Veggie Tales (part 4): Making Good Vegetarian Food Choices

BF Basics: Veggie Tales was composed by four-year post-op and 25-year vegetarian, Kelly, better known as Poet Kelly on Obesity Help. This series is written in her voice with the full endorsement of Bariatric Foodie. If you have any questions for Kelly about any of the information provided, please leave them in the comments and she’ll gladly respond.

• Don’t assume “vegetarian”
  or “vegan” mean healthy.  There is
  lots of vegan junk food out there and vegan or not, it’s still junk
  food.  Vegetarian food products can
  be high in sugar, high in fat and full of all kinds of chemicals you
  wouldn’t want to put in your body.
• Don’t assume the word
  “vegetable” means vegetarian.  For
  instance, canned vegetable soup often contains beef or chicken stock.  Once I bought some frozen vegetable
  fried rice only to find out it actually contained chicken fat!
• Don’t assume prepackaged
  foods are vegetarian just because you would not put meat in them if you
  made them yourself.  A friend of
  mine once found a packaged cake mix that contained beef fat!  I’ve never seen a cake recipe that calls
  for beef fat, but they put all kinds of wacky stuff in packaged foods.
• Don’t assume fake meat
  products, like veggie burgers, have as much protein as real meat.  Some brands will have more protein than
  others.  Read the label.

• Albumen – usually
  comes from egg whites.
• Carmine, carminic
  acid, cochineal – red dye made from crushed beetles.
• Casein, caseinate,
  sodium caseinate – milk protein. 
  Often found in soy cheese (which means they aren’t vegan).
• Gelatin – yes,
  like in Jello.  Made from boiling the
  skin and hooves of horses, cows and pigs.
• Glycerides,
  monoglycerides – animal fat.
• Lactic acid –
  found in blood and muscle tissue.  Use in
  fermented foods like beer and sauerkraut.
• Lard – fat from
  pigs or cows.
• Natural coloring
  – can mean anything, including animal ingredients.
• Natural flavor –
  can mean anything, including animal ingredients.
• Pepsin –from the
  stomach of pigs, used in some cheeses.
• Rennet, rennin –
  from the stomach of calves, used in some cheeses.
• Stearic acid –
  animal fat, sometimes used in chewing gum.
• Vitamin D – when
  foods are fortified with vitamin D, the way milk often is, the vitamin D
  usually comes from animals, often from fish liver oil.
• Whey – a milk
  product.

• Don’t make
  assumptions.  Read labels, including
  the list of ingredients.
• Animal ingredients go by
  many names and can be found in foods you might not expect to find them
  in.  If you want to make sure
  something is vegetarian or vegan, read the ingredients.