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Do vegetarian marshmallows work?

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Posted 6/7/2011 12:36 AM (GMT 0)
OK, weird question, but wondering if anyone ever used vegetarian marshmallows to slow stool for pouch changes.... I presume the gelatin is what makes the whole thing work, so they wouldn't, but I don't know for sure....

Hmm, maybe I could write the vegan marshmallow company and ask....
Posted 6/7/2011 4:30 AM (GMT 0)
vegan marshmellows I believe use gaur gaur gum (sp?) or agar maybe arrowroot of some kind. (I'm a pastry chef, so I know a bit about gelatins and their veggies substitutes.) I believe that they would work. regular marshmallows are simply sugar, water a flavor and gelatin. So the only difference is the stabilizer. They do the same things, its just that gelatin is the most stable. It may not work as well, but it should help. Or you could try angel food cake. LOL that always slows things down and it comes out looking like a big old sponge. Anyway, I think it would still work so give a go and let us know!
Posted 6/7/2011 10:24 AM (GMT 0)
How amazingly cool that you know all this and that you're a pastry chef. Must be a special drag to have UC when you work with food.... Thanks.

If I have any information, I will report...
Posted 6/7/2011 6:42 PM (GMT 0)
learn something every day here....never knew there were vegan marshmallows
Posted 6/8/2011 12:53 AM (GMT 0)
Same here, had no idea that regular marshmallows weren't vegan and love the sponge cake idea!
Posted 6/8/2011 4:00 AM (GMT 0)
yup anything with gelatin is not vegan or vegetarian. Gelatin, grossly enough comes from pig skin and bones (sometimes cow's for kosher reasons.) yummy right? tongue

The only bad part about working with pastry is i can't eat everything I make or I'd be huge and make no monies. Plus sometimes too much sugar can be a liquid problem if you no what I mean. ;)
Posted 6/8/2011 10:35 AM (GMT 0)
I grew up keeping kosher, although not the strictest kind, but we didn't eat anything from pigs.... became a vegetarian at 19, so I didn't eat any marshmallows, not to mention that I don't particularly like them and they're not exactly healthy.... but my disease has caused me to modify (I took remicade, so I let someone inject mouse in my body, and I did eat jello in the hospital after my surgery, have taken pills with gelatin in them etc.). So, mostly I was curious.... but I'll see if I can find some vegan marshmallows and try them out.

It is weird to me that the gelatin or whatever slows things down that quickly. Wouldn't it be behind a lot of food that's already on its way out? I.e. isn't it in the stomach while other food is making its way out of the small intestine? Or does it just slip right through?

Betsaronie, I've always enjoyed just looking at pastry .... it can be so pretty.
Posted 6/9/2011 4:18 PM (GMT 0)
Well, I had trouble finding vegan marshmallows, so I got kosher ones, made with fish gelatin. They taste like sugar, not fish..... worked great, but it is kind of weird to eat marshmallows first thing in the morning.... insurance should cover them since they are for a medical purpose (imagine launching that crusade in the US healthcare debate as is..... no copay for marshmallows....)

If I get some vegan ones, I'll report on them....
Posted 6/26/2011 6:06 PM (GMT 0)
blueglass - I'm a vegetarian also. I do eat products with gelatin so I don't know if you want to count me as a veggie. I became a vegetarian when I was (misdiagnosed?) w/UC at 15. I took so many drugs for a year before I asked if giving up meat would help and he said yes. My mother hated it and did everything she could do to make me eat it. It was in the early 80s and only hippies and freaks were vegetarians according to my mom.

I saw you have some eye problems and it made me curious. I have a cousin (I think he is 30) who has both crohns and UC but just told me that he has flare ups in his eye. What causes this?
Posted 6/26/2011 6:53 PM (GMT 0)
I too became a vegetarian in the early 80s .... for me, I just never really liked meat, and when I went to college and lived in a group house, I decided to learn to cook vegetarian.... I am not really one anymore, because I started eating fish a few years ago -- just couldn't digest enough of the food I used to eat any more. Now I am going back to being more vegetarian, as I like that better and w/surgery can eat more again .... (but I'm not as rigid as I was when I was 19..... so eating gelatin by your or me is not that big a deal to me either). My mom was worried when I became vegetarian that I couldn't be healthy that way, and my aunt blamed my IBD on not eating chicken....

I am not sure anyone knows the causes of the eye problems ....most people w/ibd who have eye problems get either iritis or uveitis, inflammation in different parts of they eye. I guess there's just a lot of inflammation going on, and the immune system isn't working right.

I got something called marginal keratitis -- inflammation of the cornea. The opthamologist said that in 30 years he'd never seen that in someone w/Crohns (and he's seen a lot of folks w/Crohn's) but that it was probably related. It was awful! I was so light sensitive I had to wear sunglasses indoors, and I would still cover up my face, and it was just incredibly painful. At first I got diagnosed with viral conjunctivitis, which is something that you just wait out.... finally I checked in because this just seemed so much worse..... opthamologist said immediately that it wasn't conjunctivitis .... the treatment was steroid eye drops, which are something like the best meds ever..... I was a lot better within a day.

I think those drops are what they use for most eye related complications, does your cousin have them?

I was tapering on pred when I got the eye condition..... was down to 5 or 10 mg..... after I had the drops I ended up in the hospital again and my pred was jacked up.... that helped w/the eye thing too, as well as various other inflammatory things I had going on....
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