Nutrition

Best Vegan Nutrition Websites

I’ve been writing in my examiner column about some things to watch for when evaluating vegan nutrition resources. Today I listed my favorite websites for finding reliable information on vegan diet and, for those who don’t read the Seattle Vegan Examiner, I want to reprint them here.

Eating well—both from a culinary standpoint and a health standpoint—is good activism for animals. After all, when studies reveal health problems among vegans, it’s obviously bad for the image of vegan diets. And when vegans make diets needlessly complicated, it makes others view veganism as a chore.

So, […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-06-19T11:55:00-04:00June 19th, 2009|Tags: Nutrition, Resources|5 Comments

The Atkins Diet Goes Vegan

Dr Atkins must be turning over in his grave. Researchers from Canada and the United States have taken his diet and—yikes!—veganized it. Their findings were published in the June 8, 2009 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Everyone knows about the infamous Atkins Diet, of course. It promised weight loss to anyone who severely restricted carbohydrate intake and filled her plate with fatty meats. For whatever reasons—and the possible explanations are hotly debated among nutritionists—the diet works for weight loss.

But there are some obvious problems with the Atkins approach. First of all, while […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-06-10T12:42:00-04:00June 10th, 2009|Tags: Fat, Heart health, Nutrition|37 Comments

Supplements for Sad Vegans

Are you sad? I often am. Anyone with a genetic predisposition to depression knows what it’s like to have the blues for no earthly reason. And when you are an animal rights activist, it can make things a whole lot worse.

Let’s face it, when you care about animal suffering, it’s pretty easy to feel despondent and despairing. How many of us can read about factory farming or puppy mills or fur farms without feeling anger at the least, and more often a sense of overwhelming sadness.

Maybe we can’t change our genes or control all of the things in the world […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-06-08T09:26:00-04:00June 8th, 2009|Tags: Mental health, Nutrition, vitamin B12, Vitamin D|11 Comments

Saturated Fats, Heart Disease, and Other Things We Still Don’t Understand

What is this love affair that everyone seems to have with bacon these days? It seems to appear in every other recipe published on the internet. The most recent ones I saw were for bacon candy and bacon brownies.

Now the latest internet claim is that lard—which is rendered fat from pigs—is supposedly good for us. Ugh. The basis for this idea is that much of the fat in lard is either monounsaturated (like the fat in olive oil) or is the type of saturated fat that doesn’t affect cholesterol levels.

I don’t know–maybe so. […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-06-04T14:41:00-04:00June 4th, 2009|Tags: Fat, Heart health, Nutrition|2 Comments

Getting Enough Zinc on Vegan Diets

It’s safe to say that we have more questions than answers about zinc in vegan diets. This mineral is found in a wide range of plant foods, and many studies show that vegans have intakes on a par with omnivores.

But other evidence suggests that vegans fall short. In addition, zinc absorption from plant foods can be low. In fact, the percent of zinc absorbed from different meals varies dramatically—from around 8 to 32 percent.

Because of the absorption issue, […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-05-05T12:40:00-04:00May 5th, 2009|Tags: Nutrition, Zinc|23 Comments

Vegans and Diabetes

Dietitian Jack Norris has published an excellent overview of research on vegan diets and diabetes on www.veganhealth.org.

Please note Jack’s comments about fat in his discussion of the findings. I agree with him that adopting a very low fat diet over the long term may not be advisable. I’m also not convinced that severe fat restriction is helpful in managing diabetes; other research suggests that replacing carbohydrate in the diet with monounsaturated fats improves diabetic control. Higher fat diets may also improve blood cholesterol (as long as the diet is still very low in saturated fat).

Finally, weight […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-04-17T09:03:00-04:00April 17th, 2009|Tags: Diabetes, Health, Nutrition|4 Comments

Good News About Vegan Bone Health

Just published this month in the journal Osteoporosis International, a new study revealed that bone health was similar between vegan Buddhist nuns and omnivore women even though the vegans had much lower intakes of calcium and protein.

The study involved 105 vegan nuns and 105 omnivore women in Viet Nam. Average calcium intake was 375 mg per day for the vegans and 682 mg for the omnivores. (Some of the vegan women did use very small amounts of milk in meals.) Vegan women also had low protein intakes averaging around 35 grams per day compared to more moderate […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-04-16T11:53:00-04:00April 16th, 2009|Tags: Calcium, Health, Nutrition|4 Comments

Fruits and Veggies, Vitamin A and Vegan Diets

Vegan diets usually include some excellent sources of vitamin A–but it many take a little bit of planning to make sure you get enough on a regular basis.

While vegans don’t have any preformed vitamin A in their diet (it’s only in animal foods), it can be synthesized from compounds called carotenoids found in plant foods. The best known and most biologically active carotenoid is beta-carotene.

As recently as ten years ago, nutrition researchers believed than 6 micrograms of beta-carotene produced one microgram of active vitamin A. But newer research on absorption of carotenoids shows that it […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-04-14T11:54:00-04:00April 14th, 2009|Tags: Nutrition, Vitamin A|5 Comments

Vegan Calcium is the Best Calcium

A friend asked me today whether I worry, as a vegan, about calcium. Well, I do worry about it, but not because I’m vegan. Calcium is an issue for all women. No matter what type of diet you follow, it’s important to identify good sources of this mineral.

Plant foods that are good sources of calcium include many leafy greens, like kale, collards, and mustard greens; broccoli; some legumes like black beans and vegetarian baked beans; blackstrap molasses (but not regular molasses); fortified soyfoods; fortified juices; and tofu if it is has calcium listed as an ingredient.

Some […]

By Ginny Messina|2009-01-15T14:26:00-05:00January 15th, 2009|Tags: Calcium, Nutrition|0 Comments

Protein for Vegans: Old Myths Die Hard

I’ve talked with three different reporters this past month, all with questions about vegetarian diets. All three asked, of course, which nutrients require special attention in vegetarian diets. And each expressed surprise that I didn’t mention protein. They also asked about soy—and whether it was true that it’s the only plant food that is a “complete protein”—ie, the only one that contains all 9 of the essential amino acids.

The answer is no. All plant foods that contain protein—which would be all grains, beans, nuts, seeds and vegetables—provide all 9 of the essential amino acids. So they are all […]

By Ginny Messina|2008-12-13T11:12:00-05:00December 13th, 2008|Tags: Nutrition, Protein|3 Comments