HERE’S an unlikely food to add to the list of healthy choices for your heart and brain: pork sausages.
There’s just one snag. You’ll have to stomach the idea of eating meat from transgenic pigs. The pigs have been engineered to produce large quantities of omega-3 fatty acids, found at high concentrations in foods such as flax seeds and certain fish. A recent study has questioned the belief that they protect against heart disease (see “60 Seconds”), but this may be because of toxic mercury in fish. Transgenic pork containing omega-3s would avoid this potential problem, and also circumvent fears about over-fishing. Omega-3s are still thought to boost brain power.
A team at Harvard Medical School in Boston used cloning techniques to produce piglets carrying a version of a gene from a nematode worm that converts unhealthy omega-6 fatty acids into omega-3s. Omega-3s made up an average of 8 per cent of the total fat in muscles of the six transgenic pigs, compared with 1 to 2 per cent in normal pigs (Nature Biotechnology, DOI: 10.1038/nbt1198).
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As for the taste of the pigs, no one knows, as the Food and Drug Administration has not approved transgenic pig meat for consumption. For those who prefer a drumstick or a burger, modified chickens and cows are in the pipeline, team member Jing Kang says.
