To most meat-eaters, the vegetarian lifestyle is mysterious and confusing. Do they never eat animal protein at all? Does that include eggs and milk? Is it something they do for health reasons or because they love animals? And how do they get enough protein in their diets if they don’t eat meat?
If you took a poll of vegetarians, you’d quickly discover that there are almost as many ways to be a vegetarian as there are, well, vegetarians. Some people claim to be vegetarians when really they’ve just cut back on the amount of animal products they consume. On the other end of the scale, there are vegetarians who eat no animal protein at all, or anything produced by animals – including milk, eggs and honey. So the first thing to consider when approaching the vegetarian lifestyle is exactly what kind of vegetarian you plan to be.
Vegetarian Diets – the Big Three
There are three main vegetarian diets, although variations abound in each category: Lacto Ovo vegetarian, Lacto vegetarian, and Vegan. Let’s take them one at a time and look at the differences:
A lacto ovo vegetarian eats mostly plant foods, but also eats eggs and dairy products including yogurt, milk, cheese and ice cream. This is the first step most people take when they switch to a vegetarian diet, because it’s easy to fulfill all your nutritional requirements and, well, everything tastes good when you cover it with cheese! It’s also an easy diet to maintain in the "real world," as there are always restaurant choices – including fast food options – so no matter where you are or who you’re with, you can always find something to eat.
Lacto vegetarians eat no meat or eggs, but do consume dairy products. While acceptable dairy substitutes have become much more palatable in recent years, it can still be difficult to avoid dairy entirely, and it makes cooking much more challenging. Many lacto vegetarians don’t eat eggs because, as ovum, they’re potentially animals. Or they choose not to eat eggs because they’re uncomfortable with egg farming practices (more on that later). Conversely, there are ovo vegetarians, who eat eggs but don’t consume dairy products.
Vegans eschew all animal proteins and animal by-products. This is the most extreme form of vegetarian diet, as vegans get all of their nutrition from grains, vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts and seeds. And vegans must avoid a large number of commercially produced foods that contain animal proteins – most breads are made with eggs, for example, and many non-dairy products are thickened with casein, a protein extracted from milk. Even vegetarian "burgers" often contain eggs! Despite the challenges, the vegan diet has steadily grown in popularity in recent years as more and more vegetarians have become savvy label-readers and vegan-friendly food companies have created more products for them to enjoy.
In addition to the three basic vegetarian diets, there’s also macrobiotics, a diet inspired by ancient Chinese principle of yin and yang which relies primarily on locally produced, seasonal foods. The basic macrobiotic diet includes fish – but remove the fish and the diet is vegan, with most macrobiotic cookbooks heavily favoring Asian-influenced cuisine and the use of ingredients like pickled vegetables, daikon radishes and sea vegetables like kelp and nori.
This isn’t to say that you’re required to sign up for any one style of vegetarian diet and follow it to the letter. Pesco vegetarians, for example, don’t eat poultry, beef or pork but they do eat fish.
The so-called "semi-vegetarian" has cut back on their intake of meat overall, but still eats it occasionally – if you’re reading this, that’s probably where you are already! Pollo vegetarians avoid red meat and fish but eat chicken. while the pesco-pollo vegetarian avoids red meat but consumes both chicken and fish.
There are even fruitarians, who only eat seeds, nuts and fruit, plus vegetables that are botanically classified as fruit like zucchini, eggplant, squash and avocados. And there are other diets that, while vegetarian in nature, further restrict consumption of certain foods depending on the diet’s purpose – the raw food diet requires that you only eat uncooked foods, and the "natrural-hygeine" diet, while making limited use of animal products, is designed to cleanse the body of toxins and the allowed foods are chosen accordingly.
But don’t let all of that confuse you! As a newcomer to vegetarianism, you should first set your sights on the three primary types of the diet – ovo lacto, lacto and vegan. Once you’ve discovered which of these best meets your needs, then you can decide if you want to adapt them even further, adding or subtracting as you see fit. For the most part, labeling your diet is less important than figuring out how to transition from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian one.
Which Comes First – the Dairy or the Egg?
Giving up meat but holding onto eggs and dairy in your diet is a good way to start your vegetarian experience. Your menu options are far greater, and it’s easier to work enough protein into your diet than by jumping straight to a macrobiotic or vegan lifestyle. Yes, there are good reasons to avoid eggs and dairy, and we’ll discuss that as we go along. But ovo lacto vegetarianism is perhaps the most popular, simple and straightforward approach to vegetarianism.
Besides being a great protein source, eggs also provide your body with lecithin, a substance that emulsifies dietary fat and which is needed to build cell walls. In fact, lecithin is very important in protecting your cells from oxidation, and is vital in building the protective tissues that surround the brain. (Should you choose not to eat eggs, lecithin is still important – but there are now soy-based lecithin supplements that have been shown to improve blood cholesterol levels.)
Besides, eggs are an easy meal and, for many vegetarians, the veggie omelet is a great fall-back meal that’s available at virtually every coffee shop. You should limit the amount of yolks you eat, though, as they’re high in fat and cholesterol – egg whites, on the other hand, are almost pure protein.
As for dairy, you may find yourself going overboard when you first start your vegetarian diet, making up for the loss of meat by eating more cheese and drinking more milk. Keep an eye on the amount of fat you’re eating – changing your diet isn’t going to make you feel better if you start loading up on extra fat and cholesterol!
So – What Can I Have For Lunch?
If your first thought is that you’re about to embark on a way of eating that’s going to be boring, repetitive and limiting, then you have a surprise in store. Vegetarians – vegans included – enjoy a widely varied diet made up of tasty and nutritious foods, most of which you already eat on a regular basis.
All of the same things that you eat today – burritos, burgers, casseroles, soups, lasagna, sandwiches – can be enjoyed as part of a vegetarian diet. All you need to do is remove or replace the meat. The key is to make sure you get enough protein from combining grains and legumes (which we’ll discuss in detail in Chapter Five) and choose your meals wisely.
Take that burrito. Skip the meat-based style and go for one that’s packed with beans, rice, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and sour cream. It’s delicious, chock-full of protein and other vital nutrients, and absolutely delicious. Even something as decadent as stroganoff can be adapted to a meat-free diet – cubes of tofu, marinated in soy sauce, make for a find meat substitute when tossed with noodles, spices and cream.
And don’t overlook the cuisine of cultures that have long celebrated vegetarian cooking. Miso soup, Spanikopita , hummus, vegetable curries, tabouli salad, samosas and veggie stir-fry dishes are all on your menu – so enjoy!
Once you become accustomed to eating meatless meals, you’ll find that it’s much easier than you think. With a little creativity, you can even plan entire meatless dinner parties around foods so delicious that your most carnivorous guests won’t even notice that meat’s missing from the menu – a dinner of hearty vegetable chili topped with shredded cheese with a spring salad of field greens, toasted walnuts and crumbled bleu cheese in a balsamic vinaigrette, followed by key lime pie for dessert ... well, who wouldn’t love that?
By choosing to adopt the vegetarian lifestyle, you’re going to improve your health, help conserve the earth’s natural resources, eat more ethically and responsibly, and lower your risk of contracting meat-borne illnesses from E. coli contamination and additives like hormones, chemicals and antibiotics. But that doesn’t mean your diet has to be boring – there’s a whole world of foods out there that you can enjoy.
Whatever the reason you’ve decided to remove meat from your diet, you’ll find that it’s the best nutritional decision that you’ve ever made. In the course of this book, you’ll learn about the fascinating history of vegetarianism, how you can transition from a meat-eating diet to a meatless one, the ways in which you can insure that you’re getting proper nutrition, how to buy food and cook for your family, and how to stick with your diet in a world full of carnivores.
You’re about to embark on a journey which will make you healthier and happier. Congratulations on choosing to live as a thoughtful, caring eater – your body will thank you!
Friday, May 22, 2009
CHAPTER 2 - A Brief History of Vegetarianism - How It Started and What It All Means
When you think of early man, odds are that the first image that pops into your mind is that of spear-carrying Neanderthal dragging a large, dead animal home to his cave for dinner. We’ve long held onto the erroneous notion that our ancestors were mighty warriors, taking down gigantic beasts with their bows, arrows and flint knives, and tearing into meat as their primary source of nourishment.
But the truth is more complicated than that. Certainly there were eras in human history when meat was a staple – during the Ice Age, for example, the ground was so cold and hard that vegetation was difficult to find, so that Neanderthal was forced to hunt down meat to fill his grumbling tummy. But the very earliest humans were more gatherer than hunter and actually scavenged the remains of animals that were killed by other predators, essentially gleaning from others’ roadkill. Studies by anthropologists indicate that early man was far more interested in feasting on the nutrient-rich bone marrow of found animals rather than on their flesh, using tools to cut away the meat not to eat it, but to remove it from the desired bones.
No, early man’s diet consisted of what he could find growing where he lived – vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. By combining those, and relying primarily on a diet of calcium-rich wild greens, he was able to get all of the vitamins, iron, protein, fats and carbohydrates that he needed.
Animals had yet to be domesticated, so the only meat our ancestors had to eat was either what they chased down or found lying about – gathering nuts and seeds was simply more productive than counting on being able to catch and cook an animal by supper time. Eventually, man developed agriculture, raising vegetables and grains, and domesticating animals for meat and dairy. But before that time, some 10,000 years ago, man relied heavily on that which he could pluck from trees, bushes and the ground, and his diet was about 90 percent plant food. So toss out the idea that man is at heart a carnivore – we are, in fact, omnivores, able to eat meat but certainly nor required to by our biology or our history.
The Pythagorean Credo
By the time that man’s adventures were being jotted down in scriptures and testaments, meat-eating had become commonplace – but there were still those who advised against the practice. In the Old Testament’s book of Daniel, it was set down that Daniel refused the wealthy King Nebuchadnezzar’s feast of rich foods, meat and wine, asking for only vegetables and water for 10 days. At the end of that period, Daniel asked that his health and that of his companions be compared to those who indulged in the fare of the king’s table, and Daniel’s group was deemed "better in appearance and fatter in flesh" than those who ate the king’s diet. The parable was intended to show that Daniel was a smart, strong iconoclast, able to assert himself in the presence of a king, but it also serves as one of the earliest records of the superiority of a vegetarian lifestyle – and how going against the meat-eating norm was, even then, considered an act of rebellion!
But the earliest vegetarian diet, way back in the sixth century B.C. and long before the term "vegetarian" was coined, was the Pythagorean Diet. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, famous for his contributions to geometry and mathematics, strongly believed in the reincarnation of the soul and preached an ethical lifestyle that included injunctions against killing living creatures, whether through animal sacrifice or for the eating of meat. His proscribed diet was very close to today’s vegan diet, and attracted two different classes of adherents. One group, an elite group who studied directly under Pythagoras called mathematikoi ("mathematicians" followed an extremely restricted regimen, eating only cereals, bread, honey, fruits and some vegetables. A larger group of followers called the akousmatikoi ("listeners" who attended lectures by the philosopher were allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but were required to abstain on certain days.
According to historical documents, Pythagoras told his followers, "Oh, my fellow men! Do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter: only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass." His biographer, Diogenes, wrote that Pythagoras ate millet or barley bread and honeycomb in the morning and raw vegetables at night, and that he paid fisherman to throw their catches back into the ocean.
The Pythagorean diet – which the philosopher claimed had been taught by the goddess Demeter to Heracles, who taught it to him – became known as that of intellectuals and rebels, and was banned by Rome. But in the smaller, outlying Greek states, the Pythagorean diet was more acceptable and found a wide share of adherents. And Pythagoras wasn’t the only philosopher to advise that a vegetarian lifestyle was healthier and more ethical than a meat-eating diet – Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Ovid and Virgil all advocated vegetarian diets.
Throughout the times that followed, Pythagoras’ teachings, included his diet, retained its advocates, even seeing a resurgence of popularity in Europe during the 17th century when a devout Christian named Thomas Tryon read the works of the German mystic Jacob Böhme and started a Hindu vegetarian society in London.
Towards an Enlightened Way of Eating
The Age of Enlightenment during Europe’s 18th century saw an upsurge in interest in vegetarianism, following hundreds of years in which diet was dictated by need – after all, during periods of famine and disease, one eats whatever one can get. But by the 18th century medicine had curtailed many of the more widespread diseases, and Europeans had discovered a number of delicious New World vegetables like potatoes, cauliflower and corn. The intellectuals of the time, including the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – who were now able to think about loftier issues than mere survival – began to reappraise man’s place in the order of things. For the first time, arguments were put forth that animals were intelligent, feeling creatures, and that it was immoral to mistreat them.
During the 18th century, painters like Oudry and Delacroix made artworks that showed animals as individuals with personalities, rather than just beasts to be used and slaughtered for human convenience. During this time, the treatment of animals was often horrific – beating one’s horse wasn’t considered out of line, nor were cock fights or bear-baiting, the setting of bulldogs against bears as sport. Pigs were beaten to death with knotted ropes in the belief that it would make for more tender meat and, in Paris, the slaughter of animals was done in the alleys next to the city’s many, many butcher shops, which led to public outcry against the horrible sounds of slaughter, the blood in the streets and the stench of rotting flesh. When Napoléon took control of Paris in 1799, he began a program of extensive city works that including sewers, and slaughterhouses located on the outskirts of the city. The methods used to butcher animals were made no less humane, but at least people no longer had to witness the slaughter as they walked down the city streets – beginning a tradition of killing mass quantities of animals for meat behind closed doors that continues to this day.
A painting of Slaughter House
The 1800s saw a number of religious and educational communities spring up which advocated vegetarian diets. In 1807, the Reverend William Cowherd broke with the Church of England and established the Bible Christian Church, founded on a literal interpretation of the scriptures. Cowherd believed that the Bible prohibited the eating of meat – a view that was not shared by leaders of the Church of England – and he quickly developed a large congregation. His timing was perfect, capitalizing on a widespread backlash to the industrial revolution that inspired a more romanticized view of nature and animals. Cowherd’s flock abstained from consuming meat, coffee, tea, tobacco and alcohol, and many also eschewed dairy products and eggs. The Bible Christian Church handed out free bowls of vegetable soup to the poor, and are often credited with coining the term "vegetarian."
In 1817, a disciple of Cowherd’s named William Metcalfe sailed for America with 41 church members and formed a small but influential Philadelphia congregation. Among Metcalfe’s followers was a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, a raw foods enthusiast and inventor of the graham cracker. Graham toured the United States, giving lectures on temperance (abstention from alcohol) and the importance of proper diet to good health. Through his lectures and his writings in the "Graham Journal of Health and Longevity," he counseled that certain foods and activities were unhealthy because of their "stimulating" qualities, including white bread, alcohol and the wearing of tight pants. He was a tireless advocate of the vegetarian diet – he compared human physiology to that of orangutans, concluding that vegetarian food was optimal for all primates – and founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850.
But Graham’s two greatest legacies are health related – he lectured extensively on the connections between diet and disease (stating that New York residents had weakened their resistance to epidemics through their unhealthy eating habits) and promoted the use of whole grains, denouncing the increasingly popular use of refined flour in baked goods, pointing out that while bakers were able to turn out more loaves of bread due to the faster baking times, the nutritional value of the bread was lost.Among those that Metcalfe and Graham influenced was Amos Bronson Alcott, father of "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott. A writer, philosopher and educator, Alcott was a proponent of Transcendentalism, which began as a reform movement within the Unitarian church and proposed that the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and contains what the world contains.
In 1843, he and educational reformer Charles Lane established Fruitlands, an ambitious utopian community in Massachusetts. Gathering together a small but eager group of disaffected intellectuals, Alcott advocated an austere vegan lifestyle, writing, "The entrance to paradise is still through the strait and narrow gate of self-denial. Eden’s avenue is yet guarded by the fiery-sworded cherubim, and humility and charity are the credentials for admission." The diet at Fruitlands consisted of fruit, grains, beans and peas. All animal flesh and by-products were forbidden due to their "corrupting" nature, and tea, coffee, rice, molasses and sugar were off-limits because they were produced by slave labor. The community’s goal was to produce only what they needed, believing that the acquisition of material goods inhibits spirituality. For a time, Alcott admired the self-supporting activities of the nearby Shaker community, but ultimately condemned them for indulging in production and trade with the outside world.
As well-intentioned as Fruitlands’ goals were, it didn’t take long to discover that successful communal living requires more than a well-tended vegetable garden and discussions of philosophy – Alcott’s experiment lasted just seven months. Louisa May Alcott wrote of her experience at Fruitlands in "Transcendental Wild Oats," and Fruitlands stands today as a museum.
Adventists and Corn Flakes and Vegans – Oh My!
One of biggest influences on modern-day vegetarianism in the United States has been the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church, founded in the 1840s by vegetarian health reformer Ellen White. She believed that the proper diet for humans was prescribed by God in the Bible, and wrote in 1864 that Adam and Eve were given all they needed for nourishment – "He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden.
The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man’s wants required." The SDA church focuses heavily on spiritual health, diet and exercise – in fact, several studies have found that Adventists are significantly healthier than the general population! Today, almost all of the church’s clergy and roughly half of its two million members worldwide are lacto-ovo vegetarians, and the SDA church owns its own publishing company, plus a number of hospitals, natural food stores, and vegetarian restaurants. Church-affiliated universities are leaders in scientific research into dietetics, and continue to promote vegetarianism with a strong emphasis on health.
One man who worked as a printer for White, helping to publish the Adventists’ health journal, was a fellow named John Harvey Kellogg. White and her husband, James, took a liking to Kellogg and paid for his medical school education, then placed him in charge of their Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa retreat for "health restoration and training." A believer in the value of preventative medicine, Dr. Kellogg’s treatments were founded in the Adventist philosophy with an emphasis on fresh air, sunshine, exercise, rest and diet.
