Nutrition
Animal-derived foods aren’t necessary to live a long and healthy life; in fact, quite the contrary. People who are physically active should take special care to get enough protein into their diet without the use of animal proteins. After all, muscle tissue is breaking down when exercising (you know this is happening when you feel the “burn” which is caused by the buildup of lactic acid causing muscles to break down) and protein is necessary for the recovery and rebuilding process. Vegan athletes have to pay more attention to dietary choices and food combinations in order ensure the absorption of enough high-quality protein.
What May Be Missing
In addition to protein, vegans may be missing the following nutrients in their diet:
- iron
- calcium
- vitamins B-12 and D
- zinc
Iron
Iron is quite important for building muscle and endurance. If you aren’t going to get this from beef, you’re going to have to make sure you’re eating the following on a regular basis:
- whole grain cereals fortified with iron
- legumes (beans, peas and peanuts)
- dried fruit (especially raisins)
- cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage)
In addition, you will want to combine these with foods high in vitamin C, such as citrus fruits and berries; this will aid your body in absorbing and utilizing iron.
Calcium & D
In lieu of dairy products, instead load up on fortified dairy-replacement products as well as leafy greens to keep bones strong with sufficient calcium: mustard, kale and chard are powerhouse foods in this regard, as well as dried figs. Sesame seeds are also a decent source of calcium; a unique form of nut butter made from sesame, called tahini, is a main ingredient in hummus and also available in many international foods aisles on its own. The easily absorbed calcium and vitamin D pairing is almost always present in Calcium supplements- a great addition to a mindful diet, especially if you’re a woman and over 40 or if you don’t get outside for a walk in the sun to absorb some D.
Protein
Rice and beans together make a complete protein – or almost any combination of grain and legumes. However, peanuts (which are actually legumes, not nuts) and soybeans provide complete proteins that are of the same quality as that derived from fish, poultry, dairy or eggs. Most tree nuts are also good sources of protein, and provide the additional benefit of healthy oils, such as omega-3 (also found in olive oil).
B’s
Vitamin B-12 is essential for metabolism and making use of the energy stored in food. Unfortunately, the only reliable source of this nutrient is in animal-based foods. Whole grains cereals and soy milk are often vitamin B-12 fortified, but one would have to consume a great deal in order to get this nutrient in sufficient amounts from these vegetable-based sources alone. Therefore, vegan athletes may need to take B-12 supplements.
The same is true of zinc, which is vital for healthy respiratory and digestive function. Double check to make certain your multi includes Zinc and vitamin D and be sure to include these in your daily routine, especially when in training.
By Sasha Britton, for Gym Source, provider of: Treadmills, ellipticals, and fitness equipment for over 75 years.
- For more tips on plant-based nutrition, make sure to browse VegKitchen’s Nutrition page.
- For lots more features on healthy lifestyle, please explore VegKitchen’s Healthy Vegan Kitchen page.
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The food you eat plays a crucial role in your health. Certain foods can even help in the prevention and treatment of diabetes. In diabetes, the cells of the body cannot get the sugar they need. Glucose, a simple sugar, is the body’s main fuel. Read More→
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AMINO ACIDS: An amino acid is a building block of protein. There are some twenty amino acids required to make a complete protein. The body can manufacture all but eight; these are referred to as the essential amino acids. Read More→
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When you go in the grocery store, you can’t escape the low-fat and fat-free messages on food packages. And the messages are right: too much fat is dangerous to your health. A cinnamon bun sporting fifty-seven grams of fat, for instance, is obviously not a wise choice. But not all fats are bad. In fact, some fats are just as important as protein and carbohydrates. It doesn’t take much of them, but without them, your body wouldn’t be able to function, so it’s important to become a savvy consumer of fats. Learn which fats you need and which ones you don’t, and where to find each of them.
What Is Fat?
