Posted on 05/23/2012 10:36:05 AM PDT by JohnKinAK
A pro-life leader has won a victory in her efforts to convince soft-drink manufacturer PepsiCo to stop the use of aborted fetal cells in its research for enhancing the flavors of its products. Debi Vinnedge, executive director of Children of God for Life (COGFL), announced that in late April she had received a letter from Paul Boykas, PepsiCo’s vice president for Global Public Policy, confirming that the company will not allow the use of HEK-293 — a cell line derived from human embryonic kidney — in its partnership with Senomyx, the company with which it had inked a four-year, $30 million contract for flavor research.
As reported last November by The New American, a PepsiCo shareholder had filed a resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission in an effort halt the company from contracting with Senomyx, which, according to documents collected by Vinnedge, used cell lines derived from aborted babies in its process of producing artificial flavor enhancers. According to a report by LifeNews.com at the time, Pepsi had “ignored concerns and criticism from dozens of pro-life groups and tens of thousands of pro-life people who voiced their opposition to PepsiCo contracting with biotech company Senomyx even after it was found to be testing their food additives using fetal cells from abortions.”
But after a nearly year-long campaign led by COGFL that included a nationwide boycott of PepsiCo products, in late April Boykas sent a letter to Vinnedge assuring her that PepsiCo would not “conduct or fund research — including research performed by third parties — that utilizes any human tissue or cell lines derived from embryos or fetuses.” Boykas also assured Vinnedge that “Senomyx does not use HEK cells or any other tissues or cell lines derived from human embryos or fetuses for research performed on behalf of PepsiCo.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
Pepsi, it’s people!
Now we need to get vaccine manufacturers to stop also!
They were thinking that they hired a firm to accurately predict how their product would be received by the flavor receptors and this company came up with a method that works. Pepsi is by no means the only company that does this, flavor predicting is big difficult business.
Prolly something along the lines of that this new aborted-fetus cell tech is neat, it’s cool, etc. And also it’s disgusting.
I’m glad that no more Baby Does are being used to verify that the Ya-hoo! is still in the Mountain Dew. Remember the trope that “No animals were harmed in this production”? And this was worse.
Well this company was once run by Mommy Dearest herself.
Exactly. How utterly depraved we have become that someone has to actually point this out to begin with. We are a sick society.
There is no substitute for the old fashioned taste test, if finding good flavors is the key.
What is weird is that these were not taste bud cells being used. These were kidney cells. It appeared to me that they were being used to verify the presence of trace chemicals that add nuance to flavor, so as to maintain the flavor quality of existing formulas.
Say what. I glad I swore of Carbonated Drinks years ago.
Pepsi’s Gatoraid has “Is it in you?” for a slogan. Recon Pepsi Slogan should be “Who is in you”
Actually the old fashioned taste test is horrible. For one thing it’s notoriously inaccurate (you never know what people have eaten recently that effect how things will taste to them), and for another it tends to be expensive to be hauling people in off the street. The “old fashioned” that actually works is even more expensive because it means contracting with members of a very small group that have established themselves as having “accurate” taste buds which they take good care of (there’s a similar nose group for perfumes), these people have the physiology and the training to be able to detect if you enhanced the cherry 10% as was the goal.
It doesn’t matter where the cells came from, cells is cells and once you do the tweaking they do what you want. What’s important is their ability to have predictable bio-electric reactions so you can see the results of your change. Probably what’s going to happen is the testing company is going to secure a line of cells that came from a non-aborted source (possibly live sampling, possibly cadaver) and the process will continue on the same. They were probably being used two ways, testing tweaks in the chemical process designed to get the same taste for cheaper, and testing tweaks in the chemical process designed to make small changes to the flavor.
Depravity sinks to a new low in America.
Thanks for your 2nd paragraph. I was really wondering what the cells were used for.
I don’t drink Pepsi anyway.
To the degree Pepsi continues to do business with this company it continues to ‘sit at the table’ with cannibals.
It doesn’t matter where the cells came from, cells is cells and once you do the tweaking they do what you want. What’s important is their ability to have predictable bio-electric reactions so you can see the results of your change. Probably what’s going to happen is the testing company is going to secure a line of cells that came from a non-aborted source (possibly live sampling, possibly cadaver) and the process will continue on the same. They were probably being used two ways, testing tweaks in the chemical process designed to get the same taste for cheaper, and testing tweaks in the chemical process designed to make small changes to the flavor.
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So why don’t we just open some camps to get rid of useless eaters and use their cells? We could hire Dr. Menegle to remove the proper ones.
You sir, are extremely morally challenged.
Machs nix! We’ve dropped Pepsico.....AND Campbell soups, etc., and will NOT use them again!
Or:
"The taste? It varies, from person to person."
Yeah, now I can try their lower sugar soda.
Also, most of the companies that were using this service bowed out when people asked them to but Pepsi refused. I guess they found out that their customers opinions matter.
You need to learn about logic over emotion. We already use cells for various types of experimentation from ALL the sources I outlined. Cells from live people they’re volunteers, most cells from cadavers also come from volunteers (organ donor, sold their corpse for science). The only non-volunteers are the cells from aborted fetuses. Also you should understand that one sampling goes a long way, they make the cells reproduce post harvest. One little skin scrapping that would wouldn’t even need a bandage to “recover” from can provide experimental cells for thousands of test for decades. Nobody is killing “useless eaters” that’s just hyperbole BS from people that can’t be bothered to understand what they’re talking about.
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