Is there a blood test for this?

Hazelip

Critical Thinker
H
Joined
Dec 8, 2002
Messages
497
Is there a way to test one's blood and determine if meat has been consumed or not?'

I've been googling for a half hour, and I have been unable to find anything other than a fecal occult blood test.

Thanks for any assistance you may be able to to provide,
Jake
 
Faecal occult blood (FOB), is used to determine if there is any blood in faeces, note occult means hidden, so this test is used to find non visible (ie small amounts) of blood in faeces. It is not of use for determing if someone has eaten meat.(its a very messy test apparently yuk!!).

The only thing i can think of is fats in blood. Not sure if there is a biochemical test, but blood plasma goes cloudy after eating a fatty meal (eg meat?).
Im not a biochemist btw so there may be something more useful, but its not a hospital required test (meat eaten)so i assume you would have to use a surogate marker.
 
What are you doing, looking for a way to make sure a vegan is telling the truth ...?


PS: Plants have proteins, and dairy products have proteins and fats.
Broken down it would quite complicated to
divine their constituents from similar ones in meat.
 
The only thing I can think of as an indicator is a haemoglobin test which, fortunately, is painless (one pinprick) and takes all of about 1 second. You can probably get it done for free at your local blood bank.

Haemoglobin is somehow produced by the consumption of red meat. I forget how, though it was explained to me by a chick wearing a nurse's uniform who sounded like she knew what she was talking about. I also got a chart with all the foods that increase haemoglobin levels- vegetables can be good for iron, but still aren't much good for haemoglobin.

Lots of people with low haemoglobin are either vegetarians or only eat chicken/fish as meat.

However, this is only an indicator, not a 'hard and fast' test. There are other things that can cause low haemoglobin such as too much coffee and a rigorous athletic exercise routine.

When the subject of my low haemoglobin came up, we were able to eliminate one cause straight away. :(
 
I am a biochemist, and I'm still racking my brains on this one. For a start, how long would you want the answer to be valid for? Would a test that showed that no meat had been eaten in the previous 24 hours be sufficient, or do you want to prove vegetarianism over a long period?

Faecal occult blood probably wouldn't work. The human-only tests are specific for human haemoglobin, specifically to eliminate false positives due to consumption of meat. But for veterinary species we have to use the basic ones (there are no cat or dog haemoglobin kits), and although we usually advise feeding no red meat before taking a sample, to be quite honest I've had lots of negatives from dogs and cats on ordinary canned pet food. So, a positive would indicate either gut pathology, or yes, meat had been eaten, but a negative would mean nothing.

Measuring blood haemoglobin would prove nothing - even if vegetarians on average have lower haemoglobin than omnivores, the overlap between the groups is bound to be very large.

You can get a bit of lipaemia following a fatty meal, but that isn't guaranteed, and doesn't last very long anyway. And there are other causes of lipaemia.

I think there must be an answer to this, probably based on some sort of amino acid measurements, but there isn't an obvious simple test that I know of.

Rolfe.
 
Mmmm, there is an archaeological method of finding what type diet somebody (usually in skeleton form :eek: ) has been eating. Can distinguish between sea-food and other kinds of meat, and also, I think a predominantly vegetable diet. But I'm sure a single steak would not register.

What would be the purpose of this?

Hans
 
Did anybody watch Autopsy Dead Cases special on HBO? On it, Dr. Baden performs an autopsy on a young man found dead in his house. He samples the stomach contents with a ladle and comments that there are pieces of meat in his stomach contents (ugh, I'm having reflexive nausea here). I would presume that if the meat had not passed into the duodenum, then you could sample it with a tube and have it examined by a pathologist. If it has been several hours, it may be nigh impossible to determine if the chyme has anything non-plant in it, because the pancreatic enzymes quite efficiently hydrolyze any remaining proteins that pepsin has not.
 
Yes, but how recent would the meat meal have to be? And Hazelip specified a blood test.

