Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
If you’ve ever eaten fruit jellies or jams before, then you’ve consumed pectin. You try to stay away from anything wiggly and jiggly as a vegan in case it contains gelatin, so does that mean pectin is off the list as well? Is pectin vegan?
Pectin is a heteropolysaccharide that occurs in vegetable and fruit cell walls, thus making it vegan. If you want to use pectin as a fruit thickener or even cook with it as part of your vegan diet, you can safely do so.
You want to learn more about the foods and ingredients you may come across as a vegan, and in this post, that’s exactly what we’ll help you do. We’ll explain pectin in detail first, then discuss its vegan status. We’ll even outline the benefits of pectin, so make sure you keep reading!
What Is Pectin?
Pectin comes from the Ancient Greek term pektikos, which means “curdled” or “congealed.” It’s a heteropolysaccharide, also referred to as a polycarbohydrate, which is a food-based carbohydrate source.
All terrestrial plants have pectin in their cell walls as well as their middle and primary lamella. The middle lamella attaches plant cells to primary cell walls so they’re held together. From vegetables to fruits, you can eat these plant-based foods for pectin, although how much pectin varies.
Citrus fruits are the richest source of pectin followed by lemons, grapefruits, oranges, carrots, and apples. Berries, grapes, and cherries have some pectin, but not as much as those other fruits and veggies, likely due to size.
Pectin is not only in the skin of fruits and vegetables, but elsewhere. In the case of apples, their membranes, seeds, and rinds are great sources of pectin.
When you take pectin and add acid and sugar to it, the starches in pectin allow jellies and jams to solidify as much as they do. Not all pectin is the same. You can select from two kinds, low-methoxyl or high-methoxyl pectin.
Low-methoxyl pectin is sugar-free and uses calcium to allow pectin to become somewhat solid. If you’re making preserves with low sugar or even jellies that are sugar-free, you’d want low-methoxyl pectin.
High-methoxyl pectin can set quickly or slowly depending on which you buy. The slow-set variety is ideal for making clear jellies while fast-setting high-methoxyl pectin will produce a chunkier marmalade or jam.
Dry powder pectin can be either low-methoxyl or high-methoxyl. The dry pectin varieties are modified citrus pectin, low-sugar pectin, no-sugar pectin, slow-set pectin, fast-set pectin, and classic or regular. You can also buy pectin on store shelves as a liquid, but the powder is much more common.
By using pectin in a jelly or jam recipe, you can reduce how much sugar goes into the ingredients. This is a healthier decision and allows you to better preserve the true flavor of the fruit. Pectin itself is flavorless, so it won’t influence the fruity flavor of your marmalade or jam.
Nutritionally, according to the USDA, a package of pectin or 50 grams contains:
- 163 calories
- 2 grams of fat
- 0 grams of saturated fat
- 0 grams of polyunsaturated fat
- 0 grams of monounsaturated fat
- 0 milligrams of cholesterol
- 100 milligrams of sodium (4 percent of your recommended daily value)
- 4 milligrams of potassium
- 45 grams of total carbs (15 percent of your recommended daily value)
- 3 grams of dietary fiber (17 percent of your recommended daily value)
- 2 grams of protein
- 7 percent iron
Is Pectin Vegan?
All this talk about fruit jellies has you nervous about the vegan status of pectin, but you needn’t be. Pectin is a plant cell heteropolysaccharide, so it’s completely free of animal products and byproducts.
Yes, pectin can solidify jam, but that doesn’t make it gelatin. Gelatin is sourced from animal collagen. If you read our post on whether collagen is vegan, then you should know that collagen is the primary extracellular matrix protein that produces bones, ligaments, skin, hair, and nails. All those animal collagen sources may be boiled to make gelatin.
What pectin does is add more firmness to fruits that don’t have enough of their own. Let’s compare apples to raspberries (we bet you thought we were going to say oranges, right?). Apples are one of the best sources of pectin around, as we mentioned. Their pulp alone is up to 20 percent pectin.
If you’re trying to make apple jelly, you don’t need as much powder or liquid pectin since apples have so much pectin of their own.
Raspberries are small and thus not very high in pectin. If you think of pectin like glue, squashing one raspberry is a lot easier than squashing a cube of apple, right? The apple has more “glue,” so to speak. Since raspberries would fall apart in a jelly recipe, your options are to use pectin as a solidifier or dump in sugar. Many bakers and cooks choose the pectin.
