Post Punk Kitchen Forum

What? Every time I look one up, it's vegan. Maybe I just have some innate, built-in vegan beer detector. That, or I'm South Australian so I just have Coopers flowing through my veins and don't need to venture far from the nest.

Well, I guess I think of XXXX as our most popular brand, and it isn't. And I'm pretty sure VB isn't, either.

You guys rock! This helps a ton! And it's always nice to know you're not alone.

I used to live next door to Coopers when it was in Leabrook!

Whaaa? I have to worry about olives, too? shiitake.

I had a mis-step earlier this year with ice cream that I thought was just coconut-milk ice cream. Silly me, it had dairy cream as well as coconut milk.
Reading labels is imperative.

It would never even occur to me to check olives, unless they were stuffed with something that looked like dairy.

Oh, peanuts that contain gelatin . So weird and seemingly uncessary.

It took me forever to find vegan olives here.

Our government decided to add an extra €1 to the price of a bottle of wine in the budget. Wine is just being slowly destroyed for me.

My understanding from reading numerous health websites, doctor's and dietician's websites/books, etc., is that cholesterol only comes from animal products. If there are miniscule amounts of cholesterol in a product, it must have some ingredient (perhaps in the "natural flavoring") that is not necessarily listed which came from animals. Either that or the company doesn't know the true meaning of cholesterol. For example, I was at a grocery store that had information above the fruits, vegetables, etc. in the front of the store. Next to avocados, it said "low in cholesterol"...if they meant low as in NO cholesterol, then that's true;) Vegan ingredients can have saturated fats or even transfats which your body uses to produce cholesterol (and do sometimes have plant sterols--which act in the body in a more positive way than dietary cholesterol), but only animal products contain cholesterol.

At my school they had Frito-Lay products in the vending machines for a while. Some of their chips (such as plain Lay's, plain Frito's, etc.) were vegan. Then they switched to some cheaper off-brand and I bought some plain potato chips that contained milk. I gave them away. Then I was at a meeting where they had containers of snack crackers and the peanut butter crackers (on wheat toast) had milk in them. It can be irritating sometimes. I know I'm not as good as some of you about keeping up with the lactylates and such. For one, I have no apps as I have an idiot phone (it won't text, doesn't have a camera, etc.) that I only use in rare cases to make a phone call--mainly for emergencies. I do, as other mentioned, looked at the allergen label first, then cholesterol, then I look for the ones I know (whey, honey, lanolin, etc.).

I have never in my life read so many labels as I do now. Also, after tons of reading online I have decided to always read labels even if I have bought the item before. They reformulate things all the time and sometimes even different manufacturing plants can have different recipes for the same item. So unless something has the certified vegan on it, I am reading the label.


A lot of vegetarian cheeses have casein (milk product) it them. Lots of fake meats have egg whites in them. Makes me so mad.

I believe egg whites are used to filter/clarify some wines.

Yup, cholesterol is an animal product only. Plants have something similar called plant sterols but they aren't cholesterol.

I forgot about that! It happened to me, I bought a coconut sorbet thing. I didn't even check the ingredients.

Plants do in fact contain very low levels of cholesterol ("plant sterol" is a generic term, by the way, and includes cholesterol among other more common sterols). However, the amount of cholesterol in plants is so low that it should never be an amount that would wind up on a food label for a normal serving size, it would always be rounded down to zero - if the food label has cholesterol listed, it's not vegan (unless it's an error - sometimes companies will put a generic label on multiple types of the same kind of food, you may be eating a vegan food with a non-vegan label). Even though cholesterol on the label = animal products in the food, that doesn't mean that plants can't contain cholesterol.

http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/choles.htm

One of the classes I took (nutrition? biology? physiology?) indicated that cholesterol was specifically reserved for animal-based sterols which is where I was basing my information. They also said that plant-based sterols were not called cholesterol. The way labeling is done though, it may not be differentiating.

The point of the blurb I linked to was actually that this is often taught wrong and that the information is often wrong in college textbooks. I think it would be especially likely to be taught wrong in a nutrition class. Plant sterols definitely include cholesterol as well as like hundreds of other sterols.

Here's the full article for reference (with an easy-to-read chart about cholesterol levels in various plant oils): http://chemistry.osu.edu/~gopalan.5/file/7B.PDF

And another article about measuring cholesterol levels in plant oils: http://www.pjbs.org/pjnonline/fin1055.pdf

P.S. Sterols found in plants are called "phytosterols." Sterols found in animals (like humans) are "zoosterols." There is overlap between the sterols plants produce and the sterols animals produce, since of course many of our cell structures and functions are the same. Cholesterol could be classified as both a zoosterol and a phytosterol, but plays a much bigger role in animals.

That makes sense. Reminds me of what our chemistry teacher told us in that in order to simplify things, they often explain things 'wrong' in intro classes and then correct things later on in advanced classes.

Yeah, that's annoying. As though we're not paying attention! And what about the people who only take the intro class - disseminating false information into the world forever!

Ouch... actually I don't take things personally but it sounds perfectly plausible/believable. Based on this thread, it seems that no vegan items should list cholesterol even if there are trace amounts and it sounds like it may be an error if it does.

Just to clarify- I don't take it personally, but it offends the sciency part of my brain when false information is spread to students because instructors feel that reality is too complicated.

And yes, no vegan item should list cholesterol unless it's a mistake/the label is not really for that product.

if it's never going to be listed on the label and it exists in the amount of 1mg/kg, then I disagree that we should still teach about minuscule amounts of cholesterol in plant foods in something like an into to nutrition class. I think it's fine to say that only animal ingredients contain cholesterol because, as far as eating food goes, when would that ever matter? In a biology course it would make sense to talk about it, but not really in nutrition.

ETA:: I do see your point, Ariann. From a science perspective, it's annoying when things are wrong, but I think simplifying is an important part of both learning and disseminating nutrition information. And if you ever want to go into any sort of nutrition counseling, you'll need to take more than that one intro class.

Since in this case it's so simple to say "Plant foods contain such a miniscule amount of cholesterol that they are not an important source of cholesterol in the diet" it doesn't make sense to me to instead say "Plants contain no cholesterol." Since most of the people who take intro classes *only* take the intro class, it seems even more important to not simplify to the point of telling untruths. Easy fix.

Fair enough! That makes sense to say it that way without going into the science of it all.

On another note, confectioner's glaze ruining otherwise vegan candy, I shake my fist at you!

THIS. I'm lookin' at you, Junior Mints.