Dear Friends,
You may have noticed Treeline’s “Go Red for Women” posts on social media - our contribution to the American Heart Association’s February campaign for heart health, particularly women’s heart health. Not many people know that heart disease is the number one killer of women in the United States.
Improved heart health is one of the gifts that come from eliminating animal products and cruelty from your diet. I like to think of it as the “karmic reward” of veganism.
But it’s not just a spiritual construct - the karmic reward has a scientific basis. For good heart health, the American Heart Association recommends keeping saturated fat to no more than about 13g per day. Animal fats are one of the biggest sources of saturated fat in American diets. Eliminate animals from your diet and you should have a much healthier heart.
But there is another source of saturated fat that’s not doing your heart any good. And it is….
VEGAN CHEESE!
It pains me to tell you this, but it is an unfortunate reality that many vegan cheeses, particularly those made by dairy companies, are not much better for your heart than dairy cheeses.
Here’s an example (and supermarket shelves are full of similar plant-based cheeses) - one of the best known traditional dairy cream cheese brands made by a major international dairy company has 4.5g of saturated fat per serving. So their plant-based version should be a game changer, right?
Unfortunately not. The plant-based version of their cream cheese has 6g of saturated fat per serving (and zero protein). You read that right. The plant-based version has 33% more saturated fat than the dairy original that it is supposed to be better than. You will ingest the full maximum amount of saturated fat recommended by the American Heart Association with just one nice blob of this plant-based cream cheese on your morning bagel. Cows might be a lot better off for it (which I support), but you aren’t (which I don’t).
What troubles me about this type of unhealthy vegan product coming from Big Dairy is that it feeds the stereotypical arguments that the vegan-haters level against vegan diets - that they are unhealthy. And the fact is a diet of this type of stuff is unhealthy.
But in this month of women’s heart health awareness, what really scares me about the vegan products made by Big Dairy, with all their marketing and pricing power, is that the next generation of vegans - many of whom are young women - might grow up with even more heart disease than their dairy-eating parents, despite their best intentions in going vegan.
That is why I have made sure that Treeline vegan cheeses are all low in saturated fat - with just one gram of saturated fat (and 3g of protein) per serving. I like to think of this as my part in the karmic circle!
Thank you for reading this and best wishes to you for heart health month.
Michael Schwarz
Founder and CEO