use is to pick tomatoes while they are still green, put them on a truck and pump it full of nitrogen which turns them red on the way to the market. They usually look good but they don't taste anything like a tomato should taste.

Its a disgrace.

Wupy

The thread is a sign of the times

Now, I have no judgment one way or the other whether adding CO to meat is healthy for us, but to point that it "keeps meat red, suppresses odors and slime" and other tell-tale signs that the meat may be getting old is bull-hockey and a sign that we haven't got a clue what "aged" meat means.

I give you a point to measure from - I sat and watched a gourmet cooking class video once in which the gourmet instructor stated to wrap a prime roast in a white towel, place it in the refrigerator, and leave it there for three weeks in order to properly age the meat and naturally tenderize it.

If you can't grow something that could actually reach out and bite your face off by wrapping a piece of meat in a white towel for 3 weeks, it can't be grown.

Spoil-ed-ness...forgetting what can kill you and what can't.

Like I said, dont' know how healthy it is to add CO to something we're about to eat, but aged meat won't kill you if you cook it properly.

[edit on 2-24-2006 by Valhall]

Yuck.

I get properly aged meat from the family ranch - and there is a HUGE difference in taste from supermarket meat. Plus, supermarket meat gives me a stomache ache - but aged meat from the family farm does not.

Originally posted by soficrow
Yuck.

I get properly aged meat from the family ranch - and there is a HUGE difference in taste from supermarket meat. Plus, supermarket meat gives me a stomache ache - but aged meat from the family farm does not.

hmmm...I wonder if the difference is the CO? I personally don't know what having CO in your meat would do to you in general, or your tummy specifically. In the big anitoxidant thingy - what are the constituents that red meat is alleged to break down into that starts attacking you? The reason I ask is I wonder if adding CO to the equation would make more of them.

P.S. Follow-up pondering...and what does the CO do during cooking??? Does it interact with the chemicals of the meat and make something new? Does it get released? Do we get brain damage cooking CO injected meat? Could we all pass out and die if we had a huge in-door meat-fest cooking this stuff at the same time?

See, when I start wondering, I wonder big. I also wander big...but that's another personal problem we'll discuss else where.

[edit on 3-5-2006 by Valhall]

I have known this for a long time. Perhaps because I watch the show "Good Eats" on the food network all the time.

Tomatoes are artificially turned red with Ethylene gas. This really just turns them red and does not ripen them. Thats why a vine ripe tomato you grow in your garden is so much better when red.

Its the same for Bananas to turn them yellow they are gased as well

Some strawberries contain fish genes to deter frostbite

Originally posted by Valhall
P.S. Follow-up pondering...and what does the CO do during cooking??? Does it interact with the chemicals of the meat and make something new? Does it get released? Do we get brain damage cooking CO injected meat? Could we all pass out and die if we had a huge in-door meat-fest cooking this stuff at the same time?

See, when I start wondering, I wonder big. I also wander big...but that's another personal problem we'll discuss else where.

Jeez. I wish you hadn't asked those questions. Now I will get distracted and start researching. Again. Looking for that ever present prion connection of course.

Good questions.

Okay Valhall, here it is. A quick search - twas but a minor distraction after all.


Protein misfolding and rapid folding occurs with three main known catalysts: photochemical triggering, temperature or pressure jump, and ultrarapid mixing methods. Carbon monoxide (CO) is commonly used in research to trigger rapid protein folding, and can create misfolded proteins - which can become infectious prions inside living systems.

As both CO and heat are known to trigger protein misfolding, one can assume that cooking meat treated with CO is pretty much guaranteed to create infectious prions.

The main site of CO-protein interraction appears to be in blood - carbon monoxide and oxygen both bind to hemoglobin and myoglobin. The binding process involves "alloteric mechanisms" - which in turn involve protein folding. Pathological binding involves protein misfolding.

Methods for rapid initiation of protein folding can be roughly classified into three categories: photochemical triggering, temperature or pressure jump, and ultrarapid mixing methods. The first fast-folding study employed a photochemical trigger: the photodissociation of carbon monoxide from denatured cytochrome c ( 17, 59). This experiment takes advantage of the fact that CO binds much more strongly to the heme of the denatured protein than to the heme of the native protein.

Basic Ideas of Fast-Folding Methods

***

Aside from its role in transporting oxygen to our tissues, a process critical to life, hemoglobin is a model system for understanding allostery. Allostery is a mechanism that regulates the function of many proteins by changing the shape of an active site on the protein when a ligand binds to another site. Hemoglobin is highly amenable to such studies, because it binds ligands such as carbon monoxide

Dynamics of Biomedical Molecules in Vision, Allostery, and Folding

***

...carbon monoxide, ...binds tightly to the heme and blocks formation of the native link between the Met80 sulfur and the heme iron

Protein Folding, Structure and Function

***

Absorption of a photon by myoglobin breaks a bond between the central iron atom and a carbon monoxide molecule, initiating a series of spectroscopic and structural changes, ultimately followed by rebinding of the carbon monoxide.

12 Experimental Techniques at Synchrotron Light Source Beamlines

***

The early work of Ansari et al. [36] showed the existence of “protein-quakes”, i.e. the cascading relaxation of myoglobin after the photodissociation of carbon monoxide. The protein-quake is an example of the wide-spread self-organized criticality phenomena [37, 38], where an increasing tension is met with a restricted relaxation.

Water and molecular chaperones act as weak links of protein folding networks: energy landscape and punctuated equilibrium changes point towards a game theory of proteins

.

PS. I really am intrigued by the notion of "protein quakes" referred to in the last article. Suspect you may relate to that one Val.



[edit on 5-3-2006 by soficrow]

I grew up with aged meat, because that was once link to my family Spanish roots last name still to this day our last name is used on some of the best aged hams and meats even when we don't have the business anymore since before I was born.

Still the tradition of aging meats is still with the family and I always thought that aged meat is meat salted to dried out in sheds in the back yard.

We called "Carne vieja" o "tazajo" means old meat.

It doesn't look at all to what I have seen in the markets around here.

To many consumers that are used to visual confirmation for freshness on products like meat this is going to be a bad idea.

Now people will have to check the expiration days for reassurance and taking in consideration some businesses will play with those also I wonder how long it will take before people will start to get sick after consuming red pretty meat.