Is Life Cereal Vegan?
Fortified breakfast cereal can be a wholesome, nutritious, and accessible meal, especially when paired with a fortified plant milk! For example, Life Cereal offers plenty of B vitamins, iron, and calcium as is. However, when paired with a fortified soy milk, you can boost the protein, iron, calcium, and vitamin D content even further! Add some dried fruit, flaxseeds, or any other toppings for an incredibly satisfying and nutritious meal.
Questionable Ingredients Of Life Cereal
So, is Life Cereal suitable for vegans? If you are asking whether it contains animal-derived ingredients, the answer is no. However, some ingredients used in Life Cereals could be considered red flags for those on a vegan diet. These include:
Artificial colors like yellow 6, yellow 5, red 40, and blue 1. Although they are made artificially, they may be considered non-vegan, since they are frequently tested on rats, mice, rabbits, and dogs.
Sugar. White sugar is sometimes refined using animal bone char.
Natural flavors. This is usually a wild card ingredient — we have no way of knowing exactly what it is, and generally it could mean “flavors extracted from plants or animals”. However, Life Cereal does mention that their natural flavors are extracted specifically from “spices, fruits, fruit juices, vegetables, or herbs.”
BHT or Butylated Hydroxytoluene. Not only is this ingredient questionable for our health, BHT is also frequently tested on animals, to determine its health and safety risks.
Original Flavor Of Life Cereal
That being said, it appears Quaker has recently updated their original Life Cereal recipe. This is what it looks like now:
“Whole grain oat flour, corn flour, sugar, whole wheat flour, salt, calcium carbonate, disodium phosphate, tocopherols (to preserve freshness), reduced iron, niacinamide, annatto (color), thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, folic acid.”
Although the long, complicated ingredients may seem intimidating, not to worry! All except the disodium phosphate are simply vitamins/minerals used to fortify the cereal. Additionally, it seems they’ve replaced their artificial colorings with annatto! This means the original Life Cereal is currently the most vegan-friendly flavor. However, it still contains sugar, which may or may not have been processed using bone char. Likewise, you may or may not find it unreasonable to avoid this cereal based on this possibility alone.
Other Life Cereal Flavors
On the other hand, the rest of the Life Cereal flavors are a bit more questionable. All others except the Vanilla flavor (which now also uses annatto) contain artificial colors. Additionally, their Cinnamon, Chocolate, and Strawberry flavors all contain BHT. If you’re against animal testing, you may find it reasonable to avoid these specific varieties.
The Verdict
In 2021, there are plenty of natural vegan breakfast cereal options that are free from refined sugar, mysterious ‘natural flavors’, and animal-tested ingredients. If they are readily available and accessible to you, they could be considered the best choice. If not, breakfast cereals like Life cerealare still free from animal-derived ingredients, and incredibly nutritious. Therefore, take this information as you may, and thank you for always keeping our animal friends and our planet in mind! To your vegan success!
