Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Follow-up: cholesterol and lactic acid

Cholesterol
Since I found out that cholesterol is found only in animal product, I started reading the nutritional content in addition to the ingredient list. In less than a week, I came across two products: 70% dark chocolate and ready-made thai pesto that don't list any possible animal products, yet have cholesterol in the nutritional info section. Intrestingly, for chocolate, other flavors (also dark) by the same brand were fine. Same for pesto: other types, while having cholesterol, listed cheese as one of the ingredients, and one other kind (can't recall the flavor) had no cheese and no cholesterol. So it looks pretty ambiguios, whether its a copy-past label design error or a mistake in the list. Either way, read both ingredients and nutrients.

Lactic Acid
Now, this one is rather interesting. Numerous sources (vrg.org and wikipedia) both state that industrially used lactae/lactic acid is produced by bacterial fermentation and is suitable for vegans. Some other sources (e.g. the book "Animal Ingredients A to Z" by E.G. Smith Collective) groups them with L-lactate, which is of animal origin. It seems however that it is not economically viable to extract it for separate uses, so it is mainly found in dairy products, while bacterially producted lactic acid is used in non-dairy foods as preservative (my guess, no proof). 

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Char


No, not the volcanically active homeplanet of Zerg race from StarCraft...

... Although not too far off - char is the product of burning bones and hooves; it is used to filter some alcohol drinks (some beers/wines/liquor) and some cane sugar (including some brown sugars). Beet sugar is not filtered with it.

The problem is that char is never listed on the package, because it is not actually an ingredient. Also a lot of products that do not use it, don't state so.
Here is a list of some vegan (un)friendly US sugar-making companies; I haven't found a similar resource for Canada or other parts of the world yet.