The diet he prescribed, which he called "biologic living," forbade meats, condiments, spices, alcohol, chocolate, coffee and tea, but he worked tirelessly to create a vegetarian diet that was also varied and tasty – over the course of his career, Dr. Kellogg invented over 80 different products using nuts and grains, including peanut butter, a cereal-based coffee substitute (an early version of Postum) and corn flakes. Dr. Kellogg was convinced that a great many illnesses were caused by toxic bacteria in the bowels and favored a high-fiber vegetarian diet, blaming some 90 percent of all disease on stomach and bowel problems.
He was especially concerned about the effects of meat-eating on the intestinal tract. In many ways, Dr, Kellogg’s practices can be viewed as somewhat different – he disapproved of sexual activity of all kinds, gave patients multiple daily enemas, and shocked them in electrified tanks of water – but his influence as an advocate of vegetarianism was profound. Among the visitors to his sanitarium were automobile tycoon Henry Ford, retailers J.C. Penney and S.S.Kresge, actress Sarah Berhardt, explorer Richard Byrd, inventor Thomas Edison, industrialist Harvey Firestone, President William Howard Taft, and aviator Amelia Earhart. Once he started marketing his food products, Dr. Kellogg had to hire his brother to take over because the enterprise was so successful, and his method of mass-producing cereal for the marketplace was copied by numerous competitors
Battle Creek Sanitarium was just one of many vegetarian health retreats in the United States, and advocates of the lifestyle – and shrewd businessmen hoping to capitalize on a trend – opened vegetarian restaurants in large cities across the country. Toward the end of the century, however, interest in vegetarianism waned. In the early part of the 20th century, the United States Department pf Agriculture (USDA) began producing food guides, ostensibly to help struggling families plan nutritious meals during times of little money and, later, food rationing.
These food guides, unsurprisingly, recommended that Americans eat hefty amounts of meat, eggs and dairy – all products of the food industries overseen by the Department of Agriculture.
The Swingin’ 60’s: Peace, Free Love and Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism regained some popularity in the 1960s with the teaching of Michio Kushi, an advocate of macrobiotics who founded the Kushi Institute in Massachusetts. Born in Japan, Kushi came to the United States in 1949, eager to share what he’d learned from macrobiotic educator Georges Ohsawa, who taught that food was the key to health, and that health was the key to peace.
In Boston, Kushi founded Erewhon, the country’s pioneer natural foods distributor,making organically grown whole foods and naturally processed foods widely available and introducing countless people to miso, tofu, tempeh and other soy products, as well as sea vegetables, barley malt and rice syrup, azuki beans and rice cakes – the mainstream availability of health foods that we have today simply wouldn’t exist if not for Michio Kushi. Throughout the 1980s, Kushi met with government leaders at the United Nations and around the world, promoting macrobiotics, working to convey the philosophies of healthful, thoughtful eating.
But the real vegetarian boom came in the early 1970s following the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s "Diet for a Small Planet." Published at a time when the world was beginning to register alarm over depletion of the earth’s resources, Lappé’s book raised awareness of the wasteful manner in which animals are reared for consumption as meat. Though not a vegetarian herself, Lappé promoted feeding ourselves in a healthful, respectful ways that made a gentler impact on the environment. Her book advocated a complicated methodology for eating complete proteins that involved combining food low in certain amino acids with other foods high in that amino acid – in later editions of the book she abandoned that method, saying, "In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought." While Lappé’s book was slow to gain popularity, in the three decades since its release its sold over three million copies and spawned a 2002 sequel, "Hope’s Edge" The Next Diet for a Small Planet," in which Lappé once again looks at the way we feed ourselves. In 2001, Lappé and her daughter, Anna, founded the Small Planet Institute, a research and education organization which partners with foundations, individuals and socially responsible businesses to promote "living democracy," a philosophy of sustainable, positive, working communities.
The ethical side of vegetarianism also received a boost in the mid-1970’s, with the publication of the book "Animal Liberation" by ethicist Peter Singer, which argued against what the author called "speciesism" – discrimination based on the belief that humans own animals and can do whatever they like with them. His contention that all beings capable of suffering should be granted equal consideration helped to promote not just vegetarianism but a vegan lifestyle, due to his belief that the use of animals for food is unjustifiable because it creates unnecessary suffering. A few years later in 1975, the non-profit group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was formed, founded on the tenet that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." In addition to high profile campaigns against animal testing and fur farming, PETA has lobbied passionately against the use of animals for food. The group has had great success in uncovering and stopping inhumane treatment of animals in laboratories and in spreading awareness of veganism, particularly through their placement of "Lettuce Ladies" – lovely young women dressed only in bikinis made from lettuce – and a 2003 advertising campaign which compared animals killed in factory farms with concentration camp victims.
So Where Are We Now?
Vegetarianism is more popular and acceptable by mainstream society than ever before. The more that we learn about diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and with more meat-borne illnesses from E. Coli, Mad Cow disease and other bacterial infections on the rise, a vegetarian diet is a smarter option than at any time in the past. In a world where our natural resources are being depleted at a rate far faster than they can possibly be renewed, it makes more sense than ever to walk gently on the planet. Fortunately, the ranks of vegetarians are swelling as people figure these things out for themselves – with any luck, most of the world will come around to the vegetarian way of thinking, while we still have some of those resources left.
But the truth is more complicated than that. Certainly there were eras in human history when meat was a staple – during the Ice Age, for example, the ground was so cold and hard that vegetation was difficult to find, so that Neanderthal was forced to hunt down meat to fill his grumbling tummy. But the very earliest humans were more gatherer than hunter and actually scavenged the remains of animals that were killed by other predators, essentially gleaning from others’ roadkill. Studies by anthropologists indicate that early man was far more interested in feasting on the nutrient-rich bone marrow of found animals rather than on their flesh, using tools to cut away the meat not to eat it, but to remove it from the desired bones.
No, early man’s diet consisted of what he could find growing where he lived – vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. By combining those, and relying primarily on a diet of calcium-rich wild greens, he was able to get all of the vitamins, iron, protein, fats and carbohydrates that he needed.
Animals had yet to be domesticated, so the only meat our ancestors had to eat was either what they chased down or found lying about – gathering nuts and seeds was simply more productive than counting on being able to catch and cook an animal by supper time. Eventually, man developed agriculture, raising vegetables and grains, and domesticating animals for meat and dairy. But before that time, some 10,000 years ago, man relied heavily on that which he could pluck from trees, bushes and the ground, and his diet was about 90 percent plant food. So toss out the idea that man is at heart a carnivore – we are, in fact, omnivores, able to eat meat but certainly nor required to by our biology or our history.
The Pythagorean Credo
By the time that man’s adventures were being jotted down in scriptures and testaments, meat-eating had become commonplace – but there were still those who advised against the practice. In the Old Testament’s book of Daniel, it was set down that Daniel refused the wealthy King Nebuchadnezzar’s feast of rich foods, meat and wine, asking for only vegetables and water for 10 days. At the end of that period, Daniel asked that his health and that of his companions be compared to those who indulged in the fare of the king’s table, and Daniel’s group was deemed "better in appearance and fatter in flesh" than those who ate the king’s diet. The parable was intended to show that Daniel was a smart, strong iconoclast, able to assert himself in the presence of a king, but it also serves as one of the earliest records of the superiority of a vegetarian lifestyle – and how going against the meat-eating norm was, even then, considered an act of rebellion!
But the earliest vegetarian diet, way back in the sixth century B.C. and long before the term "vegetarian" was coined, was the Pythagorean Diet. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, famous for his contributions to geometry and mathematics, strongly believed in the reincarnation of the soul and preached an ethical lifestyle that included injunctions against killing living creatures, whether through animal sacrifice or for the eating of meat. His proscribed diet was very close to today’s vegan diet, and attracted two different classes of adherents. One group, an elite group who studied directly under Pythagoras called mathematikoi ("mathematicians" followed an extremely restricted regimen, eating only cereals, bread, honey, fruits and some vegetables. A larger group of followers called the akousmatikoi ("listeners" who attended lectures by the philosopher were allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but were required to abstain on certain days.
According to historical documents, Pythagoras told his followers, "Oh, my fellow men! Do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter: only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass." His biographer, Diogenes, wrote that Pythagoras ate millet or barley bread and honeycomb in the morning and raw vegetables at night, and that he paid fisherman to throw their catches back into the ocean.
The Pythagorean diet – which the philosopher claimed had been taught by the goddess Demeter to Heracles, who taught it to him – became known as that of intellectuals and rebels, and was banned by Rome. But in the smaller, outlying Greek states, the Pythagorean diet was more acceptable and found a wide share of adherents. And Pythagoras wasn’t the only philosopher to advise that a vegetarian lifestyle was healthier and more ethical than a meat-eating diet – Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Ovid and Virgil all advocated vegetarian diets.
Throughout the times that followed, Pythagoras’ teachings, included his diet, retained its advocates, even seeing a resurgence of popularity in Europe during the 17th century when a devout Christian named Thomas Tryon read the works of the German mystic Jacob Böhme and started a Hindu vegetarian society in London.
Towards an Enlightened Way of Eating
The Age of Enlightenment during Europe’s 18th century saw an upsurge in interest in vegetarianism, following hundreds of years in which diet was dictated by need – after all, during periods of famine and disease, one eats whatever one can get. But by the 18th century medicine had curtailed many of the more widespread diseases, and Europeans had discovered a number of delicious New World vegetables like potatoes, cauliflower and corn. The intellectuals of the time, including the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – who were now able to think about loftier issues than mere survival – began to reappraise man’s place in the order of things. For the first time, arguments were put forth that animals were intelligent, feeling creatures, and that it was immoral to mistreat them.
During the 18th century, painters like Oudry and Delacroix made artworks that showed animals as individuals with personalities, rather than just beasts to be used and slaughtered for human convenience. During this time, the treatment of animals was often horrific – beating one’s horse wasn’t considered out of line, nor were cock fights or bear-baiting, the setting of bulldogs against bears as sport. Pigs were beaten to death with knotted ropes in the belief that it would make for more tender meat and, in Paris, the slaughter of animals was done in the alleys next to the city’s many, many butcher shops, which led to public outcry against the horrible sounds of slaughter, the blood in the streets and the stench of rotting flesh. When Napoléon took control of Paris in 1799, he began a program of extensive city works that including sewers, and slaughterhouses located on the outskirts of the city. The methods used to butcher animals were made no less humane, but at least people no longer had to witness the slaughter as they walked down the city streets – beginning a tradition of killing mass quantities of animals for meat behind closed doors that continues to this day.
A painting of Slaughter House
The 1800s saw a number of religious and educational communities spring up which advocated vegetarian diets. In 1807, the Reverend William Cowherd broke with the Church of England and established the Bible Christian Church, founded on a literal interpretation of the scriptures. Cowherd believed that the Bible prohibited the eating of meat – a view that was not shared by leaders of the Church of England – and he quickly developed a large congregation. His timing was perfect, capitalizing on a widespread backlash to the industrial revolution that inspired a more romanticized view of nature and animals. Cowherd’s flock abstained from consuming meat, coffee, tea, tobacco and alcohol, and many also eschewed dairy products and eggs. The Bible Christian Church handed out free bowls of vegetable soup to the poor, and are often credited with coining the term "vegetarian."
In 1817, a disciple of Cowherd’s named William Metcalfe sailed for America with 41 church members and formed a small but influential Philadelphia congregation. Among Metcalfe’s followers was a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, a raw foods enthusiast and inventor of the graham cracker. Graham toured the United States, giving lectures on temperance (abstention from alcohol) and the importance of proper diet to good health. Through his lectures and his writings in the "Graham Journal of Health and Longevity," he counseled that certain foods and activities were unhealthy because of their "stimulating" qualities, including white bread, alcohol and the wearing of tight pants. He was a tireless advocate of the vegetarian diet – he compared human physiology to that of orangutans, concluding that vegetarian food was optimal for all primates – and founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850.
But Graham’s two greatest legacies are health related – he lectured extensively on the connections between diet and disease (stating that New York residents had weakened their resistance to epidemics through their unhealthy eating habits) and promoted the use of whole grains, denouncing the increasingly popular use of refined flour in baked goods, pointing out that while bakers were able to turn out more loaves of bread due to the faster baking times, the nutritional value of the bread was lost.Among those that Metcalfe and Graham influenced was Amos Bronson Alcott, father of "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott. A writer, philosopher and educator, Alcott was a proponent of Transcendentalism, which began as a reform movement within the Unitarian church and proposed that the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and contains what the world contains.
In 1843, he and educational reformer Charles Lane established Fruitlands, an ambitious utopian community in Massachusetts. Gathering together a small but eager group of disaffected intellectuals, Alcott advocated an austere vegan lifestyle, writing, "The entrance to paradise is still through the strait and narrow gate of self-denial. Eden’s avenue is yet guarded by the fiery-sworded cherubim, and humility and charity are the credentials for admission." The diet at Fruitlands consisted of fruit, grains, beans and peas. All animal flesh and by-products were forbidden due to their "corrupting" nature, and tea, coffee, rice, molasses and sugar were off-limits because they were produced by slave labor. The community’s goal was to produce only what they needed, believing that the acquisition of material goods inhibits spirituality. For a time, Alcott admired the self-supporting activities of the nearby Shaker community, but ultimately condemned them for indulging in production and trade with the outside world.
As well-intentioned as Fruitlands’ goals were, it didn’t take long to discover that successful communal living requires more than a well-tended vegetable garden and discussions of philosophy – Alcott’s experiment lasted just seven months. Louisa May Alcott wrote of her experience at Fruitlands in "Transcendental Wild Oats," and Fruitlands stands today as a museum.
Adventists and Corn Flakes and Vegans – Oh My!
One of biggest influences on modern-day vegetarianism in the United States has been the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church, founded in the 1840s by vegetarian health reformer Ellen White. She believed that the proper diet for humans was prescribed by God in the Bible, and wrote in 1864 that Adam and Eve were given all they needed for nourishment – "He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden.
The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man’s wants required." The SDA church focuses heavily on spiritual health, diet and exercise – in fact, several studies have found that Adventists are significantly healthier than the general population! Today, almost all of the church’s clergy and roughly half of its two million members worldwide are lacto-ovo vegetarians, and the SDA church owns its own publishing company, plus a number of hospitals, natural food stores, and vegetarian restaurants. Church-affiliated universities are leaders in scientific research into dietetics, and continue to promote vegetarianism with a strong emphasis on health.
One man who worked as a printer for White, helping to publish the Adventists’ health journal, was a fellow named John Harvey Kellogg. White and her husband, James, took a liking to Kellogg and paid for his medical school education, then placed him in charge of their Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa retreat for "health restoration and training." A believer in the value of preventative medicine, Dr. Kellogg’s treatments were founded in the Adventist philosophy with an emphasis on fresh air, sunshine, exercise, rest and diet.
The diet he prescribed, which he called "biologic living," forbade meats, condiments, spices, alcohol, chocolate, coffee and tea, but he worked tirelessly to create a vegetarian diet that was also varied and tasty – over the course of his career, Dr. Kellogg invented over 80 different products using nuts and grains, including peanut butter, a cereal-based coffee substitute (an early version of Postum) and corn flakes. Dr. Kellogg was convinced that a great many illnesses were caused by toxic bacteria in the bowels and favored a high-fiber vegetarian diet, blaming some 90 percent of all disease on stomach and bowel problems.
He was especially concerned about the effects of meat-eating on the intestinal tract. In many ways, Dr, Kellogg’s practices can be viewed as somewhat different – he disapproved of sexual activity of all kinds, gave patients multiple daily enemas, and shocked them in electrified tanks of water – but his influence as an advocate of vegetarianism was profound. Among the visitors to his sanitarium were automobile tycoon Henry Ford, retailers J.C. Penney and S.S.Kresge, actress Sarah Berhardt, explorer Richard Byrd, inventor Thomas Edison, industrialist Harvey Firestone, President William Howard Taft, and aviator Amelia Earhart. Once he started marketing his food products, Dr. Kellogg had to hire his brother to take over because the enterprise was so successful, and his method of mass-producing cereal for the marketplace was copied by numerous competitors
Battle Creek Sanitarium was just one of many vegetarian health retreats in the United States, and advocates of the lifestyle – and shrewd businessmen hoping to capitalize on a trend – opened vegetarian restaurants in large cities across the country. Toward the end of the century, however, interest in vegetarianism waned. In the early part of the 20th century, the United States Department pf Agriculture (USDA) began producing food guides, ostensibly to help struggling families plan nutritious meals during times of little money and, later, food rationing.
These food guides, unsurprisingly, recommended that Americans eat hefty amounts of meat, eggs and dairy – all products of the food industries overseen by the Department of Agriculture.
The Swingin’ 60’s: Peace, Free Love and Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism regained some popularity in the 1960s with the teaching of Michio Kushi, an advocate of macrobiotics who founded the Kushi Institute in Massachusetts. Born in Japan, Kushi came to the United States in 1949, eager to share what he’d learned from macrobiotic educator Georges Ohsawa, who taught that food was the key to health, and that health was the key to peace.
In Boston, Kushi founded Erewhon, the country’s pioneer natural foods distributor,making organically grown whole foods and naturally processed foods widely available and introducing countless people to miso, tofu, tempeh and other soy products, as well as sea vegetables, barley malt and rice syrup, azuki beans and rice cakes – the mainstream availability of health foods that we have today simply wouldn’t exist if not for Michio Kushi. Throughout the 1980s, Kushi met with government leaders at the United Nations and around the world, promoting macrobiotics, working to convey the philosophies of healthful, thoughtful eating.