Maybe amino acids, or maybe fractionating the individual fatty acids would do it. You'd need to get a sizeable database of known meat-eaters and known vegetarians to validate the method though, if this hasn't already been done.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
I am a biochemist, and I'm still racking my brains on this one. For a start, how long would you want the answer to be valid for? Would a test that showed that no meat had been eaten in the previous 24 hours be sufficient, or do you want to prove vegetarianism over a long period?
Click to expand...

Same here, I cannot think of any reliable method other than sampling stomach contents.
 
The only other marker I can think of would be serum creatinine, which rises after meat consumption and tends to be 10-20% lower in vegans. However, its low specificity makes it unsuitable as a screening yes/no test.
 
You can use stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in hair (they did this to the iceman) to determine certain aspects of diet, but one would need to be a fairly strict vegetarian or meat-eater for it to show up. I remember my stable isotope prof telling us about an acquaintance of his that let his hair grow for a while and sampled it at different areas, corresponding to times when he lived in the US and Africa, and could easily see the effects of different diets on his hair isotopes.

I found this, on the website of Spectroscopy Now.com (website: http://www.spectroscopynow.com/Spy/basehtml/SpyH/1,1181,4-5-7-0-44635-ezine-0-2,00.html):

New research on the isotope analysis of the hair of living humans has now been carried out to study the relationship, if any, between diet and recent migration to another part of the world. Roland Bol of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Okehampton, UK and Christian Pflieger from Fachhochschule Jena in Germany measured the isotope values of local people from an English rural community and compared them with values for individuals who had recently arrived from Canada, Chile, Germany and the USA.

The results were revealed at the recent Annual Meeting of the Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometry Users' Group (SIMSUG 2002, see also SIMSUG 2003) and were published in Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom. 2002, 16, 2195. Using the same isotopes (of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur) the diet and origin of the individuals was confirmed. So it was possible to identify an omnivore from the UK, as opposed to lacto-ovo-vegetarians and vegans.
Click to expand...

Does this help?
 
Phaycops said:
You can use stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in hair (they did this to the iceman) to determine certain aspects of diet, but one would need to be a fairly strict vegetarian or meat-eater for it to show up. I remember my stable isotope prof telling us about an acquaintance of his that let his hair grow for a while and sampled it at different areas, corresponding to times when he lived in the US and Africa, and could easily see the effects of different diets on his hair isotopes.
Click to expand...

This is interesting in that hair analysis for nutritional status is usually considered quackery, especially as used by diagnostic labs to show deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, and such.
 
Thank you all very much! A blood test was my first thought, but if another biological test (such as the hair test) could accomplish the task of determining if meat had been eaten, so be it.

The purpose? I'm an aspiring author of fantasy & science fiction. I'm currently working on a story in which Ingrid Newkirk is the head of a U.S. agency responsible for outlawing consumption of meat. If one travels abroad in this world I'm building, and re-enters the country with indications of meat consumption, there is a fine to be paid.

However, I do consider this to be an interesting question, fictional motivation or not. I've encountered several claims that vegetarians are healthier on average than meat-eaters; yet if it proves to be so difficult to distinguish one type of person from another, how can there be a valid basis for the claims? Meanings, if I cannot actually test someone the consumption of meat, how can I ensure that all the “vegetarians” tested do, in fact, abstain from consuming meat?

I'm looking forward to reading more suggestions. This question has been eating at me for days now. ;)
 
Hazelip said:
The purpose? I'm an aspiring author of fantasy & science fiction. I'm currently working on a story in which Ingrid Newkirk is the head of a U.S. agency responsible for outlawing consumption of meat. If one travels abroad in this world I'm building, and re-enters the country with indications of meat consumption, there is a fine to be paid.
Click to expand...

I have to ask the question: why would a U.S. agency outlaw consumption of meat? From a health, economic and regulatory standpoint this is ridiculously implausible.

