Becoming Vegan

Archive for April, 2009

vegan cooking – Vegan Cooking – What to Eat When There is No Meat

April 30th, 2009

When approached by a situation that involves cooking for a vegan, even the most seasoned cooks can find difficulty in deciding how best to prepare for the main course and accompaniments that make up an evening meal. There follows a few useful guidelines to aid you in the process of devising menus for your vegan guests and relatives:

So, First Question – What Does Vegan Mean?

People often get confused between vegan and vegetarianism. While a vegetarian typically avoids all meat products, vegans avoid all fish and meat AND the by-products also. Such by-products include dairy, eggs, and even honey. Any product that comes from animals must be left out when preparing food for vegans.

Preparation

Whether cooking one dinner or one dozen, fixing meals for vegans requires solid preparation. It is crucial for each meal to be full of flavour and nutritionally correct, which is often a problem for the chef who is familiar with using animal-based food products in recipes. The courses should be specced-out early in the process, considering the best way to to add iron, protein, fiber, and taste to the vegan dinner.

Advanced planning is less complicated if you can discover a specialist on-line recipe collection with a collection of vegan recipes. Even then, you must verify each of the vegan recipes item by item before using them. Unfortunately, a few recipes described as vegan are not even fully vegetarian. Sadly, some individuals have very different opinions of what ‘vegan’ really means. Still, if you make an effort many of these vegan recipes are very tasty and highly nutritious. A few may need particular ingredients, but once again, the internet can be a major help in tracking these down. You may actually locate online sellers of vegan food stuffs, which, as they are usually ‘experts’ in the vegan lifestyle, should even be able to give advice on replacement ingredients for your vegan cooking.

Vegan Variety

In vegan cooking, it is tempting to create bland dishes that seem similar to each other. You can easily avoid this mistake. In Point Of Fact, dishes can be as exciting those cooked in carnivorous meals. With the huge number of TVP style alternatives to animal based ingredients, you can use substitutions for ingredients from beef to bacon, which can also introduce plenty of of flavor and variety to the feast.

Don’t Make Dangerous Assumptions

As the main cook for a vegan meal, one of the most important tasks is to be utterly sure you are honouring your guests’ beliefs. It would be very simple, as well as far quicker, to simply accept that all non-meat ingredients are not animal based and prepare a dinner accordingly. However, a good chef will remember to read through the ingredient lists of all bought items needed for the meal so you can be perfectly certain the food is OK for vegans. You will find some surprising places that meat products and their by-products crop up, for example:

veganism – How To Really Save Planet Earth: A Test About Al Gore by Jeff Popick

April 30th, 2009

If you really want to bring the Earth back from the brink of disaster, who should you be listening to?

A. Al Gore of “Live Earth” and “An Inconvenient Truth”

B. Diane Sawyer of ABC’s “Seven Ways to Help Save the World”

C. Michael Brune of “Rain Forest Action Network”

D. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck of “CNN Headline News”

“An Inconvenient Truth” left out the most inconvenient truth of all, and the Live Earth concerts were an environmental joke (and the music was really bad, too). Ms. Sawyer’s suggestion to cut back on toilet paper is a bit of poo itself. Then, with a golden opportunity to enlighten and empower Americans, Michael Brune of the Rain Forest Action Network only highlighted the problem with even our “environmental” groups. Therefore, and by way of deductive reasoning, the answer must be

vegan lifestyle – Beginning a raw vegan lifestyle…? – Yahoo! Answers

April 30th, 2009

Beginning a raw vegan lifestyle…?

I'm really interested in becoming a raw vegan. I can't afford a spirilizer or a dehydrator, but I do have a blender. Does anyone have any tips or advice to help me on this journey? Though I would like to lose somewhere around 20 lbs., it's not all about weight loss…I want to feel better as a whole. So, any tips, tricks, advice, recipes, grocery lists, etc, would be very helpful

6 Free Vegan Recipes For You … Click Here Now!

eating vegan – The Dark Side of Vegetarianism

April 30th, 2009

The Dark Side of Vegetarianism

WEDNESDAY, April 1 (HealthDay News) — Despite its proven health
benefits, a vegetarian diet might in fact be masking an underlying eating
disorder, new research suggests.

The study, in the April issue of the Journal of the American
Dietetic Association, found that twice as many teens and nearly double
the number of young adults who had been vegetarians reported having used
unhealthy means to control their weight, compared with those who had never
been vegetarians. Those means included using diet pills, laxatives and
diuretics and inducing vomiting to control weight.