But the real vegetarian boom came in the early 1970s following the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s "Diet for a Small Planet." Published at a time when the world was beginning to register alarm over depletion of the earth’s resources, Lappé’s book raised awareness of the wasteful manner in which animals are reared for consumption as meat. Though not a vegetarian herself, Lappé promoted feeding ourselves in a healthful, respectful ways that made a gentler impact on the environment. Her book advocated a complicated methodology for eating complete proteins that involved combining food low in certain amino acids with other foods high in that amino acid – in later editions of the book she abandoned that method, saying, "In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought." While Lappé’s book was slow to gain popularity, in the three decades since its release its sold over three million copies and spawned a 2002 sequel, "Hope’s Edge" The Next Diet for a Small Planet," in which Lappé once again looks at the way we feed ourselves. In 2001, Lappé and her daughter, Anna, founded the Small Planet Institute, a research and education organization which partners with foundations, individuals and socially responsible businesses to promote "living democracy," a philosophy of sustainable, positive, working communities.
The ethical side of vegetarianism also received a boost in the mid-1970’s, with the publication of the book "Animal Liberation" by ethicist Peter Singer, which argued against what the author called "speciesism" – discrimination based on the belief that humans own animals and can do whatever they like with them. His contention that all beings capable of suffering should be granted equal consideration helped to promote not just vegetarianism but a vegan lifestyle, due to his belief that the use of animals for food is unjustifiable because it creates unnecessary suffering. A few years later in 1975, the non-profit group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was formed, founded on the tenet that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." In addition to high profile campaigns against animal testing and fur farming, PETA has lobbied passionately against the use of animals for food. The group has had great success in uncovering and stopping inhumane treatment of animals in laboratories and in spreading awareness of veganism, particularly through their placement of "Lettuce Ladies" – lovely young women dressed only in bikinis made from lettuce – and a 2003 advertising campaign which compared animals killed in factory farms with concentration camp victims.
So Where Are We Now?
Vegetarianism is more popular and acceptable by mainstream society than ever before. The more that we learn about diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and with more meat-borne illnesses from E. Coli, Mad Cow disease and other bacterial infections on the rise, a vegetarian diet is a smarter option than at any time in the past. In a world where our natural resources are being depleted at a rate far faster than they can possibly be renewed, it makes more sense than ever to walk gently on the planet. Fortunately, the ranks of vegetarians are swelling as people figure these things out for themselves – with any luck, most of the world will come around to the vegetarian way of thinking, while we still have some of those resources left.
CHAPTER 3 - Ethical Eating - Why Becoming a Vegetarian is Good for You and for the Earth
Some people become vegetarians because they simply find meat unappetizing – chewing and digesting hunks of animal flesh isn’t their idea of fine dining. And that’s a perfectly valid reason to embrace a meatless lifestyle. But for many others, vegetarianism is part of their commitment to living theirs lives with as much environmental, moral and political responsibility as possible – and becoming a vegetarian is a natural part of that resolve.
In fact, just because humans can digest meat and metabolize the protein, that doesn’t mean that we were designed to eat meat as a primary nutritional source. Yes, we can eat meat – but the way our bodies are built shows that we function more efficiently on plant foods. One clue is the design of our teeth. If you examine the teeth of true carnivorous animals, theirs are long, sharp and pointed in the front for the purpose of tearing away flesh. Our so-called "canine" teeth – the four teeth in the front corners of our mouths – are very poorly designed for the task when you compare them to the teeth of dogs, cats, lions and wolves. Human teeth are short, blunt and only very slightly rounded on top – not designed to tear at meat at all! Similarly, the lower jaws of meat-eating animals open very wide but move very little from side-to-side, adding power and stability to their bite. Like other plant-eating animals, our jaws not only open an close but also move forwards, backwards and side-to-side, designed to bite off pieces of plant matter and then grinding it into smaller pieces with our flat molars.
But the most important evolutionary development that sets humans apart from other animals is our huge, overdeveloped brain. We have the ability to choose what we eat and how we live – we aren’t just eating machines forced by the circumstances of nature to eat a specific diet. As a human, you can make decisions based on science, ethics, morals and good old fashioned common sense.
Every choice you make has repercussions, from the excess packaging that you toss in the trash (plastic and cardboard that ends up in a landfill) to the light bulbs that you use (most likely manufactured by a company that supplies nuclear triggers to bomb manufacturers). The food you choose to eat is no exception. In our industrialized Western world, meat appears in tidy wrapped packages in our grocer’s case so we don’t have to think about where it came from – the resources used to raise the animal, the additives pumped into feed to increase production, and the manner in which the animals live and die. But every time you buy meat, you support the system that created it – and chances are, you have no idea just what that entails!
What’s the Beef with the Cattle Industry?
One of the most eye-opening revelations in Frances Moore Lappé’s provocative 1971 book, "Diet for a Small Planet" was the information she provided on the environmentally disastrous impact of the beef industry. One of the biggest effects is on the groundwater supplies that provide the water we use for drinking, cooking and bathing. In the United States alone, the various underground water tables are dropping from six inches to six feet per year. And even as our water supplies are dwindling, almost half of the water used in the U.S. each year is used to irrigate land to grow food – with vast quantities of that going to produce the grain that’s fed to farm animals.
The rate of return – the amount of food we get for the amount of water we use – on animal protein is pretty poor. As an example, it takes about 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes. Compare that to the estimated 2,000 gallons of water used to produce a pound of beef. In her book, Lappé called cattle a "protein factory in reverse," meaning they consume more protein than they provide! For every pound of beef that a steer provides, it eats seven pounds of grain and soy protein – so doesn’t it make more environmental sense to just eat the grains? As global warming due to air pollution becomes an ever more dire development, scientists are looking not only to the pollutants caused by cars and factories, but to that caused by factory farming as well. Cattle produce methane gas (and if you’ve ever driven past a stockyard, you know how dense that gas can be!) and methane makes up 9 percent of the gasses contributing to the greenhouse effect – approximately 70 to 80 tons of methane per year.
They also produce waste high in nitrous oxide, another factor in global warming. In fact, animal waste is the largest source of environmental emissions of nitrous oxide, making up 95 percent. Cattle farming in rainforest areas contributes to global warming, too, as more and more rainforest is leveled to create pastures for grazing. And the runoff from cattle farms – containing nitrogen, phosphorous, waste-borne pathogens and detergents – often flows directly into the waterways, destroying fish habitats and leaching into the groundwater that provides our drinking water supplies.
Then there’s the massive use of fossil fuels required to get beef to market. Today’s massive, high-tech factory farms burn fuel to run the machinery that provides heating, lighting and cooling, in addition to the gasoline that fuels the trucks that deliver the feed, transport the cattle and deliver the meat to market. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that it takes about 48 gallons of gasoline per American, per year, to provide the red meat and poultry that we eat.
Old McDonald Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Ah, the pastoral pleasures of farm life! Fluffy sheep grazing contentedly in the fields, the chickens clucking in the henhouse and the pigs happily munching away at the family’s leftovers from their communal trough. Everyone’s happy and healthy and doing their part for the cycle of life. Right?
Unfortunately, it’s not at all like that. At least, not in this day and age of mass-quantity factory farms where the well-being of animals isn’t considered – the only issue is how to harvest as much meat for market as possible per square foot of land. And to that end, farmers now forgo traditional grazing practices, packing as many animals as possible into crowded feedlots, where they do nothing throughout their short lives but eat tons of grain and drink thousands of gallons of water.
Dairy cows are often treated better than beef cattle, but not much – increasingly, dairy farmers are keeping their cows housed inside barns their entire lives, where they develop leg and hoof problems due to standing in once place on cement floors. Cows today are also forced to produce more milk than ever before, being constantly milked by machines with little rest from the process, giving them painfully inflamed udders. The forced milk production shortens their lives, too – when treated well, cows can live for up to 20 years, producing milk for over half their life. Today’s dairy cows are so overmilked that they can only produce for three or four years, after which time they’re sent to the slaughterhouse.
Cows aren’t the only animals to suffer under factory farming practices. Chickens are treated especially poorly, living their entire lives in cramped confinement, crowded so closely together that they’re "debeaked" – their beaks snapped off with a machine tool – so that they don’t harm each other with their hysterical pecking. Debeaked chickens have difficulty eating, which isn’t surprising, and live in such terrible conditions that they’re forced to eat their own and other chickens’ feces along with their food, contributing to the wide variety of potentially deadly bacteria that gets passed onto the consumer.
Besides the debeaking, another unpleasant practice is "molting." Chickens produce more eggs when they’re shedding their feathers, so egg farmers induce the state by starving the birds for up to twelve days at a time. Besides being inhumane, some researchers have concluded that forced molting increases chickens’ levels of salmonella. This also assists egg farmers in weeding out the weaker hens – about 3 percent of chickens die of starvation during the forced molting process.
In fact, the entire egg-production process starts with killing – male chicks have no function on a modern egg farm and are "culled" by workers whose job consists of identifying male chicks and tossing them, while still alive, into machines that grind them up and add them to the hens’ feed. Practices like this, along with molting and debeaking, have caused enough of a public outcry that even the McDonald’s Corporation couldn’t ignore it – in 2000, the fast food giant sent letters to the farmers who provide the over 1.5 billion eggs that they use each year, demanding that chickens be housed in larger cages and that forced molting be stopped.
How This Little Piggy Gets to Market
Pigs are one of the most intelligent of the domesticated beasts, friendly and gregarious. Those who raise pigs – the ones who care about their animals – say that they’re as smart and as loving as dogs or cats, enjoying music, basking in the sun and playing with toys. They’re also very clean animals who only "wallow" in mud to cool off and keep away flies. All of which makes it especially horrifying when you learn how they’re treated in factory farms.
Mother pigs on farms in the United States live out most of their lives in "gestation" crates that are just 7 feet long by 2 feet wide, too small for them to even turn around. They display signs of boredom and stress when contained in such a manner, biting the bars of the cage and gnashing their teeth – piglets’ tails are often routinely cut off so they won’t bite each other’s tails, a neurotic behavior that only occurs in confinement. Piglets are taken away from their mothers three weeks after birth, then packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Often, the piglets’ teeth are chipped off with pliers to further discourage them from biting each other.
For transport, pigs are stuffed into trucks with no food or water and without any temperature regulation, subjecting them to extremes of heat or cold. During the freezing midwestern winters, they often freeze to the sides of the trucks or die from dehydration. According to numbers provided by the pork industry, over 100,000 pigs die on their way to slaughterhouses each year, and over 400,000 arrive crippled due to barbaric transport practices.
At the slaughterhouse, the pigs are stunned with an electrical charge to their brain or heart which, when done correctly, renders them immediately unconscious before they’re tossed into tanks of scalding water which softens their skin and removes their hair. Stunning is often done incorrectly, however – meaning that the pigs are still conscious and already in severe pain when they’re thrown into the scalding water. Audits of factory farms by the USDA and independent organizations continually find scores of humane slaughter violations, including one PETA investigation that uncovered a plant in Oklahoma where workers killed pigs by slamming the animals heads against the floor and beating them with hammers.
Vegetarianism – The Thoughtful Alternative
There are many, many benefits that you’ll see immediately by becoming a vegetarian, including clear skin, shiny hair and lower risk of high cholesterol, diabetes and kidney disease. But the wider benefit is the one you can’t see – the benefit to the rest of the world. Keep the following in mind when you feel tempted to go back to eating meat ...
You’re helping to conserve water. Water is the earth’s most precious resource, and currently about 50 percent of the water in the United States is used to grow crops for grain-fed animals – as opposed to 35 percent that’s used to grow food crops for humans to eat. It takes roughly 15 times as much water to produce the same amount of protein from an animal that we can get from plant sources. Switching to a vegetarian diet is the single biggest thing that you can do to cut down on your consumption of water.
You’re helping to protect the land. Livestock grazing erodes topsoil, drying out the land and making it unusable for other farming. This is one reason why forests are clear-cut at an alarming rate to make room for more cattle grazing – agriculture accounts for nearly 90 percent of the 30 million acres of rainforest that are destroyed each year. Nearly 25 percent of all prescription drugs have a basis in rainforest plants – destroying the rainforest may mean destroying our chances of curing cancer or AIDS.
You’re helping to conserve fossil fuels. In this supply-and-demand world, less demand means less production, which means less consumption of fossil fuels. More than a third of the fossil fuels used in the United States are used by animal agriculture – a calorie of animal protein requires ten times as much fuel as needed to produce a calorie of plant protein. Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the amount of fossil fuel needed to cultivate and process various foods, fuel that’s used to operate agricultural machinery, provide food for livestock and irrigate crops. They also factored in emissions of methane and nitrous oxide produced by cows, sheep and manure treatment. According to the findings, the average American diet that consists of about 28 percent animal foods generates the equivalent of 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide each year than a comparable vegan diet.
The researchers pointed out that driving a hybrid car rather than an average vehicle would conserve a little over one ton of carbon dioxide per year – meaning that living a vegan lifestyle reduces more emissions than driving a hybrid car!
You’re making a more compassionate choice. Now that you’ve read about the horrors of factory farming, is that slice of bacon really worth it? There’s a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: "When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity." Many people believe that we have a natural right to kill and eat animals, but think of it this way – imagine a time when an alien species visits our planet.
They’re smarter than we are, and have technology far more advanced of our own. And they like to eat meat. So humans become the factory-farmed animals, taken to slaughterhouses – as we cry and scream and fight to no avail – and we’re shoved into pens until such time as we’re marched onto the killing floor, bashed in the head and stripped of our flesh, which is then neatly packaged up for market. It’s a horrible thought – yet that’s what humans do to animals every day. St. Francis of Assisi said, "If you have men who will exclude any of god’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." Choosing a vegetarian lifestyle is choosing the path of compassion.
Feeding the World with Plants
Considering the vast resources squandered to provide consumers with meat, it’s obvious that it’s an illogical, inefficient way to feed our continually growing population. Vegetarian diets can sustain far more people than diets that revolve around meat – when we eat grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, we’re eating the food that is fed to the meat animals that are later, in turn, eaten by us. It just doesn’t make sense! Factor in the damage to the earth, the water and the air ... on a global level, our reliance on animal foods is devastating.
There’s some debate as to whether choosing a meatless diet really helps to feed people elsewhere – there simply isn’t enough food to feed the world, but that’s an issue with far more complicated issues of politics, distribution and geography involved than just choice of diet. But one thing is certain – Westerners eat way more food than we need. In poorer nations, the average person eats about a pound of grain each day. In the United States, it’s four times that – and a large part of that is the grain used to produce the animal proteins we eat. While people are starving all over the globe, the U.S. feeds 70 percent of its harvested grain to animals – meaning that most of the food we grow goes to produce even more food that most of the rest of the world can’t afford to purchase.
What’s absolutely true is that the expansion of meat-eating around the world is directly contributing to hunger, and will continue to do so unless something drastic is done. Worldwide, meat production quadrupled from 44 million tons in 1950 to 195 million tons in 1996. Countries like China and India – both countries with a long, rich tradition of vegetable-based diets – are becoming increasingly avid consumers of meat foods.
In China alone, pork consumption has risen so astronomically in the last decade, the Chinese now consume more pork per person than in the United States. And while India still has the largest vegetarian population in the world, the country is now also the largest exporter of meat in Asia. There just isn’t enough grain to support these industries, much less feed people directly. In 1993, China exported 8 million tons of grain, thanks to the country’s expanding pork industry, China imported 16 million tons of grain in 1995 – just two years later. Meat-eating is almost universally seen as a symbol of a economic progress, but the more meat humans eat, the more humans there are that go hungry.
It’s likely that, if more people embraced vegetarianism, less animals would be fed and killed for meat. A widespread conversion to plant-based diets would reduce food shortage simply by reducing the amount of factory-farmed animals and their drain on land and other resources.
With fewer animals to feed, it might be possible to rebuild world grain reserves, guaranteeing that there’s enough food for even the poorest countries. And reducing the amount of world-wide animal agriculture would contribute to biological diversity, climate control, and the ozone layer.
It’s a lot to comprehend, thinking about world hunger. Ultimately, though, your conscience is your guide – knowing what you know now, do you still feel good about eating a hamburger? Albert Einstein said it best: "Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." By choosing a meatless lifestyle, your choosing to be a caring citizen of the world.
In fact, just because humans can digest meat and metabolize the protein, that doesn’t mean that we were designed to eat meat as a primary nutritional source. Yes, we can eat meat – but the way our bodies are built shows that we function more efficiently on plant foods. One clue is the design of our teeth. If you examine the teeth of true carnivorous animals, theirs are long, sharp and pointed in the front for the purpose of tearing away flesh. Our so-called "canine" teeth – the four teeth in the front corners of our mouths – are very poorly designed for the task when you compare them to the teeth of dogs, cats, lions and wolves. Human teeth are short, blunt and only very slightly rounded on top – not designed to tear at meat at all! Similarly, the lower jaws of meat-eating animals open very wide but move very little from side-to-side, adding power and stability to their bite. Like other plant-eating animals, our jaws not only open an close but also move forwards, backwards and side-to-side, designed to bite off pieces of plant matter and then grinding it into smaller pieces with our flat molars.
But the most important evolutionary development that sets humans apart from other animals is our huge, overdeveloped brain. We have the ability to choose what we eat and how we live – we aren’t just eating machines forced by the circumstances of nature to eat a specific diet. As a human, you can make decisions based on science, ethics, morals and good old fashioned common sense.
Every choice you make has repercussions, from the excess packaging that you toss in the trash (plastic and cardboard that ends up in a landfill) to the light bulbs that you use (most likely manufactured by a company that supplies nuclear triggers to bomb manufacturers). The food you choose to eat is no exception. In our industrialized Western world, meat appears in tidy wrapped packages in our grocer’s case so we don’t have to think about where it came from – the resources used to raise the animal, the additives pumped into feed to increase production, and the manner in which the animals live and die. But every time you buy meat, you support the system that created it – and chances are, you have no idea just what that entails!
