Are human fetal cells used to produce Pepsi?

Question

A friend just came over and apparently Pepsi is made from people.

Or, more specifically:

The aborted human fetal cell line is known as “HEK-293,” and it is used to see how the human palate will react to synthetic flavors. Since most of today’s processed food lacks flavor, companies like Semonyx are hired to develop flavors on their own.

“What they don’t tell the public is that they are using HEK 293 — human embryonic kidney cells taken from an electively aborted baby to produce those receptors,” said Debi Vinnedge of the pro-life group Children of God for Life. “They could have easily chosen animal, insect, or other morally obtained human cells expressing the G protein for taste receptors.”

(though it looks like that post says that they use these cells to develop flavors, not as actual additives).

The claim I heard was that Pepsi contains cells from humans - is this true?

Answer 1

The claims people bring to this site never fail to impress! This is more false than it is true.

1. Pepsi does not contain HEK-293 cells. HEK cells were used to test different kinds of sweeteners to determine their reaction. To repeat, people who drink Pepsi are not drinking anything that originally came from a human. (sources: Forbes, LifeSiteNews)

2. HEK-293 cells were indeed originally derived from an aborted human fetus, but they have been heavily mutated by a virus and are not easily recognizable. For scientific purposes they are a tool, not a research subject or a food, making them not much different in practice than HeLa cells.

   The transformation resulted in the incorporation of approximately 4.5 kilobases from the viral genome into human chromosome 19 ... The type of kidney cell that the HEK293 cell line is unknown, and it is difficult to conclusively characterize the cells post-transformation, since adenovirus 5 could have significantly disrupted cell morphology and expression.

   (source: HEK-293.com)

On the other hand, the use of human cells in biological research is a real ethical and legal issue, as discussed in, for example, the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the court case Moore v. Regents of the University of California.

Answer 2

Pepsi is certified kosher in the US, Mexico, and Canada (source), so there cannot be any human products involved in Pepsi made at those locations, as human flesh is not kosher. Kashrus certification involves intimate knowledge of each ingredient used in the product.

From Wikipedia:

This certification verifies that the ingredients, production process, and/or food-service process complies with the standards of kashrut (Jewish dietary law) as stipulated in the Shulchan Arukh, the benchmark of religious Jewish law.

This at least erases skepticism in the US, Mexico, and Canada. The recipe is presumably the same in different countries.