You know what fat is. It’s greasy stuff, stuff that makes you lick your fingers. It’s butter, it’s oil, it’s the soggy cardboard pizza box, the you eat and how you feel. creamy inside of an avocado. Fat’s special trick—besides making food taste rich and heavy—is that it doesn’t dissolve in water. That’s why salad dressing separates into oil and vinegar. It’s also why fat can line the insides of your blood vessels without getting washed away. But don’t get too alarmed just yet. There are three kinds of fats you need to know about: saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and polyunsaturated fat. And there’s also one crazy thing called a trans-fatty acid, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First of all …
Saturated Fat
Three fats walked into a bar. One was a puddle of liquid, one was kind of squishy, and one was a stick of butter. Which one was the saturated fat? Answer: the stick of butter. Generally, saturated fat is solid at room temperature, liquid when warmer. This is because it’s saturated with hydrogen. Being saturated means that in its chemical structure, every empty space is packed with a hydrogen atom. You wouldn’t think that would matter much, but being stuffed full of hydrogen like that is what makes it stiff and solid and is also what makes it bad for you. Think of the fat that people trim off the sides of steaks and pork chops. Think of lard, margarine, and ice cream. Because we don’t eat much coconut or palm oil, animal products are generally where you find the most saturated fat in American diets. As you can probably predict, saturated fat is the one you don’t want. Eating too much saturated fat increases the level of cholesterol in your body, which is dangerous to your health. Although a little bit of saturated fat is okay—up to10 percent of your daily calorie intake—too much leads to heart disease, cancer, and, well, fatness. These are rampant medical problems here in the United States.
Monounsaturated Fat
Monounsaturated fat, on the other hand, is the healthiest fat. In fact, it actually makes you healthier. It’s called monounsaturated because it’s missing just one of the hydrogen atoms that saturated fat has (mono means one). This makes it liquid at room temperature. When chilled in the fridge, some monounsaturated oils, such as olive oil, become a mushy solid. Monounsaturated fat protects against chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer. It helps to raise your levels of good cholesterol, called high-density lipoprotein (HDL), lower your bad cholesterol, called low-density lipoprotein (LDL), and stabilize your blood sugar. Some scientists believe that it even allows your blood to flow better and reduces blood pressure. It’s in avocados, nuts other than walnuts, and olive, canola, and peanut oils. But even with good fats such as these, no more than 30 percent of your daily calories should come from fat.
Polyunsaturated Fat
Polyunsaturated fat is missing more than one hydrogen atom (poly means many), which means it stays a liquid unless the temperature drops well below freezing. The effects of polyunsaturated oils on health are debatable: they are definitely better than saturated fat, but no one seems to agree on just how good they are. The oils from corn, soybeans, safflowers, and sunflowers are mainly polyunsaturated oils.
Essential Fatty Acids
Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are a type of polyunsaturated fatty acids. There are two main kinds, commonly known as omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Although they are important for our reproductive, cardiovascular, immune, and nervous systems, our bodies cannot make them, so we have to get them from the food we eat. Omega-6 is found in many places, but omega-3 is only found in a few. The best sources are walnuts, flax, hemp, pumpkin seeds, soybeans, olive oil, and wheat germ. Just five walnut halves a day—eighteen grams—is enough to meet your omega-3 needs. Likewise, one tablespoon of flaxseed oil also delivers enough EFAs for one day. Some cereals and soy milks are also fortified with EFAs.
Trans-Fatty Acids
This is the Frankenstein, the monster of the fat world. Trans-fats are totally unnatural, a freak produced in the laboratory. They’re created during food processing when an unsaturated oil—one that’s missing some hydrogen atoms—has hydrogen forced into the empty spaces. This process is called hydrogenation and it turns the liquid fat into a solid. Food manufacturers like to do this for a couple of reasons. One reason is that hydrogenated fats boil at a higher temperature, which is better for deep-frying food. (Better because the food is crisper and absorbs less oil during cooking.) The second reason is that solid fats don’t spoil as fast as nonhydrogenated fats do. This means that Twinkies and potato chips can sit on the shelf for a lot longer without getting too old to eat. I mean, can you imagine a bag of Ruffles going bad the way a loaf of bread does? Well, they don’t, and that’s because they’re hydrogenated.
