Vegetarian - Why Some Vegetarians Will Not Consume Sugar

 There are vegetarians, often stringent vegans who will not eat sugar.  They are concerned about the animal connection, in that sugar may have been whitened using bone char from cows.

A number of options are open to those vegetarians who wish to continue to eat sugar products, without seeming to condone animal suffering.

The two main sources of sugar in the USA are cane sugar and beet sugar. It is cane sugar that may have been whitened with bone char, but that is never the case with beet sugar. Therefore, a vegetarians first option could be to only eat products containing beet sugar. However, to complicate things further, there are a variety of cane sugars, some of which may not been have been whitened with bone char, and may be considered satisfactory by vegetarians.

The challenge is to find out which sugars are entirely satisfactory by vegetarian standards, and those which are suspect. So how do you determine the source of the sugar?

The first thing to do is to check the labeling, paying attention to the panel showing nutritional details. If it lists dextrose or fructose, it indicates that the sugar content is from beet or corn. However, beware if it lists sucrose, because that would mean the sugar content could be from a number of sources, and include bone char whitened cane sugar.

There are some companies that have emphasized that they do not use bone char in processing their sugar. They include, Imperial Sugar Company, Florida Crystals Refinery, American Crystal Sugar Company, Sugar In the Raw, and Irish Sugar Ltd. So a sure way to ensure that any sweet products you enjoy are bone char free, is to cook your own using sugar obtained from these sources.

Some other sugar processing companies have stated that they do use bone char, so with a little research it should not be too difficult to find a product that meets your vegetarian requirements.