Ginny Messina: When Vegans Get Cancer

The good people at Earth Balance’s Made Just Right blog ran an article by me on omega-3s:

Omega-3’s: Are You Getting Enough?

There’s no new information here, but it might be my most concise attempt at explaining the omega-3 conundrum.

With all the columnists telling parents not to feed their kids vegan, this was quite an enjoyable read:

Don’t Feed the Baby: In a live chat, Dear Prudence offers advice on a vegan infant,…

There is not much research on vegans and kidney disease, and the VeganHealth.org page on Vegetarian Diets for People with Kidney Disease is fairly bare bones; mostly links to resources for people with kidney disease who want to be vegetarian.

However, a report on lacto-ovo vegetarians that could be important for kidney disease was released in April, so I decided to add it to the page. The addition is short, so I’ve reproduced it here:

“A 2012 study on lacto-ovo vegetarians, without kidney disease, found the urine of vegetarians to have a 60% lower amount of two different sulfates that are thought to be toxic and are problematic for patients with kidney disease (1). The lower amounts were thought to be due to a combination of lower protein intake, higher fiber intake, and difference in bacteria in the digestive tract.”

Resource

1. Patel KP, Luo FJ, Plummer NS, Hostetter TH, Meyer TW. The Production of p-Cresol Sulfate and Indoxyl Sulfate in Vegetarians Versus Omnivores. Clin J Am Soc Nephrol. 2012 Apr 5. [Epub ahead of print] Link

Parents with vegan and vegetarian children (from birth to 18 years of age) along with their children are requested to complete a two-page long survey for a research project. The goal of the project is to use growth charts developed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the pattern of growth (e.g. height, weight and BMI for age) among children adhering to different diets (e.g. meat eating, lacto-ovo-vegetarians and vegans). The survey includes questions such as height, weight and age of the child.

To participate or for additional information, please contact Dr. Roman Pawlak at vegetarianchildren@gmail.com.

Roman Pawlak, PhD, RD
Associate Professor
East Carolina University
Department of Nutrition Science
Greenville, NC 27858

It looks like I haven’t done a special post on how to support JackNorrisRD.com this entire year. So now is the perfect time because you can support JackNorrisRD.com and at the same time get some cooking lessons from vegan nutritionist and cooking instructor Heather Nauta of www.HealthyVeganRecipes.net by signing up for her cooking classes through this link: Heather’s Online Cooking Classes.

How To Cook Simple, Healthy Meals That Even Picky Eaters Will Love

Heather Nauta is giving you a fun way to learn how to cook healthy and delicious meals with her new online cooking classes.

“I’m excited to help you move past the same old, not-so-healthy meals to making simple, flavorful, nutrient-dense recipes that give you the nutrients you need to sail through your day full of energy, confidence and happiness,” says Heather.

“Healthy eating often means learning how to cook all over again. If you’re transitioning to a healthier diet and aren’t too comfortable in the kitchen, I want to pass on what I’ve learned to you.”

In each class, Heather takes a new topic (like soups, veggie burgers and how to cook beans), discusses cooking techniques and nutrition, and shows you how to make a delicious, healthy recipe (like sweet potato quinoa chili and baked falafel burgers).

The recipes are vegan and use healthy, whole plant foods so they’re generally:

– Low fat
– Low sugar
– Low salt
– Gluten-free

“And it’s more than just a cooking course – I get into nutrition and health information while we’re cooking, and people have been really excited to discover how to get proper minerals, vitamins and protein into their meals.”

The classes were recorded live in early 2012. There are 24 classes of 45-60 minutes each, for a total of about 21 hours of classes.

For most of these meals, once you’ve made them once, you’ll easily be able to do all the prep work in less than 30 minutes.

When you sign up, you get access to a private membership website where you can:

– Watch the cooking classes online any time you want (day or night)
– Download the videos and recipes
– Ask Heather questions about any of the recipes or techniques

Sign up for the classes starts Friday, May 18th, with an early-bird discount price of only $67 (55% off!) going until Monday, May 21st. The first 50 people will also get $60 worth of bonuses, including a 30-minute consultation with Heather to ask any healthy cooking questions.

“I worked really hard putting this together, and after getting feedback from recent participants, I’m positive it can help you create simple, tasty meals that help you move toward optimal health.”

Heather’s posting free videos this week with some of her best tips for healthy, quick and flavorful cooking leading up to the launch on Friday, May 18th. Check out the first one here, to see her 3 steps to make your meals exceptionally healthy and a recipe for a super healthy avocado dip.

