Vegan cheese made from home-grown vegetable oils is healthier, greener and more “oozy”, scientists have found.
The cheese substitute is typically made from a combination of starch and solid fats like coconut or palm oil.
The fats give it the “sliceable, meltable” texture people expect from cheese – but also mean vegan cheese often ends up with a high saturated fat content.
Now a team at Heriot-Watt University (HWU) has developed a way of making vegan cheese slices from vegetable oils like rapeseed and sunflower, rather than the coconut and palm oil.
The work is as part of efforts to make the product healthier and more sustainable.
I thought vegetable oil is soy oil. Yet I was always confused because soy isn’t a vegetable.
Now they’re saying sunflower oil and rapeseed oil are vegetable oils. And neither are vegetables too.
And I always saw rapeseed oil referred to as “canola oil”, not vegetable oil.
I’m so confused.
soy isn’t a vegetable
Vegetable is a loosely defined culinary term, not botanical. “Plant-derived” would be more appropriate.
Canola is rapeseed oil processed to remove erucic acid , which is a toxin. This is using heat and solvents.
Plant and vegetable oils are interchanged in terminology. Vegans love to get stuck on semantics.
I didn’t know that’s what it meant. Is olive oil a vegetable oil? I mean, clearly it’s a plant oil.
Why can I get olive oil, canola oil, and vegetable oil as separate products? Shouldn’t the latter describe the two firsts? And why not call them “plant oils”? Isn’t “vegetable oil” confusing? A misnomer?
Yay, more highly processed shit for people trying to eat a healthy diet. Now with more ooze.
Yay, more highly processed shit for people trying to eat a healthy diet. Now with more ooze.
- Vegan cheese already exists and is already highly processed. It’s an alternative to an animal-based food that’s also unhealthy and highly processed.
- People who eat a plant-based diet for health would be able to avoid it basically just as much as they could before if this takes off.
- Existing vegan cheese is typically made with coconut or palm oil, high in saturated fats.
- The innovation discussed in the article offers to raise protein while lowering unhealthy saturated fat content.
- Veganism isn’t about a “healthy diet”. It’s about the animals. There’s !wfpb@lemmy.world if you’re looking for a community strictly about healthy, plant-based dieting.
A plant-based diet that vegans adopt coincidentally can have a lot of health benefits (dependent largely on how closely you stick to whole foods), but coming in and complaining about unhealty, processed alternatives to unhealthy, processed animal-based foods is kind of like coming into a community about smoothies and complaining on a post about a new cookie smoothie because drinking smoothies is about health and liquefied veggies and fitness. It’s your choice if you want to use smoothies strictly to stay healthy (and good for you); some people just generically like and want to talk about smoothies and don’t care if they have a sugary, junk smoothie once in a while or even all the time.
TL;DR: You’re not in a healthy dieting community, so please don’t act like it if it doesn’t personally affect you.
I tried going vegan for a couple of weeks until I tried to find cheese that didn’t taste like ass. I actually liked Impossible Meat though. If they can’t make it taste better, don’t bother.
Veganism isn’t a diet though. It is a way of life aimed towards excluding consumption of things that result in animal cruelty, exploitation, or death.
I’m not vegan because the vegan cheese is good. I’m vegan because i value life and, among many reasons, the dairy industry is atrocious.
You say if they can’t make the vegan cheese taste better then don’t bother, which is also problematic. The OP talks about how it is aimed to be more sustainable and mentions current vegan cheeses might use palm oil. Palm oil can be vegan if ethically sourced but the problem with the industry is that is not sustainable and leads to deforestation.
But even if you are not vegan, choosing to eat non-meat and non dairy alternative foods for even some of your meals can have a positive impact on the environment and your health.
I acknowledge that the vegan lifestyle is more ethical, but what about insects? I’m not being facetious.
I read an article that they may be able to grow meat from cloned cells in a lab. Does that change the ethics? I think so.
What about insects? They are animals.
Lab grown meat / cloned cells are still initially extracted from animals. There is inherent exploitation and/or harm done to the animals. Some vegans may believe this utilitarian approach is ok. I do not.
My point about insects is that any type of farming, even organic farming, kills insects, often unintentionally, even if one is being mindful not to. What then? Eat dirt? No living thing can live without killing something else. It’s the nature of life.
Wouldn’t you agree that endeavoring to do less harm (eating cloned meat, eating vegan once or twice a week, eating less meat) is better than nothing?
Shamefully i referred to myself as basically fitting the label “meatlover” before going vegan. I feel like if i did it, everyone can. Sure cheese replacement does not taste as cow cheese and deaths still occour but those deaths aren’t the product and if I wanted more such deaths I’d just eat tons of meat as they need to be fed and grow using a substansial amount of food.
The less animal products the better but you are able to make a choice not to voluntarily exploit them. Also while im not sure if you are implying that you want to wait until lab grown meat is available to the end consumer. If you do thats kind of saying “I will only make such choice if there is basically no effort in doing so” to me.
