Advertorial. Vegetable stock sounds super healthy at first - after all, it only contains vegetables and salt. Many people use it as a tasty base for a wide variety of soups and sauces, to add a spicy flavour to their favourite dishes or to enjoy on its own with water. What you probably don't think about with this basic are Flavour enhancerFlavours, Sugar and Colourants.
But most commercial vegetable broths contain many of these ingredients and the vegetable content, on the other hand, is very low.
What do the ingredients in most vegetable broths look like?
If you look at the ingredient list of a vegetable broth from the supermarket, you will most likely find some of the following ingredients:
- Flavour enhancers such as glutamates, guanylates and inosinates (recognisable by the E-numbers from 600)
- Flavours
- Dyes (the E numbers from 100)
- Preservatives (E numbers from 200)
- Hydrogenated oils, mostly palm oil
- Iodised salt
- Wort from wheat
- Garlic
- Sugar
- Glucose syrup
- Maize or rice starch
- Rice syrup
- Yeasts
- Thickening agents such as locust bean gum (E numbers from 400)
- Celery (only of concern for allergy sufferers)
If you now think that buying organic vegetable broths solves the problem, you are wrong: even in broths from health food shops and natural food shops there are yeasts, corn or rice starch and some products even contain sugar.
What is so bad about these ingredients?
Misleading labelling of flavour enhancers
There are so-called flavour-enhancing ingredients, which may also contain some artificial flavour enhancers because these do not have to be defined by law. Flavour-enhancing ingredients include, for example:
Yeast extract
Wort
Soy protein
These ingredients contain glutamic acid, which does not have to be declared as an additive. Glutamic acid and its salts, the glutamates, are considered flavour enhancers according to the Additive Approval Ordinance. So next time you see the words "without flavour enhancers" on a vegetable broth, look again.
Real vegetables or just flavours?
Flavourings can completely replace certain ingredients in a vegetable broth and deceive our taste. This is because the flavouring can be made from a completely different food than the one it tastes like. In conventional vegetable broths you can often find the term "Aroma" in the list of ingredients. This indicates that it has been chemically produced. However, natural aroma or natural flavouring can also be found in organic vegetable broths.
These contents are obtained from plant, animal or microbiological raw materials, such as microorganisms or moulds. For example, a vegetable broth that at first glance appears to be of high quality may have "natural flavouring" in its list of ingredients. This natural flavour may also be derived from other natural raw materials and the taste of vegetables may only be imitated. This can lead us to become accustomed to artificial more intense tastes that no longer have much to do with a natural taste. Unprocessed fruit and vegetables then suddenly taste only bland and boring.
Sugar
We know that sugar is unhealthy. Rice and glucose syrup also have a sweetening effect and contribute to the sugar content. We ask ourselves why we should unnecessarily increase our sugar consumption with vegetable broth.
Palm oil - not as harmless as it sounds
Palm oil is also a common ingredient in both conventional and organic products. Palm oil is extracted from oil palms, most of which grow where rainforests naturally occur. Due to oil palm cultivation, large areas of rainforest are cleared, which leads to ecological and social problems. However, palm oil is not only problematic for the environment, but also for our health: the refining of palm oil produces increased amounts of fat pollutants, and the substance 3-MCPD is even possibly carcinogenic.
What can we learn from this?
Organic doesn't necessarily mean healthy, and in our case organic vegetable broth doesn't necessarily mean pure and good vegetable broth. We wanted to do things differently: Delicious and healthy is also possible without all these ingredients. Our vegetable stock contains 56% vegetables, 36% rock salt and 8% herbs and spices, nothing else.
Vegetable broth without salt?
For those who would like to do without salt completely, we have our Organic vegetable mix developed. This consists exclusively of vegetables and contains only the salt that is naturally present in the ingredients (onions, carrots, etc.).
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