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Other ways to support JackNorrisRD.com

– Buy anything using the link to Pangea vegan products in the sidebar of the website.

– Buy anything through the links to Amazon on the website.

– Make a direct donation to JackNorrisRD.com.

Thank you very much! It does make a big difference.

Good article from Christine Kasum Sexton of the Vegetarian Resource Group on preventing age-related muscle loss:

Can a vegan diet provide enough protein to slow down age-related muscle loss?

Just added to the Protein page at VeganHealth.org:

“A study out of Boston published in 2011 but performed using data collected during the 1980s, found that vegan and non-vegan, middle-aged women had similar levels of muscle mass despite differences in protein intake of 1.0 g/kg/day for vegans and 1.3 g/kg/day for omnivores (14). However, the muscle mass was not measured directly – rather it was estimated using formulas based on creatinine clearance (a byproduct of muscle metabolism). The researchers believed the formulas to be accurate, but since they have not been validated on vegans it should be viewed with some uncertainty.

At 30 mg/kg/day, the vegan women did not meet the RDA for lysine which is 38 mg/kg/day. However, the study showed the vegan women to be consuming only 1511 kcal/day vs. 1866 kcal/day for the omnivores, yet their body mass indexes were very similar at 20.0 and 20.7 respectively. This could indicate that food intake for the vegans was underestimated, possibly due to a lack of data on vegan foods.”

More commentary: This is one of only two studies that have looked at protein status in actual vegans, the other study being one that measured serum albumin levels (12). While not conclusive, it provides evidence that vegans generally have adequate protein status.

Reference

12. Haddad EH, Berk LS, Kettering JD, Hubbard RW, Peters WR. Dietary intake and biochemical, hematologic, and immune status of vegans compared with nonvegetarians. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Sep;70(3 Suppl):586S-593S. (Link)

14. Andrich DE, Filion ME, Woods M, Dwyer JT, Gorbach SL, Goldin BR, Adlercreutz H, Aubertin-Leheudre M. Relationship between essential amino acids and muscle mass, independent of habitual diets, in pre- and post-menopausal US women. Int J Food Sci Nutr. 2011 Nov;62(7):719-24. Epub 2011 May 16. (Link)

This post is dedicated to my mother, a lover of diet soda, and to Erik Marcus, a non-lover of soda.

I forgot to mention an interesting finding in my post Calcium and Stress Fractures in Adolescent Girls – soda was not associated with bone fractures:

“When the analyses were further adjusted for soda intake, the results were virtually unchanged (data not shown).”

But I’m not making an entire post to point this out and, thus, encourage the drinking of soda by adolescent girls. Rather, I have discovered a diet soda which I think is relatively harmless: Zevia.

I have been known to drink a soda occasionally, and while I don’t want so much sugar, I have found diet soda to be very distasteful and I don’t want all the crap the big manufacturers put into it such as aspartame and sugar alcohols.

Enter Zevia. Zevia is an “all natural soda” with no calories. It is sweetened with stevia extract and erythritol (a sugar alcohol that supposedly does not cause gastrointestinal distress like other sugar alcohols).

When I had my first Zevia, a few years ago, I really disliked it. And I wasn’t alone. So when I heard that Oakland Veg Week had gotten Zevia donated to their events, I thought “Oh, no!”

Yet, when I got to one of the events, I couldn’t help but be pulled in by the siren song of the Zevia and I tried one again. Lo and behold, I didn’t think it was that bad. In fact, I now think it is pretty darn good and have even bought a six-pack since then. I particularly like their ginger root beer. Zevia isn’t quite as satisfying as a sugar-filled root beer or cola, but it’s pretty close.

Why am I posting this? Because I know a lot of people who drink a decent amount of diet soda and I think this would probably be a better choice.

Whole Foods carries Zevia in Oakland.

In addition to Ginny Messina’s response, Reed Mangles, PhD, RD has also written an informative response to Nina Planck’s NY Times article:

Vegan Children: Response to NYT Op-Ed

Excerpt:

“The New York Times opinion piece was concluded with a call to parents raise their children as nonvegetarians and to allow them to choose their own diets as adults. I don’t get the logic – parents are choosing what foods their children eat, even if they are raising them as meat eaters. I could just as easily say that all parents should raise their children as vegans and then, if the children grow up and want to eat meat, that would be their choice.”