There's a dark side to vegetarianism, said Dr. David L. Katz, director
of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine.
He had no role in the research.

"Adolescent vegetarians [in the study] were more prone to disordered
eating and outright eating disorders," Katz said. "This is not due to
vegetarianism but the other way
around: Adolescents struggling to control their diets and weight might opt
for vegetarianism among other, less-healthful efforts."

Vegetarianism, or a mostly plant-based diet, can be recommended to all
adolescents, Katz said. "But when adolescents opt for vegetarianism on
their own, it is important to find out why because it may signal a cry for
help, rather than the pursuit of health," he said.

Katz said he thinks a balanced vegetarian diet is among the most
healthful of dietary patterns, and the study suggests some of the
benefits.

"Adolescents practicing vegetarianism were less likely to be overweight
than their omnivorous counterparts and, were the measures available, would
likely have had better blood pressure and cholesterol, too," he said.
"Eating mostly plants — and even only plants — is good for us, and
certainly far better for health than the typical American diet."

The study's lead researcher, Ramona Robinson-O'Brien, an assistant
professor in the Nutrition Department at the College of Saint Benedict and
Saint John's University in St. Joseph, Minn., agreed.

"The majority of adolescents and young adults today would benefit from
improvements in dietary intake," she said. The study found, for instance,
that the vegetarians among the participants generally were less likely to
be overweight or obese.

"However, current vegetarians may be at increased risk for binge
eating, while former vegetarians may be at increased risk for extreme
unhealthful weight-control behaviors," she said. "Clinicians and nutrition
professionals providing guidance to young vegetarians might consider the
potential benefits associated with a healthful vegetarian diet, [but
should] recognize the possibility of increased risk of disordered eating
behaviors."

The researchers collected data on 2,516 teens and young adults who
participated in a study called Project EAT-II: Eating Among Teens. They
classified participants as current, former or never vegetarians and
divided them into two age groups: teens (15 to 18) and young adults
(19-23).

Each participant was questioned about binge eating, whether they felt a
loss of control of their eating habits and whether they used any extreme
weight-control behaviors.

About 21 percent of teens who had been vegetarians said they used
unhealthy weight-control behaviors, compared with 10 percent of teens who
had never been vegetarians. Among young adults, more former vegetarians
(27 percent) had used such measures than current vegetarians (16 percent)
or those who'd never been vegetarians (15 percent), the study found.

In addition, among teenagers, binge eating and loss of control over
eating habits was reported by 21 percent of current and 16 percent of
former vegetarians but only 4 percent of those who'd never followed a
vegetarian diet. For young adults, more vegetarians (18 percent) said they
engaged in binge eating with loss of control than did former vegetarians
(9 percent) and those who were never vegetarians (5 percent), the study
found.

Young adult vegetarians were less likely to be overweight or obese than
were those who'd never been vegetarians. Among teens, the study found no
statistically significant differences in weight.

"When guiding adolescent and young adult vegetarians in proper
nutrition and meal planning, it is important to recognize the potential
health benefits and risks associated with a vegetarian diet,"
Robinson-O'Brien said. "Furthermore, it may be beneficial to investigate
an individual's motives for choosing a vegetarian diet and ask about their
current and former vegetarian status when assessing risk for disordered
eating behaviors."

More information

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has more on a healthful diet.

6 Free Vegan Recipes For You … Click Here Now!

Latest vegan eating news – Vegan diet helps firefighters

April 30th, 2009

Hey everyone, I decided it would be a great idea to post up the latest news from Google so here it is…

Vegan diet helps firefighters

Now going to curl up in my vegan fed buffalo robe so you have a nice day. " " My daughter was on a vegan diet for years, but had to start eating meet for b … Read More…

Meat is off the menu for many seeking path to better health

"But if we're eating meat and other things, those have a lot of pathogenic bacteria." Albert Schinazi, 56, has been a vegetarian for 26 years. … Read More…

His strange new vegetarian world

I needed something to take my mind off the hurt, and I was barely eating anyway. So I emptied the fridge, read a few articles on vegetarian nutrition–"take … Read More…
That’s all the news for today guys, so until next time, thanks for stopping by.

