Name: Is Meat Glue Safe?
Uploaded: 2014-11-05T04:36:24.000Z
Duration: 2 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The so-called meat glue  enzyme, Transgutaminase

by gluing together smaller  scraps into a larger chunk.

The American Meat Institute  estimates it's used

in about 8 million pounds of meat  every year in the United States.

It can be used to cross-link pieces of  any type of meat, fish, or meat product,

hence can be used to produce large  chunks of virtually intact

looking meat or fish out of  small meat or fish cuttings.

In fact, when these researchers  actually tested for it

in 20 samples of meat  from the supermarket,

they only found meat glue  in salmon and turkey.

I mean, how else are you  going get an improvement

of gelling properties  of minced lizardfish?

For decades, the sole commercial  source of transgutaminase

however the future of meat  glue remains uncertain

because of, as meat scientists describe,  communication difficulties.

One of the reasons the  industry is so excited

about this stuff is because  using meat glue enzymes

under utilized portions  of the carcasses.

For example, you can get away  with adding up to 5% tendons,

and some people can't  even tell the difference.

This has raised food  safety concerns though.

There is a risk that otherwise discarded  leftovers  of questionable microbial quality

could find their way into  the reconstituted meat.

You can actually take a  microscope and see introduced

where meat pieces were  enzymatically attached,

which shows that the  restructuring process

can translocate fecal matter  surface contamination

Furthermore, people who have problems  with gluten may develop problems

when ingesting meat treated  with the meat glue enzyme,

since it functions as an auto-antigen  capable of inducing an autoimmune reaction.