A federally funded study has found that 20 per cent of sausages sampled from grocery stores across Canada contained meats that weren't on the label.
Lead author Robert Hanner of the University of Guelph says the findings are alarming, but not surprising given studies done in other countries.
He says the Canadian Food Inspection Agency commissioned him to perform the study that examined 100 sausages labelled as containing just one ingredient .
Five of the 15 turkey sausages contained no turkey at all, they were entirely chicken and seven of 27 beef sausages contained pork.
And one of 38 supposedly pure pork sausages contained horse meat.
The results were published this week in the journal Food Control.