Useful as this is, it’s terrible news for your body. Trans-fatty acids are two to four times as bad for you as saturated fat. Keep an eye out for them in all processed foods, as well as margarine. Most margarines, while lower in saturated fat than butter, replace it with transfats. But there are a few brands that are safe. Check the nutritional facts.
That’s a lot of numbers and confusing chemistry stuff to remember when you’re in the grocery store staring at packages and trying to figure out what to put in the cart. Don’t stress about the percentages and big words too much. In general, you can bet that any food that’s part of a plant, even if it has a lot of fat, such as olives, is probably good for you. And any highly packaged food or high-fat animal product probably isn’t. The healthiest fats or oils are olive, flaxseed, canola, and soybean. The worst are cottonseed and palm oil.
Sally Kneidel, PhD, is a biologist and journalist. She has taught writing and biology for many years, including tropical ecology on student trips to the rainforests of Costa Rica. She is particularly interested in issues related to the impact of our growing human population on wildlife and habitat. While her first ten books deal strictly with zoology and botany, Veggie Revolution is her first examination of how human behavior, diet, and social responsibility affect the natural environment.
Sara Kate Kneidel, born and raised in North Carolina, earned a B.A. in Spanish and Women’s Studies from Guilford College in 2005, with a minor in field biology. After traveling and farming abroad, she now writes, works, and farms at home. Writing, she believes, is an effective means of raising public awareness of political issues and social concerns. Veggie Revolution is her first book.
Excepted from Veggie Revolution: Smart Choices for a Healthy Body and a Healthy Planet by Sally Kneidel, Ph.D., and Sara Kate Kneidel (Fulcrum).
- For more tips on plant-based nutrition, make sure to browse VegKitchen’s Nutrition page.
- For lots more features on healthy lifestyle, please explore VegKitchen’s Healthy Vegan Kitchen page.
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We hear more and more about incorporating fiber in our diets. But what exactly is fiber? Fiber is roughage that is too complex for the body to break down. It is found in plant foods and cannot be digested by humans. Read More→
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Congratulations! You are now a vegan! Now what? You, like millions of others, have taken a huge step in an effort to improve your health, minimize animal cruelty, and maybe become closer to religious beliefs and ideologies, or possibly all of the above. Making the decision to become vegan isn’t the challenging part for the majority. Read More→
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Vegan diets have become increasingly popular for many reasons including health, philosophical, religious and ecological reasons. A vegan diet contains no animal products and relies mainly on the consumption of breads, cereals, grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds to obtain adequate nutrition. However, an active vegan must make sure to be certain that adequate iron intake is present in the diet.
Iron is an essential mineral and is a component of hemoglobin, the pigment in blood that carries oxygen throughout the body. The recommended daily intake of iron varies by age and gender, 18 mg in women 19-50 years, 8 mg in men 19-50 years, and 8 mg in all adults over 50 years. Iron deficiency anemia is a common disorder, especially in women, and is associated with fatigue, weakness, lightheadedness and shortness of breath. Low iron levels do not uniformly cause these symptoms, but do increase the risk for anemia and the risk of becoming symptomatic during periods of emotional or physical stress.
Although it is commonly reported that iron intake is similar among vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores, daily iron intake is a relatively useless term because it provides no information about the amount of available iron to the body for absorption. In fact, the bioavailability of iron can vary up to 10-fold in the same foods, depending on the other foods that are eaten with the meal (Hallberg 2000). Although the iron content of vegan meals may be similar to non-vegan meals, there will likely be less iron available for absorption in the vegan meal because of chemical differences inherent to the iron found in these non-meat sources.
