The Vegan View of Pixie Vites
Dr. Fuhrman created his children's vitamin's, Pixie-Vites, because he couldn't find any good vitamins for his children to take. They all either had harmful ingredients (like refined sugar, artificial sweeteners, or isolated vitamin A), a poor balance of nutrients, or terrible taste his kids didn't like.
More than two painstaking years, and several formulations later, the Pixie-Vites are on the market with an ingredient list straight from the produce aisle, including:
raspberry juice powder, cherry juice powder, bioflavonoid complex, grape skin extract, hesperidin, rutin, quercetin, pineapple, broccoli, carrots, apple, orange, tomato, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, beet, blueberry, celery, grape, grapefruit, kale, plum, raspberry, spinach, strawberry, watermelon, radish, lemon, lime, cantaloupe, cherry, onion, papaya, peach, pear, leek and yellow pepper
Pixie-Vites are designed to compliment a healthy diet--and so they don't superdose children with things like folate that are readily supplied from fresh fruits and vegetables. And with all those fresh, natural plant-based ingredients, Pixie-Vites are favored by health conscious parents and children.
In the last few days, however, an unfortuate thing happened. A vegan website, the estimable Vegan Lunchbox, discussed Pixie-Vites with the impression that (like Dr. Fuhrman's Gentle Care vitamins) Pixie-Vites are vegan.
As became clear in the comments, in fact they are not, owing to one ingredient that comes from sheep's wool, called cholecalciferol--which is a potent source of Vitamin D.
Jennifer, who runs the blog Vegan Lunchbox, e-mailed Dr. Fuhrman for an explanation. As Dr. Fuhrman explains, the decision came down to nutrition:
The reason why the Vitamin D in Pixie Vites is not vegan and made from wool (please note it is not made by killing animals) is because that form of D is twice as absorbable as the vegan type and many kids do not eat a whole Pixie Vite and only take a small portion of one. I did not want to short change some kid by not supplying them with adequate D, so I let that one non-vegan ingredient slip by (since it is made from a by product of wool manufacturing).
Here is the complete list of ingredients. You can learn a lot more about how these vitamins came to be by listening to the second episode of the DiseaseProof podcast.