What’s the Beef with the Cattle Industry?
One of the most eye-opening revelations in Frances Moore Lappé’s provocative 1971 book, "Diet for a Small Planet" was the information she provided on the environmentally disastrous impact of the beef industry. One of the biggest effects is on the groundwater supplies that provide the water we use for drinking, cooking and bathing. In the United States alone, the various underground water tables are dropping from six inches to six feet per year. And even as our water supplies are dwindling, almost half of the water used in the U.S. each year is used to irrigate land to grow food – with vast quantities of that going to produce the grain that’s fed to farm animals.
The rate of return – the amount of food we get for the amount of water we use – on animal protein is pretty poor. As an example, it takes about 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes. Compare that to the estimated 2,000 gallons of water used to produce a pound of beef. In her book, Lappé called cattle a "protein factory in reverse," meaning they consume more protein than they provide! For every pound of beef that a steer provides, it eats seven pounds of grain and soy protein – so doesn’t it make more environmental sense to just eat the grains? As global warming due to air pollution becomes an ever more dire development, scientists are looking not only to the pollutants caused by cars and factories, but to that caused by factory farming as well. Cattle produce methane gas (and if you’ve ever driven past a stockyard, you know how dense that gas can be!) and methane makes up 9 percent of the gasses contributing to the greenhouse effect – approximately 70 to 80 tons of methane per year.
They also produce waste high in nitrous oxide, another factor in global warming. In fact, animal waste is the largest source of environmental emissions of nitrous oxide, making up 95 percent. Cattle farming in rainforest areas contributes to global warming, too, as more and more rainforest is leveled to create pastures for grazing. And the runoff from cattle farms – containing nitrogen, phosphorous, waste-borne pathogens and detergents – often flows directly into the waterways, destroying fish habitats and leaching into the groundwater that provides our drinking water supplies.
Then there’s the massive use of fossil fuels required to get beef to market. Today’s massive, high-tech factory farms burn fuel to run the machinery that provides heating, lighting and cooling, in addition to the gasoline that fuels the trucks that deliver the feed, transport the cattle and deliver the meat to market. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that it takes about 48 gallons of gasoline per American, per year, to provide the red meat and poultry that we eat.
Old McDonald Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Ah, the pastoral pleasures of farm life! Fluffy sheep grazing contentedly in the fields, the chickens clucking in the henhouse and the pigs happily munching away at the family’s leftovers from their communal trough. Everyone’s happy and healthy and doing their part for the cycle of life. Right?
Unfortunately, it’s not at all like that. At least, not in this day and age of mass-quantity factory farms where the well-being of animals isn’t considered – the only issue is how to harvest as much meat for market as possible per square foot of land. And to that end, farmers now forgo traditional grazing practices, packing as many animals as possible into crowded feedlots, where they do nothing throughout their short lives but eat tons of grain and drink thousands of gallons of water.
Dairy cows are often treated better than beef cattle, but not much – increasingly, dairy farmers are keeping their cows housed inside barns their entire lives, where they develop leg and hoof problems due to standing in once place on cement floors. Cows today are also forced to produce more milk than ever before, being constantly milked by machines with little rest from the process, giving them painfully inflamed udders. The forced milk production shortens their lives, too – when treated well, cows can live for up to 20 years, producing milk for over half their life. Today’s dairy cows are so overmilked that they can only produce for three or four years, after which time they’re sent to the slaughterhouse.
Cows aren’t the only animals to suffer under factory farming practices. Chickens are treated especially poorly, living their entire lives in cramped confinement, crowded so closely together that they’re "debeaked" – their beaks snapped off with a machine tool – so that they don’t harm each other with their hysterical pecking. Debeaked chickens have difficulty eating, which isn’t surprising, and live in such terrible conditions that they’re forced to eat their own and other chickens’ feces along with their food, contributing to the wide variety of potentially deadly bacteria that gets passed onto the consumer.
Besides the debeaking, another unpleasant practice is "molting." Chickens produce more eggs when they’re shedding their feathers, so egg farmers induce the state by starving the birds for up to twelve days at a time. Besides being inhumane, some researchers have concluded that forced molting increases chickens’ levels of salmonella. This also assists egg farmers in weeding out the weaker hens – about 3 percent of chickens die of starvation during the forced molting process.
In fact, the entire egg-production process starts with killing – male chicks have no function on a modern egg farm and are "culled" by workers whose job consists of identifying male chicks and tossing them, while still alive, into machines that grind them up and add them to the hens’ feed. Practices like this, along with molting and debeaking, have caused enough of a public outcry that even the McDonald’s Corporation couldn’t ignore it – in 2000, the fast food giant sent letters to the farmers who provide the over 1.5 billion eggs that they use each year, demanding that chickens be housed in larger cages and that forced molting be stopped.
How This Little Piggy Gets to Market
Pigs are one of the most intelligent of the domesticated beasts, friendly and gregarious. Those who raise pigs – the ones who care about their animals – say that they’re as smart and as loving as dogs or cats, enjoying music, basking in the sun and playing with toys. They’re also very clean animals who only "wallow" in mud to cool off and keep away flies. All of which makes it especially horrifying when you learn how they’re treated in factory farms.
Mother pigs on farms in the United States live out most of their lives in "gestation" crates that are just 7 feet long by 2 feet wide, too small for them to even turn around. They display signs of boredom and stress when contained in such a manner, biting the bars of the cage and gnashing their teeth – piglets’ tails are often routinely cut off so they won’t bite each other’s tails, a neurotic behavior that only occurs in confinement. Piglets are taken away from their mothers three weeks after birth, then packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Often, the piglets’ teeth are chipped off with pliers to further discourage them from biting each other.
For transport, pigs are stuffed into trucks with no food or water and without any temperature regulation, subjecting them to extremes of heat or cold. During the freezing midwestern winters, they often freeze to the sides of the trucks or die from dehydration. According to numbers provided by the pork industry, over 100,000 pigs die on their way to slaughterhouses each year, and over 400,000 arrive crippled due to barbaric transport practices.
At the slaughterhouse, the pigs are stunned with an electrical charge to their brain or heart which, when done correctly, renders them immediately unconscious before they’re tossed into tanks of scalding water which softens their skin and removes their hair. Stunning is often done incorrectly, however – meaning that the pigs are still conscious and already in severe pain when they’re thrown into the scalding water. Audits of factory farms by the USDA and independent organizations continually find scores of humane slaughter violations, including one PETA investigation that uncovered a plant in Oklahoma where workers killed pigs by slamming the animals heads against the floor and beating them with hammers.
Vegetarianism – The Thoughtful Alternative
There are many, many benefits that you’ll see immediately by becoming a vegetarian, including clear skin, shiny hair and lower risk of high cholesterol, diabetes and kidney disease. But the wider benefit is the one you can’t see – the benefit to the rest of the world. Keep the following in mind when you feel tempted to go back to eating meat ...
You’re helping to conserve water. Water is the earth’s most precious resource, and currently about 50 percent of the water in the United States is used to grow crops for grain-fed animals – as opposed to 35 percent that’s used to grow food crops for humans to eat. It takes roughly 15 times as much water to produce the same amount of protein from an animal that we can get from plant sources. Switching to a vegetarian diet is the single biggest thing that you can do to cut down on your consumption of water.
You’re helping to protect the land. Livestock grazing erodes topsoil, drying out the land and making it unusable for other farming. This is one reason why forests are clear-cut at an alarming rate to make room for more cattle grazing – agriculture accounts for nearly 90 percent of the 30 million acres of rainforest that are destroyed each year. Nearly 25 percent of all prescription drugs have a basis in rainforest plants – destroying the rainforest may mean destroying our chances of curing cancer or AIDS.
You’re helping to conserve fossil fuels. In this supply-and-demand world, less demand means less production, which means less consumption of fossil fuels. More than a third of the fossil fuels used in the United States are used by animal agriculture – a calorie of animal protein requires ten times as much fuel as needed to produce a calorie of plant protein. Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the amount of fossil fuel needed to cultivate and process various foods, fuel that’s used to operate agricultural machinery, provide food for livestock and irrigate crops. They also factored in emissions of methane and nitrous oxide produced by cows, sheep and manure treatment. According to the findings, the average American diet that consists of about 28 percent animal foods generates the equivalent of 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide each year than a comparable vegan diet.
The researchers pointed out that driving a hybrid car rather than an average vehicle would conserve a little over one ton of carbon dioxide per year – meaning that living a vegan lifestyle reduces more emissions than driving a hybrid car!
You’re making a more compassionate choice. Now that you’ve read about the horrors of factory farming, is that slice of bacon really worth it? There’s a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: "When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity." Many people believe that we have a natural right to kill and eat animals, but think of it this way – imagine a time when an alien species visits our planet.
They’re smarter than we are, and have technology far more advanced of our own. And they like to eat meat. So humans become the factory-farmed animals, taken to slaughterhouses – as we cry and scream and fight to no avail – and we’re shoved into pens until such time as we’re marched onto the killing floor, bashed in the head and stripped of our flesh, which is then neatly packaged up for market. It’s a horrible thought – yet that’s what humans do to animals every day. St. Francis of Assisi said, "If you have men who will exclude any of god’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." Choosing a vegetarian lifestyle is choosing the path of compassion.
Feeding the World with Plants
Considering the vast resources squandered to provide consumers with meat, it’s obvious that it’s an illogical, inefficient way to feed our continually growing population. Vegetarian diets can sustain far more people than diets that revolve around meat – when we eat grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, we’re eating the food that is fed to the meat animals that are later, in turn, eaten by us. It just doesn’t make sense! Factor in the damage to the earth, the water and the air ... on a global level, our reliance on animal foods is devastating.
There’s some debate as to whether choosing a meatless diet really helps to feed people elsewhere – there simply isn’t enough food to feed the world, but that’s an issue with far more complicated issues of politics, distribution and geography involved than just choice of diet. But one thing is certain – Westerners eat way more food than we need. In poorer nations, the average person eats about a pound of grain each day. In the United States, it’s four times that – and a large part of that is the grain used to produce the animal proteins we eat. While people are starving all over the globe, the U.S. feeds 70 percent of its harvested grain to animals – meaning that most of the food we grow goes to produce even more food that most of the rest of the world can’t afford to purchase.
What’s absolutely true is that the expansion of meat-eating around the world is directly contributing to hunger, and will continue to do so unless something drastic is done. Worldwide, meat production quadrupled from 44 million tons in 1950 to 195 million tons in 1996. Countries like China and India – both countries with a long, rich tradition of vegetable-based diets – are becoming increasingly avid consumers of meat foods.
In China alone, pork consumption has risen so astronomically in the last decade, the Chinese now consume more pork per person than in the United States. And while India still has the largest vegetarian population in the world, the country is now also the largest exporter of meat in Asia. There just isn’t enough grain to support these industries, much less feed people directly. In 1993, China exported 8 million tons of grain, thanks to the country’s expanding pork industry, China imported 16 million tons of grain in 1995 – just two years later. Meat-eating is almost universally seen as a symbol of a economic progress, but the more meat humans eat, the more humans there are that go hungry.
It’s likely that, if more people embraced vegetarianism, less animals would be fed and killed for meat. A widespread conversion to plant-based diets would reduce food shortage simply by reducing the amount of factory-farmed animals and their drain on land and other resources.
With fewer animals to feed, it might be possible to rebuild world grain reserves, guaranteeing that there’s enough food for even the poorest countries. And reducing the amount of world-wide animal agriculture would contribute to biological diversity, climate control, and the ozone layer.
It’s a lot to comprehend, thinking about world hunger. Ultimately, though, your conscience is your guide – knowing what you know now, do you still feel good about eating a hamburger? Albert Einstein said it best: "Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." By choosing a meatless lifestyle, your choosing to be a caring citizen of the world.
CHAPTER 4 - Where Do I Begin? - Getting Started on Your Meatless Journey
If you’ve made it this far, you’re obviously ready to change your life and become a vegetarian. But giving up meat – especially if you’ve become accustomed to making it your main source of protein – can be tough. You’ll find as you go along that it’s about more than just changing the foods that you eat – you’re going to have to adjust the way you think about nutrition, about your body and self-image, and about how your choices affect the world you live in. But it’s also a deeply personal voyage that’s yours to do in your own way, finding the path that will take you into the future in the healthiest, happiest way possible.
It may not be an easy transition, either. You may still love the taste of meat, and the idea of living your entire life without it is daunting. You may have family members who are resistant to making the change, and who’ll try to sabotage you for their own reasons. You’ll need to learn new recipes, plan new menus, and arm yourself with nutritional information that you never bothered with before. It’s a lot to think about!
It can all seem overwhelming, but with a plan, some structure and a little guidance it can be done by anyone. The most important thing is to be patient – allow yourself the time you need to develop new menus that you enjoy, try new recipes and discover new foods. Don’t think that becoming a vegetarian means that you’ll be spending countless hours wandering the aisles of natural foods stores and figuring out what to do with quinoa – unless you enjoy that sort of thing. The truth is, the easiest way to transition to a meatless diet is to eat foods easily available at your neighborhood grocery store – although you’ll definitely want to check out that health food store as you become more comfortable with your vegetarian lifestyle.
Finding a sense of purpose
To successfully change a lifelong habit like eating meat to the healthier habit of living entirely on plant-based foods, you’ll need a strong reason for changing. If you aren’t 100 percent sure of your reasons for becoming vegetarian, you’ll find it hard to resist temptation. Social pressure is often the undoing of new vegetarians – they’re completely committed when at home or eating out with another vegetarian, but give in to meat-eating when presented with a friend’s meat loaf or attending an outdoor BBQ. I was the same way – until I found a way of thinking that helped me to stick with the vegetarian lifestyle.
When I first started to become a vegetarian, I "fell off the wagon" many times. I’d be a committed vegetarian for days, then give in to some form of temptation (I still craved KFC!), feel bad about myself, then try again. And again. I kept improving all the time, eventually sticking to my vegetarian diet for weeks at a stretch. I was sure I was successful when I stayed true to my new lifestyle for three months – and then a friend took me to a seafood buffet, and I gave into temptation yet again! I knew that I wanted to become a vegetarian because I hate the idea of killing animals for my food, but sometimes animal foods are very hard to resist.
I wanted so badly to become a vegetarian, yet I kept failing. Why? How could I want to do this so much and still fail? After a lot of soul-searching, I found my reason to be a real vegetarian, and I’ve never looked back since. Once I knew, completely and with every part of my mind and my heart, why vegetarianism was so important to me, I was able to commit to it completely, and not have any desire to eat meat again!
Here’s the reason that I found works for me. Like most people, I don’t want to be hurt, killed, or receive pain, and animals certainly don’t want those things either. They feel pain, just like we do. So isn’t it wrong to inflict pain and death on animals? Just because humans have better technology, we often believe that we’re superior to other living beings and we can do whatever we want to them.
In an earlier chapter, we discussed the concept of an alien race coming to earth and believing themselves to be superior to humans. We would be nothing to them, beneath their respect – much the same way we look at cows, pigs and chickens – so why wouldn’t they think, "These humans are a low, primitive species. We can do whatever we want to them since they can’t fight back. We have complete control over them?" And if these aliens were meat-eaters, there would be nothing to stop them from herding us into pens, cutting off our feet and hands so that we can’t run or fight back, kill us in slaughterhouses and then eat us for their food. I mean, we taste great! So they kill millions of us every day, cut us up into steaks and chops, store the meat and sell it to each other in little white, plastic-wrapped packages.
It’s a horrible, horrible thought. Yet this is exactly the way we treat animals right now, because we believe we are superior to them and we have better technology. But is this really the right way to treat other living beings? Just like, they feel happiness and fear, pleasure and pain. They just want to live.
Think about that. They just want to live. Who doesn’t want to live? What right does humanity have to decide the time and the manner in which an animal’s life should end?
That’s my personal reason for becoming a vegetarian. Once I came to the realization that harming and killing animals for my food was wrong – and completely unnecessary – I was no longer even tempted by meat. I found my reason to stay committed. My journey has ended.
And I’ve been a vegetarian ever since. You need to find your own reason that strikes such a strong chord with you intellectually emotionally that you never look back at your previous life. A reason that you believe so strongly, you’ll never regret the decision, because you know that it’s the right thing to do.
If you found my "alien" reasoning quite logical, whenever you have the temptation to eat meat again, please try to remember about it . Whatever reasoning you choose, make it something that you believe with your whole heart. Once you do, vegetarianism will be something that you can adopt completely, for your entire life.
Look on the bright side!
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Look on the bright side!
The best way to make stress-free changes in your eating habits is to keep your mind on the benefits of your new diet. Many meat-eaters think that vegetarians must have a painfully boring diet, all brown rice and broccoli and tofu. But in truth, most vegetarians have much more adventurous, interesting diets than your average Joe Meat-And-Potatoes. Crack open a few vegetarian cookbooks and you’ll find delicious recipes drawing from cuisines with long histories of meat-free eating – foods from India, China, the Mediterranean, loaded with spices and exotic flavors. Add those to the meat-free foods you already love – like macaroni and cheese, vegetable soup, pasta with marinara sauce – and you’ll find there’s a whole world of delicious things you can eat!
How long it takes for you to fully embrace vegetarianism is entirely up to you. Some people give up meat in one fell swoop, deciding in an instant that, for moral, ethical or health reasons, that the time to give up meat is now, and they never look back. Other people transition slowly, giving up meat-based foods one at a time over a long period. Many take the “two steps forward, one step back” approach, falling off the meatless wagon here and there on the road to a plant-based diet. None of these methods is the “right” way – the right way for you will be any way that works! But there are methods that can make the change easier.
