Hot Dogs Actually Grosser Than You Might Think

Hotdogs – both vegetarian and meat-based – were found to contain a lot more than you bargained for in a new report by a food watch dog group.

Now if that wasn’t surprising enough, the company’s hot dog analysis revealed that 2 percent of the dogs they sampled actually contain human DNA. Last year, Americans spent $2.5 billion on hot dogs, another $2.74 billion on dinner sausages, and over half a billion on breakfast sausage.

These problems were especially prevalent from meat in hot dogs that were labeled as vegetarian or that says it contains pork in kosher labels. One out of every 50 times, to be exact, according to Clear Food, a new California food-analytics start-up whose mission is genetic-testing manufactured food to help fight all of the food-borne illnesses that are seemingly so common.

Hot dogs are often considered as mystery meat and it’s no wonder there’s a myriad of suspicions about what a hot dog is really made of.

The company’s website showed that 375 hot dogs and sausages held another ingredient that was not otherwise specified on the packaging. A few of the ingredients that were advertised on the labels were not likewise found.

No part of the report is going to make anybody crave a hot dog for a while, though a few, like 365’s mild Italian chicken sausage, scored pretty well.

“Pork is a particularly unwelcome substitution in any food when you consider that significant numbers of people do not eat pork for religious reasons”, the report reads “Pork substitution was an issue in products across the price spectrum being sold at a wide variety of retailers”. Clear Labs said that it did not find correlation between price and the Clear Score, which represents how closely the claims of the product label match the actual molecular content.