Lecture 17: Vegetarian Nutrition and Current Health Trends

Required: Vegan in Volume: Chapter 11,12

**FINAL EXAM: if you are taking the final, please email me (or snail mail me a note where you’d like it send: email is much better) so it can be emailed to you. You need to return it within two weeks, by email or snail mail.

By the end of this lecture, the student should be able to:

1. Suggest how a vegetarian life style may contribute to a healthy life style
2. Explain how to incorporate vegetarian eating into a healthy life style

You Are What You Eat
By now, you’ve got a pretty good idea about vegetarian nutrition. The lectures and the readings should give you an idea that living the veggie lifestyle can be associated with a healthier you and a healthier planet. We are not going to site studies in this lecture, but you do have a resource for citations in Simply Vegan. There have been many studies showing that a vegetarian, especially vegan, lifestyle can assist in improved health or decreased disease processes.

Some of the research has included:

1. Heart Disease: much heart disease is linked to the intake of cholesterol. Vegan diets contain no cholesterol, although they can be high in saturated fats (such as palm or coconut oil) if you don’t choose food items wisely. In a very disciplined program, cardiac patients who followed a vegan diet, exercised and attended stress reduction classes were able to reduce their cardiac disease. For an example of such a program see Heart and Stroke A-Z Guide and MedCast Channel.
2. Diabetes: diabetics who decreased or eliminated their intake of animal fat, maintained a vegan low-fat diet and included high fiber in their diet every day displayed a reduction in their diabetic symptoms.
3. Cancers: in demographic studies, populations that had primarily vegan diets displayed fewer incidences of certain cancers.

Obviously, these are very general statements and you would have to do a lot of reading and researching to ascertain degrees of disease suppression, types of diet needed for success, etc. However, as a generality, vegan diets have helped with the suppression of certain diseases and have helped to decrease the recurrence of other diseases.

Can You Really Eat Healthy and Enjoy it, Too?
Not only that, you can be as elegant or as informal as you like. You can have a five-course vegan dinner by candlelight or run a vegan greasy (but healthy) spoon. Leaf through all the recipes in both books. Where else can you find a cuisine that is healthy, flavorful, low fat, cutting edge and fashionable and helps saves the planet at the same time? Review Chapters 6 and 8 in Vegan in Volume. These chapters have catering recipes that can be used at the most sophisticated events, and are still vegan and low fat. You may also want to review the portion on French cuisine in Lecture 13; if all else fails, impress them with some French cuisine!

As a final note, I’ve included a portion of a brochure that might be useful to you when “selling” vegan cuisine. In addition to this, you might want to check out www.pcrm.org. This site has a “restaurant vegetarian starter kit” and a “personal starter kit.” They’re both useful, concise pieces of information.

Here is a portion of a brochure I wrote to introduce healthy, vegetarian eating to a community nutrition class. Feel free to paraphrase this and use it to get your message across:

Healthy Living

Here are some ideas to think about when you are shopping and preparing your meals:

• Add canned beans and soybeans to soups, pastas, pizzas, and stews
• Mix edamame (fresh, cooked soy beans, available frozen) into green salads, pasta salads, eat them as a snack instead of chips, or use them as hot or cold side dish

• Alternate peanut butter with soy butter, hazelnut butter, and almond butter

• Flavor soups and stews with miso, pureed vegetables, and nutritional yeast to increase the soy, vitamins, and minerals in your meals.

• Check out soy “coffee cream” as another way to add soy to your menu

• Add nuts and dried fruit to muffin and quick bread batters, rice, couscous, and barley

• Grate raw beets, carrots, jicama, and other root veggies into thin sticks and add to salads and soups

• Remember lower fat cooking techniques include steaming, poaching, barbecuing, wok-cooking, broiling, baking, and roasting; use vegetable and fruit juice, vegetable or mushroom broth and wine as a cooking liquid, rather than always using oil or margarine. Not only will this cut down on fat, it will create new taste sensations!

• All fruit is good and some are great!!! A food science professor at Rutgers University went looking for fruit that contained at least eight important vitamins and minerals per three-ounce serving. He found that kiwi, papaya, cantaloupe, strawberries, mangoes, lemons, oranges and avocados fit the bill. Walnuts and Brazil nuts, carrots, sweet potatoes and broccoli were pretty high up there in nutrient density, too, with lots of vitamins and minerals

• Add nuts to sauces, salads, cooked grains, vegetable dips, pancake batter, etc. Yes, nuts are higher in calories than many foods, but their fat is unsaturated, and thought to offer many health benefits. Chop nuts and roll tofu, seitan or tempeh in them and than bake for a crusted entrée. Puree pine nuts with basil and olive oil to make a fast pesto sauce for pasta or veggies.

• Think pasta. Pasta is low calorie (about 100 calories per ½ cup serving), high in complex carbohydrates, low in fat and sodium and generally is fortified with folic acid, niacin, riboflavin, and iron. Pasta is fast to make, stores well…and it tastes good!! If you’re really in a hurry, have fresh pasta in your refrigerator. After the water boils, it takes only about 2 to 3 minutes to cook.

• B 12 is your buddy. Vegan sources of B 12 are fortified cold and hot cereals, Red Star nutritional yeast’s Vegetarian Support Formula (other brands probably contain B12 too- become a label reader), some fortified soy products (such as soy milk and meat analogs), and some ready-to-eat canned and frozen vegan products, such as veggie burgers.

• When it comes to nutrition, your stomach doesn’t distinguish what time of the day it is. Who of us hasn’t had a bowl of corn flakes for dinner or a cold burrito for breakfast? It’s not the chronology, it’s the balance. Add some kiwi, tomato, and pineapple slices to that morning burrito and throw together a fruit smoothie to have with that cereal (and toss some nuts into the cereal or have a half a bagel with peanut butter along side it). Remember, you’re dedicated to balance and variety in your life and on your menu.

Kids do it, why shouldn’t you? Swapping from your lunch box that is! Veggies and nonveggies alike know that the sandwich is always better from someone else’s knapsack. Form a lunch club; you bring appetizers one day and dessert the next. You don’t have to be vegan to enjoy humus and crunchy veggies, falafel in pita, veggie bean chili with corn bread, mushroom burgers with “the works” or lemon-poppyseed muffins (and yes, they can be made without eggs; substitute 1 Tablespoon of firm tofu for each medium egg). Breaking bread together at school or work will tempt your taste buds and perhaps help to form great working relationships or friendships.

Congrats on completing your vegetarian nutrition class!

Isn’t modern technology wonderful?! I’m proud of all your work and stick-to-it-tiveness. Vegetarian nutrition is a wonderful subject and you’ve now got some wonderful resources for it.

Eat healthy and be well!

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