A radical dietary can take a lot of getting used to, both mentally and physically. And while a vegetarian diet is absolutely the best, healthiest way of life, not everyone can dive straight into the deep end straight away. Many people take a long time to slowly make the changes necessary to live a meatless lifestyle – and transitioning gradually is often the most enjoyable, low-stress way to do it.
But before we outline a ten-point plan for gradually transitioning to a vegetarian diet, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of making a quick change versus making a gradual one.
Tearing Off the Band-Aid – Making the Quick Transition
There are a number of benefits to making a one-step switch to meatless eating. They are:
You can feel good about changing your life right away. There’s something deeply gratifying about taking decisive action and making positive changes in your life. You reach your goal right away, and you get to say to yourself, “Yes – I’m a vegetarian!”
You’ll enjoy the benefits of vegetarianism starting on the very first day. By making a major, life-altering change right away, you’ll see the results much sooner. This is especially important if you’re going vegetarian for health reasons, say because you want to lose weight or you’re concerned about your cholesterol.
There’s less concern that you’ll fail and never become a “total” vegetarian. For some people, doing things gradually just isn’t an option – they lose focus and never make it to their goal. If you’re the sort of person who has a history of giving up on diets before you’ve reached your goal weight, or on hobbies before you master the craft, you my want to make the change in one big jump. There’s nothing wrong with you if that’s the kind of personality that you have – you just need to own up to it and act accordingly!
The quick approach works best for people who’ve already educated themselves on basic vegetarian nutrition, have a strong support system in place (living or working with vegetarians, or having a partner who’s also making the change at the same time) and who don’t have other stressful situations going on while they do it. Again, only you can determine if this is best for you – many people find the gradual approach just doesn’t work for them because they lose their motivation during a slow dietary overhaul, but others do much better at making huge changes slowly over a long period of time.
You may choose to make a quick change to vegetarianism because you have no other choice. You may have seen a documentary on factory farming practices and just can’t stand to eat meat again. You may have been diagnosed with a condition like diverticulitis—which causes small pockets in the intestine to harbor bacteria – and your doctor has advised you to stop eating meat. If that’s the case, you won’t be able to do your homework ahead of time – but you can still do the best you can with the information in this book and other resources that you’ll discover as you go along.
There are a few drawbacks to this method, of course. You’ll be changing a major part of your everyday life without any learned skills, and without the education that comes with experience. You’ll be springing your new meat-free lifestyle on your family, friends and co-workers all of a sudden, and will have to deal with their reactions. If you’re bombarded by negative feedback from those around you, you may find that your new way of eating is kicked to the curb before it really starts.
But, as mentioned above, many people thrive on this kind of change. You may find that giving up so many of your old habits all at once helps you to break unhealthy old patterns and seek out new recipes and menus right from the start. If that’s the case, keep an eye out for bumps in the road, look for support – whether from other vegetarians you know or on the Internet – and check out the chapters in this book dedicated to nutrition and meal planning.
Easing In – The Gradual Approach to Going Meatless
Taking changes one step at a time makes the process more manageable and, for many people, makes the entire transition seem far less daunting. It also makes it fun – with each step, you change a little something, learn some new information, and try a few things you’ve never tried before! As you master each new skill, you become more confident in your ability to maintain your new lifestyle, plan your meals and handle yourself in any number of social situations.
There are two main advantages to taking a gradual approach to switching to vegetarianism.
They are:
You’re more likely to make the changes permanent if you change your habits slowly. By changing your habits gradually, you change the way you think about eating as you go along, learning more and creating a strong base on which to anchor your new, better, healthier habits.
Making a number of small changes gives you the chance to adapt them to your current lifestyle as you go along. You probably have so many things in your everyday life going on at once that you often feel overwhelmed already – making a slow transition is simply less disruptive to your family life, job, etc. than making one huge, sweeping change.
The downside to the gradual approach, as we’ve already discussed, is that you might find yourself losing focus and taking longer to complete the transition to a completely meatless lifestyle. If you take too long, you never make it to your goal. Be honest with yourself – if it’s been months since you started changing habits and you’re still not there, you may want to take a hard look at where you are, where you want to be, and what steps you need to take to get there.
It’s also possible, if you make changes slowly, you may get stuck in one place and stay in a state of semi-vegetarianism permanently. You might decide to stop eating red meat, but never move on to giving up fish and chicken. You might intend to eventually eat an entirely vegan diet, yet you never give up eggs and cheese, and end up feeling like a failure. So if you want to make a slow transition, plot out the changes you intend to make, set specific goals and follow a structured plan.
Your Ten-Point Plan to Becoming a Vegetarian
For those craving guidance and structure, what follows is a simple ten-step transition from meat-eater to veggie lover. Of course, you don’t have to follow this course of action to become a vegetarian – but sometimes having a carefully thought-out plan in place before beginning a major venture can make you feel more secure about the unfamiliar path you’ve chosen to take. You’ll notice that, at the beginning, we’re only making changes to your evening meals – dinner is perhaps the single most “planned” meal of the day, the time when families eat together and put thought into main course, side courses and dessert.
If you think about the variety in your current diet, you’ll discover that you already draw from only a handful of recipes to make family favorites over and over again, relying on basic meals that you enjoy and have made before. You may go out to a new restaurant for a special occasion or try a new recipe now and then, but we all keep going back to tried-and-true favorites several times a month. Planning vegetarian meals is no different.
During the steps of your transition, you’ll discover a number of delicious new meals – and you’ll revise current favorites to make them vegetarian – so that you have as many meal options at your disposal as you did as a meat-eater. Maybe more!As you develop healthy new habits and learn more about nutrition, you’ll find that your previous ideas of what constitutes a complete evening meal will change drastically. Ever since the era of “Ozzie and Harriet,” we’ve been told that an appropriate family dinner includes a large portion of meat, some veggies on the side, a starch of some sort and, often, a big glass of milk.
Soon you’ll be abandoning that idea –eating a healthy satisfying vegetarian diet isn’t just a matter of replacing meat with something else while continuing the same old method of consuming “four squares.” A quickly put together veggie stir-fry with a multi-grain roll is a fast, nutritious evening dinner – so is homemade macaroni and cheese accompanied by a green salad. The old ways of eating don’t apply to you anymore, so go ahead and forget what you were taught about meal planning – you’re about to develop your own rules, based on what your body needs.
Step 1: Eat three meat-free dinners during the week that you already enjoy.
Make a list of vegetarian main dishes that you and your family already like – macaroni and cheese, vegetable soup with bread and salad, cheese quesadillas, vegetable stir fry, quiche and cheese pizza are just a few of the meatless meals you already eat. This still leaves four nights a week that you can include meat in your meals – but you’ve taken the first step toward thinking differently about your eating habits.
Step 2: Adapt three favorite recipes to make them vegetarian, and add them to your week’s dinners.A wide variety of main course meals can be turned into delicious vegetarian fare, allowing you to enjoy healthier versions of foods you already love. Take a recipe for vegetarian chili and make it your own by using the same mixture of spices in your own ground-beef chili; leave the beef out of your lasagna and replace it with sauteed zucchini, eggplant and mushrooms; make your favorite soups and stews using coarsely chopped Portobella mushrooms; mix up a zesty taco salad with the usual lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream and salsa, but replace the ground beef with a mixture of black and kidney beans. The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination!
Step 3: Add three brand-new vegetarian meals to your repertoire.
During the previous two steps, you developed six vegetarian dinners that you and your family are happy to eat. Now it’s time to do a little research and find a few new tricks to spice up your menus even further with some new recipes. Purchase a couple of vegetarian cookbooks, borrow them from friends or check them out of the library. We’ll even provide you with some great recipes in Chapter Twelve, as well as a list of cookbooks to get your started. You can also search the Internet for recipes, and online vegetarian support groups are a terrific source for recipes from other veggie-lovers.
Find recipes that look tasty and give them a try. This is a time for experimenting – if something doesn’t appeal to you after you’ve served it up, discard that recipe and try something else. No matter what your level of cooking expertise, there are recipes you can make, and you’ll even find yourself becoming a better cook as you develop new skills.
Step 4: Make all your dinners meatless.
Once you’ve found three new dinners that you love, that’s nine vegetarian dinners to choose from! That’s a different meal every night, if you like, plus two alternates – which may be more variety than you had before you started transitioning to a meatless diet! Odds are good that, at this point, you’ll be intrigued by the different flavors and textures of your vegetarian entrees and you’ll keep on creating new menus. After all, you’re not going to eat the same nine things for the rest of your life – but it’s a great place to start! With so many dinners to choose from, it’s time to ban meat from your dinner table entirely. You should feel secure that you’re not going to hungry with so many options, and inspire you to discover even more.
Step 5: Lose the lunchmeat.
Your next step, now that you’ve successfully given up eating meat during your evening meal, it’s time to turn your attention to your lunches. If you’re the sort who takes a lunch break from the office at a restaurant, look for places that offer meat-free pasta options, vegetarian (or vegetarian-friendly) cafes, and places that have well-stocked salad bars. Burger places probably won’t have much for you to eat, but spots that specialize in sandwiches usually have vegetarian options. The downtown areas of many big cities also have street vendors offering Indian, Thai, Mexican and vegan specialties.
If you eat at home or take your lunch to work, you’ll naturally have a lot more control over your meal planning. If you have a microwave at work, you can heat up a bean burrito, a frozen vegetarian meal or leftovers from your evening meals. A snack-ish meal of pita bread slices, hummus and fruit is nutritious and fun, and if you’re lacto-ovo, there’s always egg salad or grilled cheese.
Step 6: Change your old breakfast habits.
Breakfast doesn’t have to be eggs, bacon and sausage. It can be anything you want it to be! If you want cheese enchiladas or leftover vegetarian chili, go for it. A fruit smoothie with a scoop of soy protein powder is a quick breakfast that’ll give you the boost you need, or you can toast a couple of pieces of whole-grain bread and top it with peanut butter. On weekends, when you have more time to cook and linger over breakfast, make an omelette stuffed with mushrooms, onions and cheese, or cook up a stack of blueberry pancakes. If you simply can’t shake the craving for breakfast meats, there are vegetarian sausage links – even fake bacon, made from soy! – that can help satisfy it. Just remember that breakfast is whatever you want it to be – so long as you’re getting the nutrition you need, you can eat anything you like.
Step 7: Get creative.
If you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to get serious about embracing the vegetarian lifestyle. Giving up meat in only the beginning – there’s a whole world a foods to explore, from grains and seeds and nuts to vegetables you’ve never tried before. The more foods you’re open to eating, the more creativity you can bring to your cooking.
At this point, you should be feeling pretty good about the meal choices you already have under your belt, so now is the time to start having fun and trying new things. As you thumb through vegetarian cookbooks, you’ll find recipes that use “exotic” ingredients like quinoa, tahini and spelt. Try using soy milk as a replacement for cow’s milk in recipes, and experiment with exotic spice combinations that you’ve never tried before. This is your chance to develop a broader, more interesting recipe repertoire. Enjoy yourself!
Take a trip to your local food co-op of health food store and spend awhile reading the labels on all the products you’ve never seen before. Don’t be intimidated by the unfamiliar labels and ingredients – and don’t be shy about asking the employees how to use foods you find intriguing, or for recommendations and recipes. Tell them up front that you’re new to vegetarianism, and they’ll be happy to point you towards foods you’ve probably never considered before.
Step 8: Giving up the eggs.
During the last step, you may have noticed something – you’re now an ovo lacto vegetarian! Congratulations! You may also notice, though, that you’re eating a lot of eggs and cheese. This happens to most new vegetarians, actually, because cheese is tasty and eggs are inexpensive sources of protein. But both add the amount of fat and cholesterol in your diet and, if you think back to previous chapters, the practices of high-tech egg farms are barbaric.
But experienced vegetarians know how to replace eggs in recipes, and now that you’re an experienced vegetarian, it’s time you started doing it, too. You certainly don’t have to give up eggs entirely if you don’t want to – but there are a number of ways that you can at least cut back on the amount of eggs you eat.
If you’re a fan of egg salad, try replacing the eggs with tofu – use everything else you would in your favorite egg salad recipe like mayonnaise, celery, onion and mustard, and you’ll find you’ll never miss the eggs. Tofu also works as an excellent substitute for scrambled eggs when sauteed with onions, mushrooms, garlic and little salt. For a binding agent when making a veggie loaf or vegetarian burger, try some tahini (chickpea paste, available in the natural foods or ethic section of your grocery store), mashed potatoes or soft tofu.
You may find, after some experimentation, that you don’t want to give up eggs after all. But even then, cutting back on your consumption is a good idea for a number of reasons – and you can always seek out organic eggs from small, local farms that don’t indulge in the same abhorrent practices as the big operations.
Step 9: Find new ways to build your bones.
When we’re kids, we’re all told over and over again to drink our milk. Even as adults, the milk industry keeps drumming into our heads that we have to drink milk and eat lots of dairy products to maintain strong ones and teeth. While it’s true that our bodies require calcium for good health, we don’t need to drink milk to get it.
Did you know that humans are the only animals who drink the milk of another species? Cow’s milk is ingeniously designed by nature to provide the calcium, riboflavin, fat, protein and carbohydrates that a baby calf needs to grow into a huge cow – and even calves stop drinking milk once it develops past infancy. Humans have actually evolved over thousands of years so that many of us —mostly Westerners—can drink milk without getting sick by producing lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the sugars (lactose) in cow milk. But many non-Western cultures have never developed the ability to drink milk, and a large number of people of European descent are still lactose intolerant. Drinking milk as an adult is simply unnatural – people who can do so without suffering intestinal discomfort are benefitting from a genetic anomaly.
Yet, we still need calcium. If you enjoy eating cereal, try one of the many soy or rice-based milk replacements on the market. There are a wide variety of brands and they all taste different – so if you don’t like the first one or two you try, keep experimenting until you find one you like. And make sure you add calcium-rich food to your meals like leafy green vegetables, and beans. We’ll discuss this is further detail in the next chapter.
Once you find yourself enjoying a wide variety of foods that are rich in calcium, you’ll find it a lot easier to eliminate dairy from your diet. After you become accustomed to eating calcium-rich foods drinking non-dairy milk supplements, you can move on to trying soy-based cheeses. And look for nutritional yeast at your health food store – added to tofu dishes or sprinkled on popcorn, it adds a delicious, cheese-like flavor to recipes.
Step 10: Become a savvy consumer.When you shop for food, examine the labels carefully for animal products you need to avoid. You’ll be surprised by how many foods contain lard, dried milk, eggs and other animal by-products. It can be extremely challenging at first, but don’t be discouraged – you’ll soon find yourself becoming as familiar with the products and brand names that help you stay on course as you were with the products you used in your old life.
As you spend more and more time educating yourself about eating meat-free, you’ll discover exactly how diligent you want to be about your new lifestyle. You may find that it’s worth the effort you put into it, and you want to embrace a completely vegan way of life. Or you may find you are comfortable eating commercially made bread products that contain eggs while not cooking with eggs for your other meals. Don’t allow politics to dictate your dietary choices, seeing a began diet as ethically superior to an ovo lacto one, and beating yourself up because you still eat cheese. You can be proud of yourself for adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, and even if you don’t go 100 percent vegan you’ve still made a healthy, humane choice.
Be proud of yourself!
It may not be an easy transition, either. You may still love the taste of meat, and the idea of living your entire life without it is daunting. You may have family members who are resistant to making the change, and who’ll try to sabotage you for their own reasons. You’ll need to learn new recipes, plan new menus, and arm yourself with nutritional information that you never bothered with before. It’s a lot to think about!
It can all seem overwhelming, but with a plan, some structure and a little guidance it can be done by anyone. The most important thing is to be patient – allow yourself the time you need to develop new menus that you enjoy, try new recipes and discover new foods. Don’t think that becoming a vegetarian means that you’ll be spending countless hours wandering the aisles of natural foods stores and figuring out what to do with quinoa – unless you enjoy that sort of thing. The truth is, the easiest way to transition to a meatless diet is to eat foods easily available at your neighborhood grocery store – although you’ll definitely want to check out that health food store as you become more comfortable with your vegetarian lifestyle.
Finding a sense of purpose
To successfully change a lifelong habit like eating meat to the healthier habit of living entirely on plant-based foods, you’ll need a strong reason for changing. If you aren’t 100 percent sure of your reasons for becoming vegetarian, you’ll find it hard to resist temptation. Social pressure is often the undoing of new vegetarians – they’re completely committed when at home or eating out with another vegetarian, but give in to meat-eating when presented with a friend’s meat loaf or attending an outdoor BBQ. I was the same way – until I found a way of thinking that helped me to stick with the vegetarian lifestyle.
When I first started to become a vegetarian, I "fell off the wagon" many times. I’d be a committed vegetarian for days, then give in to some form of temptation (I still craved KFC!), feel bad about myself, then try again. And again. I kept improving all the time, eventually sticking to my vegetarian diet for weeks at a stretch. I was sure I was successful when I stayed true to my new lifestyle for three months – and then a friend took me to a seafood buffet, and I gave into temptation yet again! I knew that I wanted to become a vegetarian because I hate the idea of killing animals for my food, but sometimes animal foods are very hard to resist.
I wanted so badly to become a vegetarian, yet I kept failing. Why? How could I want to do this so much and still fail? After a lot of soul-searching, I found my reason to be a real vegetarian, and I’ve never looked back since. Once I knew, completely and with every part of my mind and my heart, why vegetarianism was so important to me, I was able to commit to it completely, and not have any desire to eat meat again!
Here’s the reason that I found works for me. Like most people, I don’t want to be hurt, killed, or receive pain, and animals certainly don’t want those things either. They feel pain, just like we do. So isn’t it wrong to inflict pain and death on animals? Just because humans have better technology, we often believe that we’re superior to other living beings and we can do whatever we want to them.
