How to Read Food Labels as a Vegan

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Robert Cheeke, president of Vegan Bodybuilding and Fitness based here in Portland, Oregon. And today, on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to do a tutorial all about being vegan. In this clip, I'm going to talk about how to read labels. So obviously what we want to do is we want to avoid certain things. Obviously meat's one that stands out, but any kind of dairy ingredient, whether it's milk, or casein or whey, or butter or cheese, these are all things we want to avoid when we're looking here. It's obviously to make it a vegan food. We're also looking to avoid things like honey and even refined sugar, so what you want to do is just look at the ingredient list here, and so here, I mean these things all make sense, we know what they are. Organic wheat bran, whole wheat meal, flour, organic flax, this happens to be a cereal, oats, things like that that are in here. Basically, you want things to be easily understood. If it's a big, long word that's complicated, maybe it's not something we should be taking in. But talking about vegan stuff specifically, those are some of the catch words to avoid. Avoid whey, milk, butter, cheese, eggs, honey, refined sugar, because there are some animal products used in the refining process, so that something to avoid also, and just look for foods that you recognize, recognize the name of the fruits and the grains, and everything in there. Okay, so obviously in this thing, some of the things that we can recognize are like the organic wheat bran, the whole wheat meal, organic flaxmeal, the oats that I mentioned earlier, there's rice bran, blueberries. These are things that we recognize and that we should look for and try to avoid the things that we don't necessarily recognize. "