Animal products are a viable source of iron and they contain a form of iron, heme iron, that is purported to be more readily utilized in the body than non-heme iron. In fact, around 15-35% of heme iron is utilized by the body versus only 2-20% for non-heme iron. However, animal foods are also rich sources of other unwanted products such as calories, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, pesticides, and antibiotics, all of which increase your risk for chronic disease and lower your immune defenses. Another problem, heme iron is associated with a huge increase in colon cancer. The vegan lifestyle, on the other hand, is associated with lower rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and even gallstones (Ball 1999).
Vegan diets contain only non-heme iron. The challenge for vegans is to consume adequate amounts of iron in a form that can be utilized efficiently. One adaptation that the body will make to chronically low iron stores is that it will use less iron. Therefore, some of the disadvantages of lower iron absorption in vegans are offset by the body limiting the use of iron. Yet vegetarians and especially vegans still remain at high risk for iron deficiency. Almost half of female vegans are iron deficient (Waldmann 2004). The vegan should become aware of the best dietary sources of iron and regularly incorporate them into the diet. Some of the best vegan sources of iron are listed below, along with the amount of iron (mg) found in each serving. Keep in mind that the following vitamin rich foods can be used in juicing recipes for a glass of the best liquid vitamins ever.
- Breads, Cereals, and Grains
- Cream of wheat, 10
- Bran flakes, 8
- Quinoa, 4
- Oatmeal, 2
- Fruits
- Prune juice, 3
- Dried apricots, 2
- Dried figs, 2
- Raisins, 2
- Vegetables
- Cooked spinach, 6
- Cooked mushrooms, 3
- Baked potato, 2
- Legumes
- Soybeans, 9
- Tofu, 7
- Lentils, 7
- Beans (kidney, lima, pinto), 4-5
- Nuts and Seeds
- Sunflower seeds, 2
- Cashews, 2
There are also some strategies that can be used to enhance iron bioavailability. Eating foods with high levels of vitamin C can enhance the availability of non-heme iron up to six-fold. Therefore, eating fruits and vegetables along with the high iron foods named in the list will enhance the absorption of iron. Foods such as broccoli, potatoes, and swiss chard are especially good choices because they contain high levels of both iron and vitamin C and should become staple foods of your vegan diet. Conversely, tannins found in tea and coffee, phytates found in cereal and legumes, and soy protein may hinder iron absorption and should be limited when high iron foods are consumed.
Some experts have argued that iron supplements may be necessary for the vegan female in order to attain adequate iron levels. However, this is not necessary if the guidelines above are adhered to. Furthermore, iron supplements are not without risk and may cause gastrointestinal side effects or iron overload. Iron overload results when excess iron is found in the circulation and gets deposited in the heart and liver. Iron overload is often not diagnosed until irreparable damage has been done.
Attainment of iron from vegan dietary sources is much safer than supplements. Generally, vegans can attain adequate iron levels and maintain sufficient stores in the body if they consume a wide variety of iron-rich foods and time the intake of these foods around consumption of other foods that enhance, not limit, iron absorption.
- For more tips on plant-based nutrition, make sure to browse VegKitchen’s Nutrition page.
- For lots more features on healthy lifestyle, please explore VegKitchen’s Healthy Vegan Kitchen page.
References
- Ball MJ, Bartlett MA. Dietary intake and iron status of Australian vegetarian en. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Sep;70(3):353-8.
- Hallberg L, Hulthén L. Prediction of dietary iron absorption: an algorithm for calculating absorption and bioavailability of dietary iron. Am J Clin Nutr 2000;71:1147–60.
- Waldmann A, Koschizke JW, Leitzmann C, Hahn A. Dietary iron intake and iron status of German female vegans: results of the German vegan study. Ann Nutr Metab. 2004;48(2):103-8. Epub 2004 Feb 25.
Dr Linda Kennedy MS SLP ND: Is an avid animal activist and nature lover. She owns a 10,000 square foot state of the art nutritional laboratory where she produces nutritional health supplements that are free of animal products.
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