What Are Hybrid Foods?

Hybrid foods are those that will not grow in nature. This group includes fruits and vegetables that are bred selectively rather than evolving over time. It also includes hybrid meat — meatlike products made from a combination of animal and plant ingredients.

Learn more about hybrid foods, what they are, where they come from, and potential health benefits.

Hybrid Produce and Genetic Engineering

Hybrid fruits and vegetables are not created through genetic engineering. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), hybrid foods don't use genetically modified organism (GMO) technology. Instead, hybrids combine traditional pollination that can ordinarily occur in nature with controlled pollination techniques that enable the breeding of new generations of plants with desirable characteristics. This can lead to fruits and vegetables with uniform sizes and shapes, increased juiciness, improved taste, and better nutrition.

Hybrid produce is created when two different varieties or types of a fruit or vegetable are cross-bred to create a new variety. A grapefruit, for example, is a hybrid fruit that was made from the cross-breeding of a pomelo and a sweet orange. This, however, does not mean it is a GMO food.

Combining fruits through hybridization can create nearly endless variations. For instance, you can combine apricots and plums in different ways to create apriums, plumcots, and pluots, which all have different qualities, according to Foodwise.

Potential Health Benefits

Hybridization lets growers create healthier foods in an incremental fashion, one generation at a time, according to the USDA. This results in produce that is more uniform in size and color, and experts say the method can also increase a food’s nutritional value.

According to a review of the research, hybridization may increase the number of antioxidant compounds in fruit. The technique may also increase the food’s antioxidant capacity, which helps the nutrients more effectively combat disease. The review authors suggest that eating more antioxidant-rich hybrid fruits can lead to decreases in neurodegenerative diseases, inflammatory diseases, cancer, and diabetes.

Researchers are also making hybrid food healthier. One example of this is beef rice, a hybrid food made by integrating cow muscle stem cells in grains of rice. According to a study in Nutrients, hybrid rice has 8.66 percent more protein than conventional rice. As a bonus, when considering the amount of carbon emissions it takes to create 100 grams of protein, the hybrid rice also needed significantly less energy compared with traditional beef and rice.

Examples of Hybrid Foods

Hybrid fruits include:

• Seedless apples
• Varieties of dates and kiwis
• Seedless pineapples
• Seedless citrus
• Seedless grapes
• Seedless persimmons
• Seedless watermelons

Common hybrid vegetables include:

• Beets
• Carrots
• Corn
• Potatoes
• Celery
• Cauliflower

Examples of other hybrid foods are:

• Hybrid meat products, which blend animal protein with plants
• Legumes, such as beans and soy
• Nuts, including cashews and almonds
• Seeds
• Grains such as oats, rice, and wheat
• Wheat grass
• Herbs, including goldenseal, ginseng, echinacea, chamomile, aloe vera, nutmeg, comfrey, and garlic