6 Free Vegan Recipes For You … Click Here Now!

Eating for the Earth

April 24th, 2009

images-vegan1
Plant-based diet is better for your body and the environment, experts say

By Galia Myron
April 24, 2009

Not only do thin people consume fewer resources, transporting slim people takes less energy, say British experts who compared the toll that slim populations versus overweight populations take on the environment. The study, by researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, will appear in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Because food production is a key contributor to global warming, the authors decided to examine the effects of lean versus heavy peoples on their environments. A lean population, they argue, such as that in Vietnam, consumes 20 percent less food and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a population that is 40 percent obese, such as the United States.

Furthermore, because it takes less energy to transport lighter people, Edwards and Roberts add, transport-related emissions are lower in slim populations. A lean population of one billion people, they calculate, would emit 1,000 million tonnes less than an overweight one.

“When it comes to food consumption, moving about in a heavy body is like » Read more: Eating for the Earth

A Tasty way to Do the Raw Food Vegan Diet

April 8th, 2009

images-vegan
Many people see the raw food diet as being healthier and giving them more energy, despite the lack of any long-term analyses of the successes of a raw vegan diet as compared to other types of raw food diets. To try a raw vegan diet for yourself and see what it can do for you, these are the three food groups you can partake of: high-fat plants, sweet fruit and leafy green vegetables. As to the portions of each, opinions vary. Some say as little as two percent of your daily calories should be from leafy green vegetables; others think it should be as high as around thirty. With the high-fat foods, eat things like olives, nuts, avocados, seeds and cold-pressed oils. Again, some recommend anything from a tiny amount to as high as forty per cent.

To be honest, it’s unlikely you can get as high as thirty percent of your daily calories from » Read more: A Tasty way to Do the Raw Food Vegan Diet

Preparing Food For Vegan Guests

April 7th, 2009

When facing a situation that involves cooking for a vegan, even expert cooks can have problems in deciding exactly what to cook for the main course and accompaniments that make up a proper meal. The following are a few helpful guidelines to aid you during the process of preparing meals for your vegan guests:

Vegan? What does that entail then?
There is much confusion between vegan and vegetarianism – they are not the same. While a vegetarian usually steers clear of all fish and meat products, vegans avoid all animal AND the by-products as well. Meat by-products include most cheese and dairy items. Any item that comes from an animal must be left out when preparing food for vegans.

Preparation
Whether fixing one meal or 12, fixing food for vegans needs » Read more: Preparing Food For Vegan Guests

John Salley Keynotes Detroit-area VegFest April 26

April 4th, 2009

Vegetarian tastefest & expo promotes meatless, earth-friendly diet.

Royal Oak, MI (PRWEB) April 4, 2009 — NBA champion, TV/film personality and devoted vegan John Salley will give the keynote address at this year’s VegFest, taking place April 26 at Ferndale High School. The annual vegetarian tastefest and expo formerly known as the Great American Meatout is hosted by VegMichigan, the state’s largest vegetarian group, and features food from local restaurants, lectures, cooking and raw food demonstrations, exhibitors, free samples, literature and more, all designed to promote the health, environmental and ethical benefits of a plant-based diet.

Major sponsors include Whole Foods Market, 93.9 FM The River, Natural Awakenings magazine and the Medicine Cabinet Pharmacy.

Salley, who helped lead the Detroit Pistons, Chicago Bulls and L.A. Lakers to NBA championships, has for the past seven years hosted the Emmy-nominated “Best Damn Sports Show Period” on Fox Sports Net and has appeared in a number of films, including the current “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” He is also vegan–meaning he neither eats nor uses any animal products–and passionately believes that this diet choice improved » Read more: John Salley Keynotes Detroit-area VegFest April 26

Becoming Vegan

Archive for April, 2009

vegan cooking – Vegan Cooking – What to Eat When There is No Meat

Recommended Reading

veganism – How To Really Save Planet Earth: A Test About Al Gore by Jeff Popick

Recommended Reading

vegan lifestyle – Beginning a raw vegan lifestyle…? – Yahoo! Answers

Recommended Reading

eating vegan – The Dark Side of Vegetarianism

Recommended Reading

Latest vegan eating news – Vegan diet helps firefighters

Recommended Reading

Eating for the Earth

Recommended Reading

A Tasty way to Do the Raw Food Vegan Diet

Recommended Reading

Preparing Food For Vegan Guests

Recommended Reading

John Salley Keynotes Detroit-area VegFest April 26

Recommended Reading

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