In an earlier chapter, we discussed the concept of an alien race coming to earth and believing themselves to be superior to humans. We would be nothing to them, beneath their respect – much the same way we look at cows, pigs and chickens – so why wouldn’t they think, "These humans are a low, primitive species. We can do whatever we want to them since they can’t fight back. We have complete control over them?" And if these aliens were meat-eaters, there would be nothing to stop them from herding us into pens, cutting off our feet and hands so that we can’t run or fight back, kill us in slaughterhouses and then eat us for their food. I mean, we taste great! So they kill millions of us every day, cut us up into steaks and chops, store the meat and sell it to each other in little white, plastic-wrapped packages.
It’s a horrible, horrible thought. Yet this is exactly the way we treat animals right now, because we believe we are superior to them and we have better technology. But is this really the right way to treat other living beings? Just like, they feel happiness and fear, pleasure and pain. They just want to live.
Think about that. They just want to live. Who doesn’t want to live? What right does humanity have to decide the time and the manner in which an animal’s life should end?
That’s my personal reason for becoming a vegetarian. Once I came to the realization that harming and killing animals for my food was wrong – and completely unnecessary – I was no longer even tempted by meat. I found my reason to stay committed. My journey has ended.
And I’ve been a vegetarian ever since. You need to find your own reason that strikes such a strong chord with you intellectually emotionally that you never look back at your previous life. A reason that you believe so strongly, you’ll never regret the decision, because you know that it’s the right thing to do.
If you found my "alien" reasoning quite logical, whenever you have the temptation to eat meat again, please try to remember about it . Whatever reasoning you choose, make it something that you believe with your whole heart. Once you do, vegetarianism will be something that you can adopt completely, for your entire life.
Look on the bright side!
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Look on the bright side!
The best way to make stress-free changes in your eating habits is to keep your mind on the benefits of your new diet. Many meat-eaters think that vegetarians must have a painfully boring diet, all brown rice and broccoli and tofu. But in truth, most vegetarians have much more adventurous, interesting diets than your average Joe Meat-And-Potatoes. Crack open a few vegetarian cookbooks and you’ll find delicious recipes drawing from cuisines with long histories of meat-free eating – foods from India, China, the Mediterranean, loaded with spices and exotic flavors. Add those to the meat-free foods you already love – like macaroni and cheese, vegetable soup, pasta with marinara sauce – and you’ll find there’s a whole world of delicious things you can eat!
How long it takes for you to fully embrace vegetarianism is entirely up to you. Some people give up meat in one fell swoop, deciding in an instant that, for moral, ethical or health reasons, that the time to give up meat is now, and they never look back. Other people transition slowly, giving up meat-based foods one at a time over a long period. Many take the “two steps forward, one step back” approach, falling off the meatless wagon here and there on the road to a plant-based diet. None of these methods is the “right” way – the right way for you will be any way that works! But there are methods that can make the change easier.
A radical dietary can take a lot of getting used to, both mentally and physically. And while a vegetarian diet is absolutely the best, healthiest way of life, not everyone can dive straight into the deep end straight away. Many people take a long time to slowly make the changes necessary to live a meatless lifestyle – and transitioning gradually is often the most enjoyable, low-stress way to do it.
But before we outline a ten-point plan for gradually transitioning to a vegetarian diet, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of making a quick change versus making a gradual one.
Tearing Off the Band-Aid – Making the Quick Transition
There are a number of benefits to making a one-step switch to meatless eating. They are:
You can feel good about changing your life right away. There’s something deeply gratifying about taking decisive action and making positive changes in your life. You reach your goal right away, and you get to say to yourself, “Yes – I’m a vegetarian!”
You’ll enjoy the benefits of vegetarianism starting on the very first day. By making a major, life-altering change right away, you’ll see the results much sooner. This is especially important if you’re going vegetarian for health reasons, say because you want to lose weight or you’re concerned about your cholesterol.
There’s less concern that you’ll fail and never become a “total” vegetarian. For some people, doing things gradually just isn’t an option – they lose focus and never make it to their goal. If you’re the sort of person who has a history of giving up on diets before you’ve reached your goal weight, or on hobbies before you master the craft, you my want to make the change in one big jump. There’s nothing wrong with you if that’s the kind of personality that you have – you just need to own up to it and act accordingly!
The quick approach works best for people who’ve already educated themselves on basic vegetarian nutrition, have a strong support system in place (living or working with vegetarians, or having a partner who’s also making the change at the same time) and who don’t have other stressful situations going on while they do it. Again, only you can determine if this is best for you – many people find the gradual approach just doesn’t work for them because they lose their motivation during a slow dietary overhaul, but others do much better at making huge changes slowly over a long period of time.
You may choose to make a quick change to vegetarianism because you have no other choice. You may have seen a documentary on factory farming practices and just can’t stand to eat meat again. You may have been diagnosed with a condition like diverticulitis—which causes small pockets in the intestine to harbor bacteria – and your doctor has advised you to stop eating meat. If that’s the case, you won’t be able to do your homework ahead of time – but you can still do the best you can with the information in this book and other resources that you’ll discover as you go along.
There are a few drawbacks to this method, of course. You’ll be changing a major part of your everyday life without any learned skills, and without the education that comes with experience. You’ll be springing your new meat-free lifestyle on your family, friends and co-workers all of a sudden, and will have to deal with their reactions. If you’re bombarded by negative feedback from those around you, you may find that your new way of eating is kicked to the curb before it really starts.
But, as mentioned above, many people thrive on this kind of change. You may find that giving up so many of your old habits all at once helps you to break unhealthy old patterns and seek out new recipes and menus right from the start. If that’s the case, keep an eye out for bumps in the road, look for support – whether from other vegetarians you know or on the Internet – and check out the chapters in this book dedicated to nutrition and meal planning.
Easing In – The Gradual Approach to Going Meatless
Taking changes one step at a time makes the process more manageable and, for many people, makes the entire transition seem far less daunting. It also makes it fun – with each step, you change a little something, learn some new information, and try a few things you’ve never tried before! As you master each new skill, you become more confident in your ability to maintain your new lifestyle, plan your meals and handle yourself in any number of social situations.
There are two main advantages to taking a gradual approach to switching to vegetarianism.
They are:
You’re more likely to make the changes permanent if you change your habits slowly. By changing your habits gradually, you change the way you think about eating as you go along, learning more and creating a strong base on which to anchor your new, better, healthier habits.
Making a number of small changes gives you the chance to adapt them to your current lifestyle as you go along. You probably have so many things in your everyday life going on at once that you often feel overwhelmed already – making a slow transition is simply less disruptive to your family life, job, etc. than making one huge, sweeping change.
The downside to the gradual approach, as we’ve already discussed, is that you might find yourself losing focus and taking longer to complete the transition to a completely meatless lifestyle. If you take too long, you never make it to your goal. Be honest with yourself – if it’s been months since you started changing habits and you’re still not there, you may want to take a hard look at where you are, where you want to be, and what steps you need to take to get there.
It’s also possible, if you make changes slowly, you may get stuck in one place and stay in a state of semi-vegetarianism permanently. You might decide to stop eating red meat, but never move on to giving up fish and chicken. You might intend to eventually eat an entirely vegan diet, yet you never give up eggs and cheese, and end up feeling like a failure. So if you want to make a slow transition, plot out the changes you intend to make, set specific goals and follow a structured plan.
Your Ten-Point Plan to Becoming a Vegetarian
For those craving guidance and structure, what follows is a simple ten-step transition from meat-eater to veggie lover. Of course, you don’t have to follow this course of action to become a vegetarian – but sometimes having a carefully thought-out plan in place before beginning a major venture can make you feel more secure about the unfamiliar path you’ve chosen to take. You’ll notice that, at the beginning, we’re only making changes to your evening meals – dinner is perhaps the single most “planned” meal of the day, the time when families eat together and put thought into main course, side courses and dessert.
If you think about the variety in your current diet, you’ll discover that you already draw from only a handful of recipes to make family favorites over and over again, relying on basic meals that you enjoy and have made before. You may go out to a new restaurant for a special occasion or try a new recipe now and then, but we all keep going back to tried-and-true favorites several times a month. Planning vegetarian meals is no different.
During the steps of your transition, you’ll discover a number of delicious new meals – and you’ll revise current favorites to make them vegetarian – so that you have as many meal options at your disposal as you did as a meat-eater. Maybe more!As you develop healthy new habits and learn more about nutrition, you’ll find that your previous ideas of what constitutes a complete evening meal will change drastically. Ever since the era of “Ozzie and Harriet,” we’ve been told that an appropriate family dinner includes a large portion of meat, some veggies on the side, a starch of some sort and, often, a big glass of milk.
Soon you’ll be abandoning that idea –eating a healthy satisfying vegetarian diet isn’t just a matter of replacing meat with something else while continuing the same old method of consuming “four squares.” A quickly put together veggie stir-fry with a multi-grain roll is a fast, nutritious evening dinner – so is homemade macaroni and cheese accompanied by a green salad. The old ways of eating don’t apply to you anymore, so go ahead and forget what you were taught about meal planning – you’re about to develop your own rules, based on what your body needs.
Step 1: Eat three meat-free dinners during the week that you already enjoy.
Make a list of vegetarian main dishes that you and your family already like – macaroni and cheese, vegetable soup with bread and salad, cheese quesadillas, vegetable stir fry, quiche and cheese pizza are just a few of the meatless meals you already eat. This still leaves four nights a week that you can include meat in your meals – but you’ve taken the first step toward thinking differently about your eating habits.
Step 2: Adapt three favorite recipes to make them vegetarian, and add them to your week’s dinners.A wide variety of main course meals can be turned into delicious vegetarian fare, allowing you to enjoy healthier versions of foods you already love. Take a recipe for vegetarian chili and make it your own by using the same mixture of spices in your own ground-beef chili; leave the beef out of your lasagna and replace it with sauteed zucchini, eggplant and mushrooms; make your favorite soups and stews using coarsely chopped Portobella mushrooms; mix up a zesty taco salad with the usual lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream and salsa, but replace the ground beef with a mixture of black and kidney beans. The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination!
Step 3: Add three brand-new vegetarian meals to your repertoire.
During the previous two steps, you developed six vegetarian dinners that you and your family are happy to eat. Now it’s time to do a little research and find a few new tricks to spice up your menus even further with some new recipes. Purchase a couple of vegetarian cookbooks, borrow them from friends or check them out of the library. We’ll even provide you with some great recipes in Chapter Twelve, as well as a list of cookbooks to get your started. You can also search the Internet for recipes, and online vegetarian support groups are a terrific source for recipes from other veggie-lovers.
Find recipes that look tasty and give them a try. This is a time for experimenting – if something doesn’t appeal to you after you’ve served it up, discard that recipe and try something else. No matter what your level of cooking expertise, there are recipes you can make, and you’ll even find yourself becoming a better cook as you develop new skills.
Step 4: Make all your dinners meatless.
Once you’ve found three new dinners that you love, that’s nine vegetarian dinners to choose from! That’s a different meal every night, if you like, plus two alternates – which may be more variety than you had before you started transitioning to a meatless diet! Odds are good that, at this point, you’ll be intrigued by the different flavors and textures of your vegetarian entrees and you’ll keep on creating new menus. After all, you’re not going to eat the same nine things for the rest of your life – but it’s a great place to start! With so many dinners to choose from, it’s time to ban meat from your dinner table entirely. You should feel secure that you’re not going to hungry with so many options, and inspire you to discover even more.
Step 5: Lose the lunchmeat.
Your next step, now that you’ve successfully given up eating meat during your evening meal, it’s time to turn your attention to your lunches. If you’re the sort who takes a lunch break from the office at a restaurant, look for places that offer meat-free pasta options, vegetarian (or vegetarian-friendly) cafes, and places that have well-stocked salad bars. Burger places probably won’t have much for you to eat, but spots that specialize in sandwiches usually have vegetarian options. The downtown areas of many big cities also have street vendors offering Indian, Thai, Mexican and vegan specialties.
If you eat at home or take your lunch to work, you’ll naturally have a lot more control over your meal planning. If you have a microwave at work, you can heat up a bean burrito, a frozen vegetarian meal or leftovers from your evening meals. A snack-ish meal of pita bread slices, hummus and fruit is nutritious and fun, and if you’re lacto-ovo, there’s always egg salad or grilled cheese.
Step 6: Change your old breakfast habits.
Breakfast doesn’t have to be eggs, bacon and sausage. It can be anything you want it to be! If you want cheese enchiladas or leftover vegetarian chili, go for it. A fruit smoothie with a scoop of soy protein powder is a quick breakfast that’ll give you the boost you need, or you can toast a couple of pieces of whole-grain bread and top it with peanut butter. On weekends, when you have more time to cook and linger over breakfast, make an omelette stuffed with mushrooms, onions and cheese, or cook up a stack of blueberry pancakes. If you simply can’t shake the craving for breakfast meats, there are vegetarian sausage links – even fake bacon, made from soy! – that can help satisfy it. Just remember that breakfast is whatever you want it to be – so long as you’re getting the nutrition you need, you can eat anything you like.
Step 7: Get creative.
If you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to get serious about embracing the vegetarian lifestyle. Giving up meat in only the beginning – there’s a whole world a foods to explore, from grains and seeds and nuts to vegetables you’ve never tried before. The more foods you’re open to eating, the more creativity you can bring to your cooking.
At this point, you should be feeling pretty good about the meal choices you already have under your belt, so now is the time to start having fun and trying new things. As you thumb through vegetarian cookbooks, you’ll find recipes that use “exotic” ingredients like quinoa, tahini and spelt. Try using soy milk as a replacement for cow’s milk in recipes, and experiment with exotic spice combinations that you’ve never tried before. This is your chance to develop a broader, more interesting recipe repertoire. Enjoy yourself!
Take a trip to your local food co-op of health food store and spend awhile reading the labels on all the products you’ve never seen before. Don’t be intimidated by the unfamiliar labels and ingredients – and don’t be shy about asking the employees how to use foods you find intriguing, or for recommendations and recipes. Tell them up front that you’re new to vegetarianism, and they’ll be happy to point you towards foods you’ve probably never considered before.
Step 8: Giving up the eggs.
During the last step, you may have noticed something – you’re now an ovo lacto vegetarian! Congratulations! You may also notice, though, that you’re eating a lot of eggs and cheese. This happens to most new vegetarians, actually, because cheese is tasty and eggs are inexpensive sources of protein. But both add the amount of fat and cholesterol in your diet and, if you think back to previous chapters, the practices of high-tech egg farms are barbaric.
But experienced vegetarians know how to replace eggs in recipes, and now that you’re an experienced vegetarian, it’s time you started doing it, too. You certainly don’t have to give up eggs entirely if you don’t want to – but there are a number of ways that you can at least cut back on the amount of eggs you eat.
If you’re a fan of egg salad, try replacing the eggs with tofu – use everything else you would in your favorite egg salad recipe like mayonnaise, celery, onion and mustard, and you’ll find you’ll never miss the eggs. Tofu also works as an excellent substitute for scrambled eggs when sauteed with onions, mushrooms, garlic and little salt. For a binding agent when making a veggie loaf or vegetarian burger, try some tahini (chickpea paste, available in the natural foods or ethic section of your grocery store), mashed potatoes or soft tofu.
You may find, after some experimentation, that you don’t want to give up eggs after all. But even then, cutting back on your consumption is a good idea for a number of reasons – and you can always seek out organic eggs from small, local farms that don’t indulge in the same abhorrent practices as the big operations.
Step 9: Find new ways to build your bones.
When we’re kids, we’re all told over and over again to drink our milk. Even as adults, the milk industry keeps drumming into our heads that we have to drink milk and eat lots of dairy products to maintain strong ones and teeth. While it’s true that our bodies require calcium for good health, we don’t need to drink milk to get it.
Did you know that humans are the only animals who drink the milk of another species? Cow’s milk is ingeniously designed by nature to provide the calcium, riboflavin, fat, protein and carbohydrates that a baby calf needs to grow into a huge cow – and even calves stop drinking milk once it develops past infancy. Humans have actually evolved over thousands of years so that many of us —mostly Westerners—can drink milk without getting sick by producing lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the sugars (lactose) in cow milk. But many non-Western cultures have never developed the ability to drink milk, and a large number of people of European descent are still lactose intolerant. Drinking milk as an adult is simply unnatural – people who can do so without suffering intestinal discomfort are benefitting from a genetic anomaly.
Yet, we still need calcium. If you enjoy eating cereal, try one of the many soy or rice-based milk replacements on the market. There are a wide variety of brands and they all taste different – so if you don’t like the first one or two you try, keep experimenting until you find one you like. And make sure you add calcium-rich food to your meals like leafy green vegetables, and beans. We’ll discuss this is further detail in the next chapter.
Once you find yourself enjoying a wide variety of foods that are rich in calcium, you’ll find it a lot easier to eliminate dairy from your diet. After you become accustomed to eating calcium-rich foods drinking non-dairy milk supplements, you can move on to trying soy-based cheeses. And look for nutritional yeast at your health food store – added to tofu dishes or sprinkled on popcorn, it adds a delicious, cheese-like flavor to recipes.
Step 10: Become a savvy consumer.When you shop for food, examine the labels carefully for animal products you need to avoid. You’ll be surprised by how many foods contain lard, dried milk, eggs and other animal by-products. It can be extremely challenging at first, but don’t be discouraged – you’ll soon find yourself becoming as familiar with the products and brand names that help you stay on course as you were with the products you used in your old life.
As you spend more and more time educating yourself about eating meat-free, you’ll discover exactly how diligent you want to be about your new lifestyle. You may find that it’s worth the effort you put into it, and you want to embrace a completely vegan way of life. Or you may find you are comfortable eating commercially made bread products that contain eggs while not cooking with eggs for your other meals. Don’t allow politics to dictate your dietary choices, seeing a began diet as ethically superior to an ovo lacto one, and beating yourself up because you still eat cheese. You can be proud of yourself for adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, and even if you don’t go 100 percent vegan you’ve still made a healthy, humane choice.
