Is That Burger Made of Horse Meat? New Test Detects if You're Eating Beef

There's been a lot of concern about horse meat finding its way into ground meat products. Now, there may be a new way to detect whether or not meat is contaminated. Scientists have developed a fast, cheap alternative to DNA testing in order to distinguish horse meat from beef.

Because horses and cattle have different digestive systems, the fat components of the two meats have different fatty acid compositions. The new method, therefore, examines the differences in the chemical composition of the fat in the meats, using similar technology to a hospital MRI scanner.

In 2013, a horse meat scandal swept across the world. Horse meat was discovered in a number of beef burgers and soon after, horse meat was detected in other meat products. This led to millions of pounds worth of food being taken off of supermarket shelves. This particular incident exposed the potential vulnerability of the meat supply chain to fraud and even to threats to public health. Yet because testing at the time relied on DNA to determine meat species, it was difficult to quickly determine whether or not meat was contaminated.

This new approach, though, solves that issue. The key to the new method is technology called "Pulsar," a high resolution bench-top NMR spectrometer developed by Oxford Instruments. The scientists only need to spend a couple of minutes shaking about a gram of meat in a solvent followed by a few minutes of data acquisition on Pulsar. This new technique can effectively tell horse meat from beef.

"It's a stroke of luck really that some of the most important meats turn out to have fat signatures that we can tell apart so easily with this method," said Kate Kemsley, one of the researchers, in a news release. "It's been very satisfying to see results from a real industrial setting sit right on top of those we generated in our two labs. We think this testing method should work well at key points in the supply chain, say at meat wholesalers and processers."

The findings are published in the journal Food Chemistry.

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