Laboratory test showed human DNA in vegetarian sausages

Labor finds meat in alleged veggie HotDogs
Whether horsemeat in ready meals, rotten meat or dioxin in fish: Again and again, new scandals are known around our food. Now employees of an American food laboratory have made another, most unappetizing find: They discovered meat and human DNA in supposedly pure vegetable sausages.

345 vegetarian and non-vegetarian sausages in the test
The message sounds frightening and disgusting at the same time: The American food laboratory "Clear Food" could prove in veggie sausages meat. In addition, just under one-fifth of the products tested had "hygienic problems", most notably human DNA through hair and fingernails.

"Clear Food" investigated 345 vegetarian and non-vegetarian sausages from 75 different brands and 10 different retailers in terms of ingredients and hygiene for its "The Hot Dog Report" study. 14.4 percent of the samples turned out to be "problematic", e.g. in terms of substitutions and hygienic aspects. A "substitution" was given to the lab when ingredients were added to the product that did not appear on the label. Hygienic problems, on the other hand, arose when a kind of non-harmful contamination could be detected in the hot dogs - as in most cases human DNA.

Ten samples contain chicken meat
The laboratory reports that chicken meat, which was not on the label, was found in ten samples alone during the analysis. Likewise, the researchers discovered unrecognized beef (in 4 samples), turkey (3) and lamb (2). In other cases, advertised ingredients were again missing on the label. The result was particularly striking for the products declared as purely vegetable. For here, chicken or pork could be detected in 10 percent of the sausages, and in four of the 21 vegetarian samples tested, there were also hygienic problems. Frightening: The researchers had found human DNA in a total of 2% of the samples, two-thirds of which were vegetarian, according to the lab.

"We were surprised that finished vegetarian sausages faced some fairly serious challenges, including hygiene and substitution issues. We even found traces of meat in vegetarian products, which is worrying, especially because many vegetarians do not eat meat for nutritional, ethical and religious reasons, "says the lab's commentary on their own website. (No)