Be proud of yourself!
CHAPTER 5 - Vegetarian Nutrition - Getting Everything Your Body Needs
At this point you’re probably starting to get worried about how you’re going to make sure you get the right balance of nutrients that your body needs, and thinking that you’ll need a spreadsheet to keep track of everything you eat. But it’s not as difficult as it may seem from the outset – you just need to bone up on a few nutritional basics to keep in mind when you plan your meals.
Some people spend their entire lives studying the science of nutrition, but you don’t have to make it your life’s work. The truth is, despite what the meat industry repeatedly tells you, vegetarian diets aren’t nutritionally inferior to meat-based diets. There’s no need to worry that you’ll be lacking the vitamins, minerals and protein that your body needs. Which isn’t to say that it’s not possible to eat badly as a vegetarian – many people have lousy diets, even vegetarians. But if you eat smart, your vegetarian diet can be the healthiest way you’ve ever eaten.
Protein – Am I Getting Enough?
Your first concern on starting a vegetarian way of life is that, without meat foods in your diet, you’ll lack protein. So you’ll be happy to discover that it’s almost impossible to eat too little protein on a vegetarian diet.
Protein is, of course, of the utmost importance to a healthful diet. Your bones, muscles and hormones all contain protein, and eating enough of it helps keep your body strong on the most fundamental level. Unfortunately, the importance of eating animal protein has long been made unrealistically important. Man once believed that eating the flesh of other animals would make him stronger and healthier – but now that we know what we do about cholesterol and the dangers of eating saturated fats, it’s obvious that limiting animal proteins is the healthy choice.
Vegetarians can, of course, be protein deficient – but that comes from undereating, or relying too heavily on junk foods. In most case, any diet adequate in calories from a variety of healthful sources provides enough protein. Grains, vegetables, beans, seeds and nuts are all protein-rich foods, easily providing what the body needs.
Contrary to what many vegetarians believed in the last couple of decades, they don’t need to weigh and balance arcane combinations of foods to get adequate protein. This myth goes back to Frances Moore Lappe’s 1971 book “Diet for a Small Planet,” in which she wrote that vegetarians needed to balance foods based on which amino acids they were lacking, creating “complementing proteins.” For some time, there were even nutritionists who created complex charts to help vegetarians pick foods that went together, and concerned meat-free eaters made sure to combine beans and rice, or rice and corn, or grains and cheese … and it was an awful lot to remember!
But we now know that combining types of protein isn’t nearly as important as simply eating enough calories to maintain a healthy weight – Lappe even revised later editions of her book, admitting that she was wrong about the importance of food combining. No, if you eat enough food from different sources, you’ll probably be getting plenty of protein.
If you want to get technical about it, health professionals recommend that you eat 0.8 grams of protein each day for every kilogram of body weight. A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds – so to find your recommended amount of daily protein, multiply your ideal weight by 0.8, then divide that number by 2.2. If you prefer a quicker method, just divide your ideal weight by 3. But even then, you don’t need to eat that much protein to stay healthy – keep in mind that recommendations like these always err on the side of safety, so the number you get will actually be higher than what you realistically need.
But you, as a vegetarian, should strive to meet the recommended daily requirement of protein – because plant proteins are, unfortunately, less efficient foods for providing nutrients. For one thing, they’re somewhat more difficult to digest than animal proteins, and they also lack the amount of amino acids present in meat. If you get most of your protein from beans and grains, this is especially true – ovo lacto vegetarians consume a similar amount of protein to omnivores, and vegans who eat a lot of soy products also get plenty of protein.
It’ll always be true, however, that as a vegetarian you’re eating less protein than people who eat both plant and animal proteins. A 1984 study found that a typical omnivore diet consists of between 15 and 17 percent protein, while lacto-ovo vegetarians generally eat about 13 percent protein and vegans around 11 to 12 percent. Despite needing more protein and eating less, the vegans still had an adequate amount of protein in the diets. So don’t worry about doing anything fancy to meet your protein requirements – just eat from a variety of sources and get enough calories and you’ll be fine.
You will, in fact, be better than fine – because meat-eaters generally eat too much protein! Studies have shown that replacing animal protein with plant protein in your diet can help lower your blood cholesterol levels, decreasing your risk of heart attack. Most people are by now aware of the danger of saturated fats in red meat and its effect on blood cholesterol – people recovering from heart attacks are prescribed diets which replace the beef with skinless chicken or fish. That is a good move, to be sure, but these people could lower their cholesterol even further by switching to a vegetarian diet and reducing the amount of fat that they eat. Plant proteins are lower in saturated fat than animal proteins and dairy products, and free of cholesterol. There are also studies that show that eating slightly less protein than is optimal is far superior than eating too much – and in this era of supersizing, most meat-eaters eat far more than they need. When we eat too much protein, it’s up to our kidneys to filter out the excess. In the process, calcium is lost, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. Since plant-based diets are lower in total protein, vegetarian diets are better for your bones! Excess protein is also, understandably, hard on the kidneys and unhealthy for people with kidney disease.
Plant proteins contain all the same amino acids, to differing degrees, as animal proteins, and eating enough of them gives you all the protein you need. Studies have shown that people can meet their protein needs just by eating rice, wheat or potatoes so long as they meet their caloric needs. By eating a variety of plant foods throughout the day and consuming enough calories, you’ll be getting enough healthy plant protein. You’ll have a lower risk of heart and kidney disease, and you’ll be eating protein that’s more efficiently produced besides, using less valuable resources than animal protein. It’s what people call “win-win!”
Boning up on calcium
Calcium is vital to avoid bone-threatening diseases like osteoporosis – yet in countries where residents eat the highest amount of calcium and protein, they also have the highest number of hip fractures, a symptom of osteoporosis. Because the truth is, scientists are coming to the conclusion that there’s more to osteoporosis than just the amount of calcium we eat – overall lifestyle plays a large part, including physical activity levels and environmental factors. Just eating four to five servings of calcium-rich foods each day is no guarantee that you’ll avoid osteoporosis – but it’ll certainly be a step in the right direction.
Dairy industry propaganda tells us that “milk does a body good,” but that’s simply not true. Over two-thirds of the people in the world are lactose intolerant, making it difficult to digest milk. The cause is an insufficient amount of lactase, the enzyme that breaks down the sugars in milk. Undigested, the mucous-y lactose coats the lining of the colon, bacteria interact with it to cause gas, and the result is cramps, flatulence and diarrhea. All mammals are born with a sufficient amount of lactase, but in decreases as we get older – once we’re out of infancy, we’re not meant to be drinking milk any longer.
But while we don’t need to drink milk, we still need calcium. Almost all of the calcium in our bodies at any given time is stored in our bones and teeth, with about 1 percent in our bloodstream. And that’s the calcium that’s key to good health – it’s needed to send messages between nerves, especially those that contract our muscles. It’s also a vital component in the clotting of blood. Our kidneys filter most of our bodies’ calcium and return it to the bloodstream, but some of it is lost in our urine. We also lose some through sweat and bowel movements.
Our bones are constantly breaking down (don’t worry – they build back up!) replenishing calcium into our blood. Somewhere around the age of 30, our bones stop growing and reach maximum density. This is why calcium is most important when you’re young – the denser your bones are when they reach this stage of development, the less chance you’ll get osteoporosis when you’re older. That’s because after 45 our bones break down faster than they’re rebuilt – at this point we start to lose as much as 0.5 percent of our bone mass each year. So by the time we hit 65, bone loss can start to be a real problem. Women lose even more bone mass when they reach menopause, as they stop producing estrogen, the hormone that protects our bones.
We can’t increase the density of our bones once they stop growing, but we can slow the rate that calcium disappears from our bones by making sure that we eat calcium-rich foods. This applies whether you eat an omnivorous diet, an ovo-lacto diet or a completely vegan diet – there is no firm evidence that vegetarians have stronger bones than people who meat eat, or weaker bones. But some nutritionists believe that vegetarians may actually need less calcium to keep their bones strong.
How can that be? Well, protein from plant sources are metabolized by the body in different ways that animal proteins. Meat contains more sulfur-containing amino acids than plant proteins, which makes the blood more acidic. To neutralize the acid, your body needs more calcium – and what it doesn’t find in the bloodstream it pulls from our bones. That calcium then leaves your body in your urine, taking even more calcium from your kidneys along the way.
In addition, sodium takes a heavy toll on your body’s calcium supplies, and along with table salt, sodium is added to canned foods, cured meats, soft drinks, condiments and snack foods. When you think of the amount of protein and sodium your average American eats during a day full of bacon cheeseburgers, ham sandwiches, sodas and french fries, it’s not hard to see why they need more compensatory calcium than your average vegetarian!
So how much calcium do you need, then? Well, a good rule of thumb is to eat between two and five servings of calcium-rich foods – leafy green vegetables, broccoli, beans and, yes, dairy products are among your choices – while keeping your protein and sodium intake moderate. The recommended calcium-to-protein ratio is 16:1, so if you want to calculate your calcium needs, you’ll need to estimate your protein consumption first.
Surprisingly, even bread can be a good source of calcium. It was once thought that fiber and phytates, substances found in grains and nuts, bind to calcium and make in unavailable to body, which can’t absorb it. However, when yeast is present, it breaks the bond between phytates and calcium, allowing it to be used by the body – so yeast-raised breads, especially whole grain breads, can provide a degree of calcium. Also,some leafy greens are less effective sources of calcium than others – Swiss chard, spinach, beet greens and rhubarb contain substances called oxalates that limits the absorption of calcium (but they’re still chock-full of iron, so eat them anyway!)
Eating a variety of foods every day makes for a more interesting, enjoyable vegetarian way of life, so it makes sense to get your calcium from many different foods. Adequate calcium is especially important for growing children – and we’ll address vegetarian kids in Chapter 16 – so they build the strong bones they’ll need when they’re older. But you don’t need to get your calcium from milk. As we’ve discussed here, milk isn’t even good for you! Plant foods like leafy green vegetables, soy products, fortified orange juice and dried beans are loaded with calcium. And they make your menus much more fun!
Our friends, the vitamins
There are 13 vitamins that have been determined as necessary to human health. They’re divided into two classes – water soluble vitamins, the excess of which is excreted in the urine or through sweat; and fat soluble vitamins, of which our bodies store the excess. Vitamin C and eight B vitamins are water soluble, so if you take too much of these your body just gets rid of what it doesn’t need. Vitamins B12, A, D, K and E are fat soluble – any excess of these are kept in our bodies for some time, and we can overdose on them if we take too much.
Fat soluble vitamins are called that because they need dietary fat to be absorbed by the body. A diet exceedingly low in fat makes it difficult to use these vitamins, although it’s only a small amount of fat –vitamin absorption is only an issue in the most extreme cases. They’re needed for a diverse array of bodily functions, from blood clotting to eyesight to the immune system. Water soluble vitamins already exist in the body’s enzyme system, and are necessary to keep the body functioning smoothly. A handful of these vitamins are especially important to the vegetarian diet, and it’s key that you know why you need them.
Vitamin B12 – the Everything Vitamin
One of the most controversial nutritional elements is this little guy, of which you need only the tiniest amount – just 2 micrograms per day. One tiny pinch would be enough for you to meet your body’s needs for your whole life. How small an amount do you need? Look at it this way – one microgram is one thirty-millionth of an ounce.B12 is created by microorganisms that exist in the air, water and soil. Animals, including humans, have it in their bodies. We consume Vitamin B12 by eating the flesh of animals who pass it along, or by consuming animal products like eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt. Vitamin B12 is also produced in our own intestinal tracts, but scientists believe that it occurs past the point where we can absorb it into our blood streams – so we can’t utilize the B1 we produce ourselves. We have to get it from somewhere else.
Plants only contain B12 through contact with them, passed on through the soil. So if you eat vegetables straight from the garden, you may pick up a little bit of B12 from soil present on the plant. But if you buy all your veggies from the grocery store, they’ll have been cleaned well enough that there’s probably not even the tiniest speck of B12. So where the heck do we get B12 from, anyway?
Coming as it does from minuscule bacteria, there are a number of forms of Vitamnin B12. The one we humans need, the our out bodies can use, is called cyanocobalamin. Other types of B12 – the types we can’t utilize – are called “analogs.” For years, nutritionists lectured that B12 was abundant in foods like nutritional yeast, tempeh and sea vegetables. But it turns out that, while there’s lots of B12 in those foods, it’s mostly of the type we can’t use, despite the claims on the labels. Up to 94 percent of the Vitamin B12 in those foods is in analog form and not cyanocobalamin, making them essentially worthless as sources of B12.
The only sure way to add B12 to your diet is through fortified food products and vitamin supplements. Read labels carefully, and look for the word “cyanocobalamin” – you should be able to find plenty of breakfast cereals and meat substitutes fortified with the right kind of B12. If you decide to go with a vitamin supplement, choose one with the lowest dose available.
Remember, you only need 2 micrograms a day, and most supplements contain much more than that. The reason to keep your daily dosage low is because your body actually adapts to the amount of B12 you get from supplements and your diet – it’s going to absorb just what it needs and discard the rest. So why take a big dose when no matter how much you take, you’ll only absorb 2 micrograms?
Also keep in mind that you really only need a B12 supplement if you’re eating a vegan or near-vegan diet. If you’re ovo-lacto, you’ll get all the B12 you need from the foods you eat.
Riboflavin, your little yellow friend
If you’ve ever taken a megavitamin and was alarmed later at the bright yellow color of your urine, you’ve met Vitamin B2, also known s riboflavin. Like all of the B vitamins, riboflavin plays a part in the complex enzyme reactions that make everything in your engine work. Nutritional scientists believe that Vitamin B2 plays a part in more of the body’s various functions than any other vitamin, so when you don’t get enough it can cause a number of disparate dysfunctions – anemia, skin problems, a swollen tongue, dry cracks at the corners of the mouth or neurological problems.
Riboflavin is naturally present, in small amounts, in a number of foods, and the amount you need is directly connected to your energy intake – the more calories you need, the more riboflavin you require. The recommended daily requirement of riboflavin is 1.7 milligrams per day for men and 1.3 for women, but many experts now believe that number is high – many people eat far less than the RDA of riboflavin and never show any signs of deficiency.
A number of plant foods contain moderate amounts of riboflavin, making it easy to get the amount you need from the foods you eat. Leafy greens, broccoli, yogurt and avocados are sources of riboflavin, and enriched breads and cereals are good sources, and legumes like soybeans and soy food products are even better. You can make sure that your vitamin supplement contains Vitamin B2 but, as with so many nutrients, simply eating a healthy diet that includes a variety of foods will assure you that you’re getting enough.
Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin
Vitamin D is a vitamin, of course, but it also falls under the same general classification as hormones – our body generates it for use by another part of the body later. In this case, we create Vitamin D through exposure to the sun, then it goes to our bones, kidney and intestines to regulate calcium and strengthen our bones. Hundreds of years ago, people suffered regularly from diseases like rickets and osteomalacia when they received inadequate exposure to sunlight. Thankfully, these are rarely seen today.
To get enough Vitamin D from the sun, you need about a half an hour’s exposure on the hands and face, three times a week with no sunscreen, to generate enough to help your body year ‘round. If you have darker sun, you’ll need more. Lighter skin, less. However much you need, the exposure you get during the summer and spring is supposed to carry you through the long winter. It’s possible to not get enough Vitamin D, especially if you live in an area that has a heavy smog layer, spend all of your days indoors, or only go outside wearing heavy clothing or sunscreen. Older people are at a greater risk of Vitamin D deficiency, as our ability to manufacture it decreases with age.
The good news is that if your vegetarian diet includes dairy, you’re probably getting enough. In the United States, dairy products are fortified with Vitamin D, and extra supplements aren’t necessary. Vegans (and others who forgo dairy products) may want to take supplemental Vitamin D. If so, you may want to consult with a nutritionist or other health professional – excess Vitamin D is stored in the body, creating calcium deposits that can damage the kidneys and heart.
But the best solution? Get outside in the sun!
The rest of the best
Vitamin B1 (thiamin) helps convert carbohydrates to energy, and we need about 0.5 milligrams for every 1,000 calories we eat to do the job. The disease beriberi, famous from countless jungle adventure movies, is caused by a deficiency of thiamine and results in damage to the nervous system. Vegetarians generally get lots of thiamine in their diets – whole grains are loaded with it, enriched breads offer a lot of B1, and nutritional yeast is a good source, too.
Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) is a component of in 60 different enzyme systems, most of which help your body metabolize protein – the amount you need is based on how much protein you eat.
Vegetarians, who consume less protein overall than omnivores, need less B6. Since plant foods contain very high levels of B6 for the amount of protein they offer, vegetarians usually get plenty of B6. There’s even more good news for vegetarians – studies have shown that animal proteins actually increase the need for B6 more than plant proteins, so people on meatless diets need about 25 percent less. It’s also been found that the type of B vitamins offered by plant foods are less susceptible to destruction during cooking than those in meat , so vegetarians win there, too.
Folic acid, also called “folate,” is necessary for the body to metabolize protein and for efficient cell division. It works with B12 to create new material needed for the cells to divide and grow.
The current RDA is 200 micrograms for men and 180 micrograms for women. Vegetables are great sources of folic acid, especially broccoli, leafy greens and asparagus. Legumes also contain a lot of folic acid, so eat your soy and your black-eyed peas.Vitamin C was once believed to cure colds, but we now know that the best you can hope for is that large doses will reduce the severity of a cold if you catch one. Lack of Vitamin C also causes scurvy, once the scourge of sea-faring folk who lacked fresh vegetables on long voyages. Odds are, you’re not a pirate or a merchant seaman, so you probably don’t need to worry about your intake of C as it’s abundant in fruits and vegetables, especially citrus fruits, strawberries, peppers, watermelon, potatoes – yes, potatoes! – and broccoli. Because of this, vegetarians get more than the recommended amounts from the foods they eat, and vegans get the most Vitamin C of all!