Hazelip said:
However, I do consider this to be an interesting question, fictional motivation or not. I've encountered several claims that vegetarians are healthier on average than meat-eaters; yet if it proves to be so difficult to distinguish one type of person from another, how can there be a valid basis for the claims?
Click to expand...

I've seen no credible evidence that vegetarians are any healthier than those on any other well-balanced, meat-containing diet.
 
Hazelip said:
The purpose? I'm an aspiring author of fantasy & science fiction. I'm currently working on a story ....
Click to expand...
Oh, that's easy then. It only has to sound moderately plausible, which is a lot easier than actually working.

Just invent an "amino acid screen" or "fatty acid screen", and I'll guarantee that very few of your readers will be in a position to challenge the idea.

Rolfe.
 
BTox said:


This is interesting in that hair analysis for nutritional status is usually considered quackery, especially as used by diagnostic labs to show deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, and such.
Click to expand...

Well, yes, but this is different for many reasons. First and foremost, nobody is using these hair analyses to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease. The only thing it's useful for is telling you what kind of diet someone ate. This has to do with the ways that different plants fix nitrogen. C3 and C4 plants have very different nitrogen isotope signatures, and this difference is consequently moved up the food chain, with a subsequent change to the isotope ratios at each level. Therefore, a strict vegetarian living off corn would have a much different isotopic signature in his/her hair than someone on the Atkins diet. There are also characteristic differences between marine ecosystems and terrestrial ecosystems in terms of nitrogen isotope values, so it is possible to differentiate between a population of Inuits who eat seal, and a population of people with a land-based diet.

Moreoever, you can see differences in one individual over the length of time their hair has been growing, because the residence times (don't know if that's the proper term, but you dig what I'm sayin') of nitrogen in the human body are very short. You can also examine the nirtogen and carbon isotopes of bone collagen or other organs and tissues, which all have diferent turnoever times. The valuable implications of hair are that you can get a record over several years of a person's life, if they've allowed their hair to grow that long. This has implications for anthropology and archaeology, and can also be used on animals.

Here's some websites for you to peruse:
http://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/projects/fingernails/foodweb/isotopes.html

http://www.mankato.msus.edu/emuseum/biology/forensics/diet_and_dentition.html

http://www.staff.brad.ac.uk/mprichar/PRGIntrotoIsotopes.html

http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2002/masseynews/April/April29/stories/cow_hair2.html

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1200/1998_Nov_7/53280921/print.jhtml
 
BTox said:
I have to ask the question: why would a U.S. agency outlaw consumption of meat? From a health, economic and regulatory standpoint this is ridiculously implausible.
Click to expand...
It's FICTION...
I've seen no credible evidence that vegetarians are any healthier than those on any other well-balanced, meat-containing diet.
Click to expand...
I didn't say that there was. I'd only said that I'd heard references, or claims.

Now, from a testing and authentication standpoint, I'm very curious. If there is no way to test, and therefore distinguish, a meat-eater from a vegetarian, how can anyone make any dietary claims? You'd only be taking the word of the test subject as to dietary habits.
 
Hazelip said:
It's FICTION....
Click to expand...

I realize that. No offense intended, I also dabble in writing sci-fi, but as a scientist, I try to stay in the realm of plausibility. Just me, I guess.
 
Hazelip said:
It's FICTION... I didn't say that there was. I'd only said that I'd heard references, or claims.

Fiction indeed. Ever read "Lipidleggin'" by, I think, Asimov, although it's been a long time since I read it?

Now, from a testing and authentication standpoint, I'm very curious. If there is no way to test, and therefore distinguish, a meat-eater from a vegetarian, how can anyone make any dietary claims? You'd only be taking the word of the test subject as to dietary habits.
Click to expand...

Well, if we can make human-hemoglobin specific occult tests, perhaps we could make cow-specific, pig-specific, and bird-specific tests as well?

Perhaps detect residual cow/pig/bird/etc proteins in the system, probably not in the blood, though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom