Based on the product title, the design of the bottle, the product description, and even the brand logo, you’d think vitamin D is vegan. Every marketing design decision on these store pages lures you into such a conclusion. But it’s not! Vitamin D/cholecalciferol is a molecule that is exclusively made in animals. Almost all vitamin D in production is extracted from lanolin, the waxy secretions in sheep’s wool. In theory, lanolin could be called a vegetarian product, since wool is something sheep are sheared for and not something sheep are made of. In practice, almost all lanolin is extracted from the wool waste byproduct of dead sheep slaughtered for meat. If a company doesn’t claim a specific non-kill source for its lanolin on the bottle, the lanolin came from dead animals. It is up to debate whether a product that is the side product of animal slaughter that would have happened anyway is vegetarian or not. Vegan it is certainly not.

There is vitamin D for sale from vegan sources, extracted from lichen. It also costs at least 20x more. These bottles are not it! The vegan-sourced product pages go to great length to emphasize their cholecalciferol does not come from lanolin. These pages just list “cholecalciferol” in the ingredients list with no specific source. Technically, none of the language on these pages is a lie! “Veggie capsules” refers to the cellulose the pill walls are made of. If you “somehow” end up believing that the whole pill is made of vegetables, that’s your own fault! If you see a brand name like “forest leaf” and think its products are made from leaves, nobody can help you! The company is blameless! The only outright lie in these screenshots is the “vegan friendly” label. Curiously, that claim only appears in the product image, and not in the text searchable description of the product itself.

Ok then, you’d say, that’s innocent marketing speak, nobody would be mislead by it, we all know about cholecalciferol. Yet half of all customer comments on the “vegan friendly”-in-image-only product praise it for its vegan content! (Thanks AI summary!) Many of them bought this product because they thought it was vegan. Tsk tsk! And what is vegan-“friendly” anyway? Am I vegan friendly because I am a friend of vegans? Is that a legally-enforceable phrase?

My opinion is that while the amount of lanolin in vitamin D pills is tiny and comes from waste products, these pills are still not vegan and not vegetarian. A pure vegan lifestyle would not condone them. Yet these companies say everything short of a lie (and sometimes literally lie) to make consumes falsely think their products are vegan. And vegan consumers let them! And even praise them for it.

I would be fine if vegans/vegetarians accepted that a negligible amount of animal product to supply a vital ingredient that could not be acquired in any other way (until a few years ago when lichen cholecalciferol became available) where sun exposure alone is not sufficient for modern climates and lifestyles is acceptable. But in the meantime, these companies are exploiting the naivete and well-wishes of consumers for profit by greenwashing their products, spreading misinformation rather than knowledge. The customer reviews is proof that misinformation is happening, even if no single phrase describing the product is legally a lie. We should not allow ourselves be exploited!

Shoutout to the “kosher” and “no shellfish” labels.