Yes, pectin and gelatin are similar-sounding words, and yes, they both solidify foods. Pectin and gelatin are each flavorless as well. Yet one is an animal byproduct and the other, pectin, is vegan-safe.
How to Make Your Own Pectin
If you’d rather make pectin at home to ensure its vegan status, apples are the most recommended fruit for doing so. Here’s a recipe courtesy of Food Network for apple-based pectin.
You’ll need water (4 cups) and Granny Smith apples (2 pounds). Make sure the apples aren’t ripe, as the ripening process causes fruits to lose pectin. That’s why ripe fruits are often softer and mushier than unripe ones.
First, cut the apples into eighths. Don’t core them or peel them. Turn on your stovetop to high heat. Pour the water and apples into a saucepan, then hold the saucepan over high heat. The water and apples will begin boiling.
When that happens, turn the heat down to medium. Over the next 20 minutes, let the ingredients simmer. The apples should be quite tender by this point. Turn off the stovetop and let the apples cool.
Next, get a bowl and add a piece of cheesecloth, moistening it first. Dump the ingredients from the pan into the bowl. The juice and pulp of the apples should strain through the cheesecloth. Grab all four corners of the cheesecloth and then make a knot in the middle. Hold the cheesecloth over the bowl so the contents can drip, then hang the cheesecloth so it can continue dripping for the rest of the day/evening.
In the morning, pour your apple juice into a measuring bowl or cup so you can track the quantity. Take a clean pot and add the apple juice. Put the pot on high heat and boil the juice until you’ve reduced half of it. You’ve now made pectin.
Pour the apple pectin into a container and store it in the fridge. The pectin has a short shelf life of only four days unless you freeze it, then it’s good for six months.
The Benefits of Pectin
It’s good that you learned to make apple pectin, as its health benefits have been studied and documented. Here are some great reasons to begin incorporating apple pectin into your vegan diet.
Could Reduce Cancer Risk
Admittedly, a lot more research is needed in this area before any concrete conclusions can be drawn, but there is some evidence that apple pectin may affect one’s cancer risk. This 2007 study from the journal Glycobiology as well as several others has reported that, in test tubes, pectin might be able to stop colon and prostate cancer cells.
However, in rats, their primary tumors remained even when the prostate cancer spread lessened, says this classic report from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Might Benefit Digestion
This benefit affects people differently. Some pectin users have bloating and gas. For others, it can stop constipation. That’s what a Chinese journal reported in 2014. Their study had 80 participants, all with a form of constipation called slow-transit constipation. Over four weeks, they ate pectin.
The ones who ingested at least 24 grams of the stuff had less constipation and more good gut bacteria.
Could Reduce Acid Reflux Severity
If you deal with acid reflux, then you know how painful it is when stomach acid comes back up into your esophagus. Having acid reflux increases your risk of developing gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD and heartburn as well.
This study from BMC Gastroenterology as published in 2008 reviewed whether pectin could help children with acid reflux and cerebral palsy who were tube-fed. The study included 18 participants, all of whom said their acid reflux episodes were fewer and not as serious.
Might Help You Lose Weight
If you’re looking to lose a few pounds, make sure you’re consuming apple pectin. The starch keeps your stomach from emptying as often, slowing digestion down. Although this seems like it would be detrimental, it’s anything but. The longer it takes your body to process the food that’s in your system, the less hungry you feel until the process ends.
A classic study from the Journal of the American College of Nutrition with 74 participants had promising results. The participants consumed pectin in varying amounts, anywhere from five to 20 grams. They also drank a glass of orange juice with the pectin.
Then they went to bed and ate nothing from the time they consumed the pectin until the next day. The results show that seemingly regardless of how much pectin the participants ate, they consumed less food the next day and felt fuller longer.
This study only lasted two days, which may not be enough time for truly conclusive evidence to develop, but rat studies have shown that obese rats can trim down with pectin. This Environmental International publication from 2019 is one such study done on the topic.
Conclusion
Pectin is a heteropolysaccharide in vegetable and fruit cell walls that thickens fruit jams, preserves, and marmalades. Although it sounds a lot like gelatin, pectin is completely plant-based and vegan-safe. With the myriad of benefits associated with apple-based pectin, why not add some pectin to your diet today?