Some people spend their entire lives studying the science of nutrition, but you don’t have to make it your life’s work. The truth is, despite what the meat industry repeatedly tells you, vegetarian diets aren’t nutritionally inferior to meat-based diets. There’s no need to worry that you’ll be lacking the vitamins, minerals and protein that your body needs. Which isn’t to say that it’s not possible to eat badly as a vegetarian – many people have lousy diets, even vegetarians. But if you eat smart, your vegetarian diet can be the healthiest way you’ve ever eaten.
Protein – Am I Getting Enough?
Your first concern on starting a vegetarian way of life is that, without meat foods in your diet, you’ll lack protein. So you’ll be happy to discover that it’s almost impossible to eat too little protein on a vegetarian diet.
Protein is, of course, of the utmost importance to a healthful diet. Your bones, muscles and hormones all contain protein, and eating enough of it helps keep your body strong on the most fundamental level. Unfortunately, the importance of eating animal protein has long been made unrealistically important. Man once believed that eating the flesh of other animals would make him stronger and healthier – but now that we know what we do about cholesterol and the dangers of eating saturated fats, it’s obvious that limiting animal proteins is the healthy choice.
Vegetarians can, of course, be protein deficient – but that comes from undereating, or relying too heavily on junk foods. In most case, any diet adequate in calories from a variety of healthful sources provides enough protein. Grains, vegetables, beans, seeds and nuts are all protein-rich foods, easily providing what the body needs.
Contrary to what many vegetarians believed in the last couple of decades, they don’t need to weigh and balance arcane combinations of foods to get adequate protein. This myth goes back to Frances Moore Lappe’s 1971 book “Diet for a Small Planet,” in which she wrote that vegetarians needed to balance foods based on which amino acids they were lacking, creating “complementing proteins.” For some time, there were even nutritionists who created complex charts to help vegetarians pick foods that went together, and concerned meat-free eaters made sure to combine beans and rice, or rice and corn, or grains and cheese … and it was an awful lot to remember!
But we now know that combining types of protein isn’t nearly as important as simply eating enough calories to maintain a healthy weight – Lappe even revised later editions of her book, admitting that she was wrong about the importance of food combining. No, if you eat enough food from different sources, you’ll probably be getting plenty of protein.
If you want to get technical about it, health professionals recommend that you eat 0.8 grams of protein each day for every kilogram of body weight. A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds – so to find your recommended amount of daily protein, multiply your ideal weight by 0.8, then divide that number by 2.2. If you prefer a quicker method, just divide your ideal weight by 3. But even then, you don’t need to eat that much protein to stay healthy – keep in mind that recommendations like these always err on the side of safety, so the number you get will actually be higher than what you realistically need.
But you, as a vegetarian, should strive to meet the recommended daily requirement of protein – because plant proteins are, unfortunately, less efficient foods for providing nutrients. For one thing, they’re somewhat more difficult to digest than animal proteins, and they also lack the amount of amino acids present in meat. If you get most of your protein from beans and grains, this is especially true – ovo lacto vegetarians consume a similar amount of protein to omnivores, and vegans who eat a lot of soy products also get plenty of protein.
It’ll always be true, however, that as a vegetarian you’re eating less protein than people who eat both plant and animal proteins. A 1984 study found that a typical omnivore diet consists of between 15 and 17 percent protein, while lacto-ovo vegetarians generally eat about 13 percent protein and vegans around 11 to 12 percent. Despite needing more protein and eating less, the vegans still had an adequate amount of protein in the diets. So don’t worry about doing anything fancy to meet your protein requirements – just eat from a variety of sources and get enough calories and you’ll be fine.
You will, in fact, be better than fine – because meat-eaters generally eat too much protein! Studies have shown that replacing animal protein with plant protein in your diet can help lower your blood cholesterol levels, decreasing your risk of heart attack. Most people are by now aware of the danger of saturated fats in red meat and its effect on blood cholesterol – people recovering from heart attacks are prescribed diets which replace the beef with skinless chicken or fish. That is a good move, to be sure, but these people could lower their cholesterol even further by switching to a vegetarian diet and reducing the amount of fat that they eat. Plant proteins are lower in saturated fat than animal proteins and dairy products, and free of cholesterol. There are also studies that show that eating slightly less protein than is optimal is far superior than eating too much – and in this era of supersizing, most meat-eaters eat far more than they need. When we eat too much protein, it’s up to our kidneys to filter out the excess. In the process, calcium is lost, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. Since plant-based diets are lower in total protein, vegetarian diets are better for your bones! Excess protein is also, understandably, hard on the kidneys and unhealthy for people with kidney disease.
Plant proteins contain all the same amino acids, to differing degrees, as animal proteins, and eating enough of them gives you all the protein you need. Studies have shown that people can meet their protein needs just by eating rice, wheat or potatoes so long as they meet their caloric needs. By eating a variety of plant foods throughout the day and consuming enough calories, you’ll be getting enough healthy plant protein. You’ll have a lower risk of heart and kidney disease, and you’ll be eating protein that’s more efficiently produced besides, using less valuable resources than animal protein. It’s what people call “win-win!”
Boning up on calcium
Calcium is vital to avoid bone-threatening diseases like osteoporosis – yet in countries where residents eat the highest amount of calcium and protein, they also have the highest number of hip fractures, a symptom of osteoporosis. Because the truth is, scientists are coming to the conclusion that there’s more to osteoporosis than just the amount of calcium we eat – overall lifestyle plays a large part, including physical activity levels and environmental factors. Just eating four to five servings of calcium-rich foods each day is no guarantee that you’ll avoid osteoporosis – but it’ll certainly be a step in the right direction.
Dairy industry propaganda tells us that “milk does a body good,” but that’s simply not true. Over two-thirds of the people in the world are lactose intolerant, making it difficult to digest milk. The cause is an insufficient amount of lactase, the enzyme that breaks down the sugars in milk. Undigested, the mucous-y lactose coats the lining of the colon, bacteria interact with it to cause gas, and the result is cramps, flatulence and diarrhea. All mammals are born with a sufficient amount of lactase, but in decreases as we get older – once we’re out of infancy, we’re not meant to be drinking milk any longer.
But while we don’t need to drink milk, we still need calcium. Almost all of the calcium in our bodies at any given time is stored in our bones and teeth, with about 1 percent in our bloodstream. And that’s the calcium that’s key to good health – it’s needed to send messages between nerves, especially those that contract our muscles. It’s also a vital component in the clotting of blood. Our kidneys filter most of our bodies’ calcium and return it to the bloodstream, but some of it is lost in our urine. We also lose some through sweat and bowel movements.
Our bones are constantly breaking down (don’t worry – they build back up!) replenishing calcium into our blood. Somewhere around the age of 30, our bones stop growing and reach maximum density. This is why calcium is most important when you’re young – the denser your bones are when they reach this stage of development, the less chance you’ll get osteoporosis when you’re older. That’s because after 45 our bones break down faster than they’re rebuilt – at this point we start to lose as much as 0.5 percent of our bone mass each year. So by the time we hit 65, bone loss can start to be a real problem. Women lose even more bone mass when they reach menopause, as they stop producing estrogen, the hormone that protects our bones.
We can’t increase the density of our bones once they stop growing, but we can slow the rate that calcium disappears from our bones by making sure that we eat calcium-rich foods. This applies whether you eat an omnivorous diet, an ovo-lacto diet or a completely vegan diet – there is no firm evidence that vegetarians have stronger bones than people who meat eat, or weaker bones. But some nutritionists believe that vegetarians may actually need less calcium to keep their bones strong.
How can that be? Well, protein from plant sources are metabolized by the body in different ways that animal proteins. Meat contains more sulfur-containing amino acids than plant proteins, which makes the blood more acidic. To neutralize the acid, your body needs more calcium – and what it doesn’t find in the bloodstream it pulls from our bones. That calcium then leaves your body in your urine, taking even more calcium from your kidneys along the way.
In addition, sodium takes a heavy toll on your body’s calcium supplies, and along with table salt, sodium is added to canned foods, cured meats, soft drinks, condiments and snack foods. When you think of the amount of protein and sodium your average American eats during a day full of bacon cheeseburgers, ham sandwiches, sodas and french fries, it’s not hard to see why they need more compensatory calcium than your average vegetarian!
So how much calcium do you need, then? Well, a good rule of thumb is to eat between two and five servings of calcium-rich foods – leafy green vegetables, broccoli, beans and, yes, dairy products are among your choices – while keeping your protein and sodium intake moderate. The recommended calcium-to-protein ratio is 16:1, so if you want to calculate your calcium needs, you’ll need to estimate your protein consumption first.
Surprisingly, even bread can be a good source of calcium. It was once thought that fiber and phytates, substances found in grains and nuts, bind to calcium and make in unavailable to body, which can’t absorb it. However, when yeast is present, it breaks the bond between phytates and calcium, allowing it to be used by the body – so yeast-raised breads, especially whole grain breads, can provide a degree of calcium. Also,some leafy greens are less effective sources of calcium than others – Swiss chard, spinach, beet greens and rhubarb contain substances called oxalates that limits the absorption of calcium (but they’re still chock-full of iron, so eat them anyway!)
Eating a variety of foods every day makes for a more interesting, enjoyable vegetarian way of life, so it makes sense to get your calcium from many different foods. Adequate calcium is especially important for growing children – and we’ll address vegetarian kids in Chapter 16 – so they build the strong bones they’ll need when they’re older. But you don’t need to get your calcium from milk. As we’ve discussed here, milk isn’t even good for you! Plant foods like leafy green vegetables, soy products, fortified orange juice and dried beans are loaded with calcium. And they make your menus much more fun!
Our friends, the vitamins
There are 13 vitamins that have been determined as necessary to human health. They’re divided into two classes – water soluble vitamins, the excess of which is excreted in the urine or through sweat; and fat soluble vitamins, of which our bodies store the excess. Vitamin C and eight B vitamins are water soluble, so if you take too much of these your body just gets rid of what it doesn’t need. Vitamins B12, A, D, K and E are fat soluble – any excess of these are kept in our bodies for some time, and we can overdose on them if we take too much.
Fat soluble vitamins are called that because they need dietary fat to be absorbed by the body. A diet exceedingly low in fat makes it difficult to use these vitamins, although it’s only a small amount of fat –vitamin absorption is only an issue in the most extreme cases. They’re needed for a diverse array of bodily functions, from blood clotting to eyesight to the immune system. Water soluble vitamins already exist in the body’s enzyme system, and are necessary to keep the body functioning smoothly. A handful of these vitamins are especially important to the vegetarian diet, and it’s key that you know why you need them.
Vitamin B12 – the Everything Vitamin
One of the most controversial nutritional elements is this little guy, of which you need only the tiniest amount – just 2 micrograms per day. One tiny pinch would be enough for you to meet your body’s needs for your whole life. How small an amount do you need? Look at it this way – one microgram is one thirty-millionth of an ounce.B12 is created by microorganisms that exist in the air, water and soil. Animals, including humans, have it in their bodies. We consume Vitamin B12 by eating the flesh of animals who pass it along, or by consuming animal products like eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt. Vitamin B12 is also produced in our own intestinal tracts, but scientists believe that it occurs past the point where we can absorb it into our blood streams – so we can’t utilize the B1 we produce ourselves. We have to get it from somewhere else.
Plants only contain B12 through contact with them, passed on through the soil. So if you eat vegetables straight from the garden, you may pick up a little bit of B12 from soil present on the plant. But if you buy all your veggies from the grocery store, they’ll have been cleaned well enough that there’s probably not even the tiniest speck of B12. So where the heck do we get B12 from, anyway?
Coming as it does from minuscule bacteria, there are a number of forms of Vitamnin B12. The one we humans need, the our out bodies can use, is called cyanocobalamin. Other types of B12 – the types we can’t utilize – are called “analogs.” For years, nutritionists lectured that B12 was abundant in foods like nutritional yeast, tempeh and sea vegetables. But it turns out that, while there’s lots of B12 in those foods, it’s mostly of the type we can’t use, despite the claims on the labels. Up to 94 percent of the Vitamin B12 in those foods is in analog form and not cyanocobalamin, making them essentially worthless as sources of B12.
The only sure way to add B12 to your diet is through fortified food products and vitamin supplements. Read labels carefully, and look for the word “cyanocobalamin” – you should be able to find plenty of breakfast cereals and meat substitutes fortified with the right kind of B12. If you decide to go with a vitamin supplement, choose one with the lowest dose available.
Remember, you only need 2 micrograms a day, and most supplements contain much more than that. The reason to keep your daily dosage low is because your body actually adapts to the amount of B12 you get from supplements and your diet – it’s going to absorb just what it needs and discard the rest. So why take a big dose when no matter how much you take, you’ll only absorb 2 micrograms?
Also keep in mind that you really only need a B12 supplement if you’re eating a vegan or near-vegan diet. If you’re ovo-lacto, you’ll get all the B12 you need from the foods you eat.
Riboflavin, your little yellow friend
If you’ve ever taken a megavitamin and was alarmed later at the bright yellow color of your urine, you’ve met Vitamin B2, also known s riboflavin. Like all of the B vitamins, riboflavin plays a part in the complex enzyme reactions that make everything in your engine work. Nutritional scientists believe that Vitamin B2 plays a part in more of the body’s various functions than any other vitamin, so when you don’t get enough it can cause a number of disparate dysfunctions – anemia, skin problems, a swollen tongue, dry cracks at the corners of the mouth or neurological problems.
Riboflavin is naturally present, in small amounts, in a number of foods, and the amount you need is directly connected to your energy intake – the more calories you need, the more riboflavin you require. The recommended daily requirement of riboflavin is 1.7 milligrams per day for men and 1.3 for women, but many experts now believe that number is high – many people eat far less than the RDA of riboflavin and never show any signs of deficiency.
A number of plant foods contain moderate amounts of riboflavin, making it easy to get the amount you need from the foods you eat. Leafy greens, broccoli, yogurt and avocados are sources of riboflavin, and enriched breads and cereals are good sources, and legumes like soybeans and soy food products are even better. You can make sure that your vitamin supplement contains Vitamin B2 but, as with so many nutrients, simply eating a healthy diet that includes a variety of foods will assure you that you’re getting enough.
Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin
Vitamin D is a vitamin, of course, but it also falls under the same general classification as hormones – our body generates it for use by another part of the body later. In this case, we create Vitamin D through exposure to the sun, then it goes to our bones, kidney and intestines to regulate calcium and strengthen our bones. Hundreds of years ago, people suffered regularly from diseases like rickets and osteomalacia when they received inadequate exposure to sunlight. Thankfully, these are rarely seen today.
To get enough Vitamin D from the sun, you need about a half an hour’s exposure on the hands and face, three times a week with no sunscreen, to generate enough to help your body year ‘round. If you have darker sun, you’ll need more. Lighter skin, less. However much you need, the exposure you get during the summer and spring is supposed to carry you through the long winter. It’s possible to not get enough Vitamin D, especially if you live in an area that has a heavy smog layer, spend all of your days indoors, or only go outside wearing heavy clothing or sunscreen. Older people are at a greater risk of Vitamin D deficiency, as our ability to manufacture it decreases with age.
The good news is that if your vegetarian diet includes dairy, you’re probably getting enough. In the United States, dairy products are fortified with Vitamin D, and extra supplements aren’t necessary. Vegans (and others who forgo dairy products) may want to take supplemental Vitamin D. If so, you may want to consult with a nutritionist or other health professional – excess Vitamin D is stored in the body, creating calcium deposits that can damage the kidneys and heart.
But the best solution? Get outside in the sun!
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Vitamin B1 (thiamin) helps convert carbohydrates to energy, and we need about 0.5 milligrams for every 1,000 calories we eat to do the job. The disease beriberi, famous from countless jungle adventure movies, is caused by a deficiency of thiamine and results in damage to the nervous system. Vegetarians generally get lots of thiamine in their diets – whole grains are loaded with it, enriched breads offer a lot of B1, and nutritional yeast is a good source, too.
Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) is a component of in 60 different enzyme systems, most of which help your body metabolize protein – the amount you need is based on how much protein you eat.
Vegetarians, who consume less protein overall than omnivores, need less B6. Since plant foods contain very high levels of B6 for the amount of protein they offer, vegetarians usually get plenty of B6. There’s even more good news for vegetarians – studies have shown that animal proteins actually increase the need for B6 more than plant proteins, so people on meatless diets need about 25 percent less. It’s also been found that the type of B vitamins offered by plant foods are less susceptible to destruction during cooking than those in meat , so vegetarians win there, too.
Folic acid, also called “folate,” is necessary for the body to metabolize protein and for efficient cell division. It works with B12 to create new material needed for the cells to divide and grow.
The current RDA is 200 micrograms for men and 180 micrograms for women. Vegetables are great sources of folic acid, especially broccoli, leafy greens and asparagus. Legumes also contain a lot of folic acid, so eat your soy and your black-eyed peas.Vitamin C was once believed to cure colds, but we now know that the best you can hope for is that large doses will reduce the severity of a cold if you catch one. Lack of Vitamin C also causes scurvy, once the scourge of sea-faring folk who lacked fresh vegetables on long voyages. Odds are, you’re not a pirate or a merchant seaman, so you probably don’t need to worry about your intake of C as it’s abundant in fruits and vegetables, especially citrus fruits, strawberries, peppers, watermelon, potatoes – yes, potatoes! – and broccoli. Because of this, vegetarians get more than the recommended amounts from the foods they eat, and vegans get the most Vitamin C of all!
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