The Vegan Culinary Experience (VCE), written by Chef Jason Wyrick, is the first and only vegan culinary magazine in the world. It’s also a free PDF (click on the magazine cover image on the VCE home page to download).

The current issue, Healthy Eats, has an article by yours truly, Thriving on a Vegan Diet. If you’ve followed my writing, there aren’t any surprises here, but it’s a good summary of what you need to know to stay healthy on a vegan diet.

I was out of town for two weeks, had a lot of Vegan Outreach (VO) work to catch up on, and hope to get back to nutrition blogging soon.

In the meantime, VO is running a matching donation drive — we are trying to match $102,000. We started November 1 and are still just over halfway to our goal.

Every day, in all kinds of weather, VO leafleters are handing out our hard-hitting booklets to thousands of college students. In 2011, we handed booklets to over 1.5 million students at about 1,000 schools!

These efforts are creating a generation of young people who oppose factory farming and view animals as deserving respect. And we are starting to see this reflected in polls and rates of meat consumption.

Please become part of this change by donating to VO’s end of year fundraising drive! We cannot let up the momentum now.

And if that’s not enough reason, remember that VO provides the financial support for VeganHealth.org. Without VO, what organization would be willing to present all the scientific research on veg diets? Who would take the time to provide free advice to people who are having questions or problems?

Please donate now by clicking here, and your donation will be doubled.

Thank you very much for being a part of this change!

Jack

If you missed my interview with Elisa Rodriquez, RD, LDN that appeared on One Green Planet, it has been re-posted on Elisa’s site, EatUrVeggies.com.

And tomorrow, Wednesday, November 30, EatUrVeggies will have info on how to win a free copy of Vegan For Life!

I have added a new feature to PeaCounter.com, which does not require logging in, where you can calculate your physical activity level by putting in how many minutes per day you do various activities and then calculate your energy requirements:

peacounter.com/con_en

I base this all on equations and activities provided by the Institute of Medicine and there are some limitations in terms of the number of activities.

For example, the fastest running is 10 minute miles. But if you run faster, you should be able to extrapolate and get a rough idea of what your caloric expenditure would be.

Also, there is a limit to the IOM’s calculations in that “very active” is the highest physical activity you can have and so whether you run 10 minute miles for 120 minutes or for 240 minutes, your caloric expenditure will be the same. But if you play around with it, you can estimate beyond what the IOM’s calculations provide.

Meet Jack, A Vegan Advocate for Life

I have added a page of nutrition calculators to PeaCounter.com.

Readers of my blog might be particularly interested in the Body Mass Index, Ideal Body Weight, and vitamin D calculators.

If you have any conversions you use regularly and would like to see there, please let me know here.

The Mayo Clinic in Phoenix is looking for vegans, 40 years an older, in the area to study. You will need to donate a blood sample and will be compensated $25.

Call Patsy Thrush if interested: 480-301-4981

I was able to attend a screening of Vegucated last night in San Francisco and I highly recommend that you take your non-veg friends to see it if you get a chance.

Marisa Miller Wolfson is the filmmaker and the movie begins with a brief synopsis about her journey to becoming vegan. The main part of the movie, though, is about three New Yorkers who she finds via Craigslist and persuades to give veganism a try for six weeks. She takes them through a process of “vegucation” which mainly includes teaching them about how animals are treated, about some of the health benefits of eating a plant-based diet, and how to make the transition.

Most of the filming was done around 2006 so a lot of time has now passed since the 6-week challenge and 2 of the 3 people are still vegan (in fact, one of them attended the screening last night).

Vegucated is fun (except for relatively short sections on animal farming) and I think it would be very hard to walk away from it without having some significant interest in veganism and a positive view of vegans and how we are trying to make the world a better place.

Currently, the only way to see the film is to attend a screening (dates and locations). There is one in Sacramento tonight (October 26, 2011) at 6:30.

You can also host a screening in your area starting in January (more info).

I have created a nutrient analysis website that I think might be of use to many of my readers:

PeaCounter.com

You can create daily menus to see how much of each nutrient you are getting. It all started when I tried to create an Excel spreadsheet for people to calculate their amino acid intakes on VeganHealth.org’s Protein page many years ago. This was a terribly user-unfriendly and incomplete way to calculate amino acid needs and slowly but surely I created something I hope will be much better.

Two additional features of PeaCounter.com are:

1. All the Dietary Reference Intakes are listed at PeaCounter.com/dris.

2. You can quickly look up the nutrient amounts for a particular food and also create links that can be sent to others by clicking on the navigation bar in the top right.

I hope you will find it useful!

Amazon has reinstated their affiliate program for California residents, so you can now, once again, support JackNorrisRD.com by purchasing anything from Amazon at the links in the sidebar. Readers using my Amazon links were making a significant impact towards supporting this site before Amazon ended their program, so I hope you can return to buying your Amazon stuff through my link. Thank you!

In addition to Amazon, you can support JackNorrisRD.com in the following ways, all available at any time from the sidebar of the site:

• Purchase Vegan For Life via the Barnes & Noble link.
• Purchase anything else via the Barnes & Noble link.
• Purchase anything via the Pangea link.
• Donate.
• Buy a $25 ad that goes in a blog post to ~1200 readers interested in veg nutrition.

Thank you very much!