Vegan Kids, Dr. G on Diabetes, Ginny on Almond Milk
We just added a new child to the Real Vegan Children page. This page lists kids who have been “vegan since conception.” The new child is Zander Earl and his mother provides an interesting and extensive write-up.
Dr. Greger recently highlighted an exciting study at NutritionFacts.org in his video, Preventing Prediabetes By Eating More. In this study, adding 5 cups of pulses (beans and peas) per week to the diets of people at risk for type 2 diabetes resulted in improvements similar to counseling patients to reduce food intake by 500 calories per day.
Dr. Greger also recently came out with a new DVD, Dr. Greger’s 2014 Year-in-Review Presentation.
Ginny Messina posted an interesting article, Vegans Drink Almond Milk Because It’s Cruelty-Free–Not Because It’s Hip. Excerpt:
“I like almond milk, but I rarely drink it. I actually don’t drink plant milk much at all, but when I do, it’s always soymilk. I want the protein it provides, and it’s also easy on the environment.”
July 30th, 2014 at 10:16 am
Hi Jack. Please do research on phospholipids 🙂
Different lipids are responsible for different processes in the brain!
And lecithin can be of different composition and from different sources.
If I do not take lecithin, my memory and consciousness becomes much lower in comparison to when I was eating meat.
Sorry bad English.
July 30th, 2014 at 3:37 pm
Sanek,
Have you seen this?
http://veganhealth.org/articles/choline
August 2nd, 2014 at 6:36 am
Hi Jack, lots of recent “failure to thrive” ex-vegans making waves in the blogosphere lately. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, as they are always insightful and reasoned. Thanks for your work!
August 4th, 2014 at 6:26 pm
I notice that many of the failure to thrive bloggers have only been vegan for a few years. And some of them even began their blogs almost immediately after they became vegan. Maybe people shouldn’t be writing blogs about subjects that they know very little about and have very few experiences with. That seems like common sense to me.
August 5th, 2014 at 6:30 am
Hi Jack,
Thanks again for running such a great blog. My thought on the soymilk/almondmilk question is that the bulk of soymilks I come across are sweetened: I live in a small town and very few soymilks, if any, are sugar-free, and the ones that are are prohibitively expensive. I miss the protein that comes from soymilk, but I feel so much better, health-wise, when I drink the sugarless almondmilk. The same goes for soy yogurt: I love WholeSoy and I’m glad they’re back in production but I just can’t eat yogurt that’s got as much sugar as they put in theirs. I think that two cups of yogurt has the sugar content of a soda, no?
August 5th, 2014 at 6:43 am
Richard,
You could ask your local store to stock unsweetened, which is the type of soymilk I drink. I haven’t done a survey, so I could be wrong, but I would think that almond milk generally has more sugar than soymilk.
August 5th, 2014 at 7:08 am
I should have mentioned, Jack, but I get the unsweetened almondmilk. They do carry that at my local stores, and for a good price—I guess with almondmilk being as trendy as you and Ginny rightly point out there’s a bigger demand for it.
I’ll give some thought to asking the store about carrying unsweetened soy, but as of now I’m not all that optimistic about the chances of their carrying it. I live in the U.S. southeast, and there’s a lot of prejudice against veganism, to the point that a cashier at my local grocer’s more or less makes fun of me, and not in a friendly way, for buying soy and/or almondmilk. Sometimes her expression is retrained contempt. (I do try to avoid her when I can but it’s not always possible. But I bring it up to give you a sense of the culture around here.)
August 5th, 2014 at 12:13 pm
Hang in there, Richard!
August 5th, 2014 at 3:53 pm
Richard, I agree that WholeSoy is an excellent soy yoghurt. They do make a plain, unsweetened yoghurt which is good, and which you can add fruit or preserves to yourself. It has only 2g sugar per serving. You may have to ask the store to stock it as I have noticed that some only stock the flavored varieties. The amount of sugar in their flavored varieties is lower than most flavored dairy or non-dairy yoghurts but is still quite a lot for a few ounces of food.
August 14th, 2014 at 5:00 pm
Beth,
> Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, as they are always insightful and reasoned.
Thank you for your kind words! I don’t have any recent thoughts on this, though Ginny does:
http://bit.ly/VotSIa
September 19th, 2017 at 4:15 pm
Does calcium-fortified soy milk need to be consumed separately from iron-rich meals?
Also, does cooking the soy milk (like in porridge) reduce the fortified vitamin B12 or calcium?
Thanks 🙂
September 22nd, 2017 at 4:39 pm
Annelise,
> Does calcium-fortified soy milk need to be consumed separately from iron-rich meals?
To my knowledge the low absorption of iron is only from calcium supplements, not calcium in food.
> Also, does cooking the soy milk (like in porridge) reduce the fortified vitamin B12 or calcium?
No for calcium, and theoretically it shouldn’t for B12, but I would make sure you get some B12 that hasn’t been cooked on a regular basis.
September 22nd, 2017 at 4:45 pm
Thanks so much. So calcium fortified foods act differently from calcium supplements, even though the calcium is added? I thought that it was basically like a supplement mixed in to food, so it’s good to know if not.
Annelise
September 24th, 2017 at 11:41 am
Annelise,
Yes, it appears from the research that calciium supplements inhibit iron absorption but calcium-fortified foods as part of meals do not. Here’s the most relevent study I found in a quick Google search to see if there was anything recent (it appears there isn’t) on the subject:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15277162
It would be nice to have more information on calcium-fortified plant foods. If you have issues with iron absorption (such as low iron levels or iron-deficiency anemia) I would make sure you’re getting a good source of vitamin C at two of your meals each day to increase iron absorption.