I am a vegan. That means I eat no flesh, nor do I eat/drink any dairy products. Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. The no flesh part is easy. If it had parents, I don't eat it. Yes, that includes fish. So many people think that fish are not flesh. Oh well. Meat is not sneaked into other products that much either, so avoiding flesh is easy. Meat can be used in hundreds of ways, so using it as a filler in other foods is too expensive.
Milk is another story. Milk is everywhere. If you see the letters lac in an ingredient, it means there is milk in it. Casein is another milk word. Means milk protein. You will find some form of milk in most commercially made bread, most all prepared, frozen foods, even the ones that say vegetarian on the label. Our government subsidizes milk farmers, so companies use it as much as they can as a filler.
The worst offenders are pharmaceutical manufacturers. Lactose or milk sugar, is in 99% of all pills or tablets. It's a cheap filler. If you can't have milk, then you must have your medication made by a special pharmacist called a compounder. Wanna talk about how much that costs? And of course, insurance does not cover it. If you do ever find a medication without lactose in it, it will invariably be in a gelatin capsule. What's gelatin? Well, a meat product, of course.
Vegans just can't win. Good thing we are healthier in most ways because we are vegans and don't need to wade through the morass of modern medicine.
