Cutting out beef and pork is the obvious half and the easy half. The half that takes longer is everything that is quietly made from an animal without saying so on the front of the packet.
The words worth knowing by sight
- Gelatin. Made from mammal collagen. Sweets, marshmallows, some yoghurts, capsule shells, and a lot of things you would not expect.
- Glycerin, or glycerol. Can be plant or animal. The label almost never says which.
- Natural flavors. A legal category, not an ingredient. Can be plant, can be animal, and the manufacturer is the only one who knows.
- Stearic acid, magnesium stearate, mono- and diglycerides. Common additives that can come from either source.
- Tallow, lard, suet, rendered fat, casein, whey, lactose. Straightforwardly mammal, though the last three are dairy and only matter if dairy is one of your flags.
- Carmine and cochineal are insect rather than mammal, so they are not an alpha-gal problem, but they turn up on the same lists online and cause a lot of confusion.
The honest position on most of these is that you cannot tell from the label. That is not a gap in your reading, it is a gap in what labelling law requires. When it matters, the manufacturer is the only source, and a lot of them will answer a direct question by email.
The non-food ones
Alpha-gal is not only a food problem, and this is the part that surprises people a year in.
- Capsules. Many are gelatin. Some pharmacies can source the same drug in a tablet or a vegetarian capsule.
- Medication fillers. Magnesium stearate and lactose are common, and a pharmacist can usually check a specific product for you.
- Personal care. Some soaps, lotions, lip balms and cosmetics use tallow or animal-derived glycerin.
- Medical products. Some vaccines contain gelatin, some surgical materials and implants are made from bovine or porcine tissue, and heparin is porcine-derived. Reactions in people with alpha-gal have been reported for several of these.
None of that means refusing treatment. It means the people treating you need to know you have alpha-gal so they can choose between options, which is exactly what the ER card is for. Talk to your doctor and your pharmacist rather than skipping a medication on your own.
The label words worth a second look, grouped by how much each one tells you
What Opie does with this
Every scan checks the ingredient list against the mammal list, and separately against the additives that can come from either source, which get flagged as worth asking about rather than as a finding. If you have your own list of things to avoid on top of alpha-gal, those come back in their own section so the two claims never get mixed up.
What it will not do is tell you a product is safe. A clean scan means Opie did not find anything on a list, read from the label that was in front of it. Formulations change, labels get reprinted, and the last word stays with you.