It's like Velvetta. What is that stuff REALLY??? Kinda like the Spam of the cheese world. 
My wife is hooked on Cool Whip "Lite". So how would you make a low fat natural whipped cream that doesn't destabilize quickly?
Well, velveeta is pretty easy to make, not that easy to exactly duplicate because Kraft puts in their proprietary blend of extracts and flavorings. But in general, you take cheese, standardize it (water, milk, whey, whey powder, etc), heat it up, toss in some sodium phosphate, alginate, a sodium citrate to react with the alginate, and flavors and colors and resolidify after blending.
Cool whip isn't hard either, and it's similarly scary.
You take some water, blend in a sweetener that has some body to it, like corn syrup, and corn syrup that's been amylase-treated to make the glucose into fructose, then you need something to imitate the feeling of fats, so you partially solidify oils by bubbling some hydrogen through a good-tasting oil, like coconut oil. Mix that and you have this sludge that separates easily, so you need a few more things. One, you need an emulsifier. So add polysorbate and caseinate. Cool, it's mixed together, next problem is how to keep it bound up and how to be able to develop a froth (cool whip is mostly air), so you add a starch substitute like xanthan or guar gum. Carageenan isn't the preference here because the xanthan and guar combos complement each other. And then the last thing you need after you've emulsified and whipped it, is to keep it stable at room temp. So you suspend all that in a wax, like sorbitan.
And there you have it
. "lite" just means fewer oils, or a different way to process the oils. You get less mouthfeel, feels less like a dairy product.
If you want to make it a dairy product, use cream instead of coconut oil, or just milk, and add everything for it to froth, be sweet, and stable at room temp.
