“Its pretty unlikely that the human DNA piece is actually harmful to consumer health,” said Mahni Ghorashi, a Clear Labs founder. “We consider it more of a hygienic issue that degrades the quality of the food.”

Snopes, the rumor-debunking site, was rather more harsh, labeling the information “unproven.”

Consumers should brace themselves for more buzzworthy headlines as genome sequencing gets cheaper and Silicon Valley companies like Clear Labs, Beyond Meat and Soylent try to disrupt eating itself.

Chris Dixon, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Soylent, said a broad cultural fixation on Silicon Valley is focusing attention on new food technology. “People are much more interested in food start-ups now, partly because they are coming out of Silicon Valley, and they have the kind of Silicon Valley approach to things,” he said.

Beyond Meat, for example, is pushing synthetic meat. Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder and investor in the company, described the marketing approach: “Grow the brand as big as you can, like a fake it till you make it type of thing, and then back into it with a stellar product.”

The Clear Labs story was an effort to bring marketing attention to the company’s use of gene-sequencing technology, first pioneered by the Human Genome Project. Looking at regions of the genome called bar code regions, the company identifies traces of animal species in food samples, including those that are not supposed to be there. The Hot Dog Report did contain significant findings, notably that pork had been substituted for chicken and turkey in 3 percent of samples, and that 10 percent of vegetarian products contained real meat.