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Health

This transgenic little piggy boosts your brain

29 March 2006

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…

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