Diets for Vegans

Veganism is a way of life. Vegans won't exploit animals in any way and don't support cruelty to animals, which means that vegans won't eat animals or use them for clothing. Vegans differ from vegetarians by not eating products that come from animals, such as eggs or milk. Vegans only eat plant-based foods. If you, as the mother of your family, are vegan, chances are the whole family adopts this lifestyle, too. To get the proper nutrients, vegan families have to know about the types of food available for them.

Plan Well
As long as you plan well, you can safely eat a vegan diet during pregnancy, breastfeeding, infancy, childhood and adolescence, according to KidsHealth. In fact, if done properly, a vegan diet can be advantageous to a meat-eating one because of lower levels of fat and cholesterol and higher levels of fiber and antioxidants. However, all restrictive diets do pose a difficulty in getting the proper nutrients for your body. Following a vegan diet doesn't allow you to get enough vitamin B-12, for example, which you get in animal products. Vegans lack calcium in their diet, too.

What to Eat
What you need to focus on as a vegan is to get enough vitamin B12 for your red blood cells. You can get this through fortified soy products, enriched breakfast cereals, nutritional yeast or from supplements, according to KidsHealth. You need calcium for bone strength, which you can get from dark green vegetables, sesame seeds, red and white beans, almonds, figs, blackstrap molasses and fortified juice. Vegans should also get vitamin D to help absorb calcium. Getting out in the sun is one way to get vitamin D; other ways are through fortified soy milk or rice milk. Vegans can get protein through legumes, nuts and seeds; iron from chickpeas and tofu; zinc from whole-grain breads, wheat germ and tahini and riboflavin from mushrooms, sweet potatoes and broccoli. Because you don't eat fish or eggs if you are vegan, you lack omega-3 fatty acids; take supplements to make up for that.

Food Pyramid
Vegans have a food pyramid that MayoClinic.com recommends. The top of the pyramid are fats, and you need two servings a day. Next are fruits, which are also two servings a day. You need four servings of vegetables, which make the third rung of the pyramid. Legumes, nuts and other protein-rich foods make up the fourth rung. You need five servings per day of protein. Grains make up the bottom of the pyramid. You need six servings of grain per day.

Feeding Your Baby
Make sure that your baby gets enough calories. One way is to make your cereals thick rather than thin. Also, add some vegetable oil to the grains to increase the calories, suggests the Vegan Society. Soya bean oil or canola oil are better than sunflower, safflower or corn oils. Give your baby mashed lentils, mung beans or chickpeas and stir in some black molasses. Provide tofu prepared with calcium salt. This contains more calcium than cow's milk, according to the Vegan Society.

School
You'll probably have to pack lunches for your children when they go to school, but some schools provide vegetarian options. The Vegan Society suggests that you prepare your children by talking to them about why your family is vegan so that your children can answer the questions their classmates invariably ask. Some kids may find it difficult to be different, while others embrace the idea.

Source : Modern Mom Food

UN Urges Global Move to Meat and Dairy-free Diet

Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change, UN report says

An cattle ranch in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The UN says agriculture is on a par with
fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth.

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products."

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: "Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels."

The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern, former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions.

The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said.

Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products - livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides."

Both energy and agriculture need to be "decoupled" from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.

Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: "Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."

The panel, which drew on numerous studies including the Millennium ecosystem assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for governments around the world: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers, over-exploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational exposure to particulate matter.

Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, says the report, which has been launched to coincide with UN World Environment day on Saturday.

Last year the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said that food production would have to increase globally by 70% by 2050 to feed the world's surging population. The panel says that efficiency gains in agriculture will be overwhelmed by the expected population growth.

Prof Hertwich, who is also the director of the industrial ecology programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that developing countries – where much of this population growth will take place – must not follow the western world's pattern of increasing consumption: "Developing countries should not follow our model. But it's up to us to develop the technologies in, say, renewable energy or irrigation methods."

Source : The Guardian

Eating Less Meat Could Save 45,000 Lives a Year, Experts Claim

Cutting meat consumption to 210g a week would hugely reduce deaths from heart disease and cancer, research shows.

Processed meat such as ham is particularly bad for health, says the FoE report.

More than 45,000 lives a year could be saved if everyone began eating meat no more than two or three times a week, health experts and Friends of the Earth claim today.

Widespread switching to low-meat diets would stop 31,000 people dying early from heart disease, 9,000 from cancer and 5,000 from strokes, according to new analysis of British eating habits by public health expert Dr Mike Rayner contained in an FoE report.

Dramatically reduced meat consumption would also save the NHS £1.2bn and help reduce climate change and deforestation in South America, where rainforests are being chopped down to grow animal feed and graze cows which are exported to Europe, the report states.

Eating too much meat, particularly processed meat, is bad for health because doing so can involve consuming more fat, saturated fat or salt than official guidelines recommend, the FoE say.

They do not advocate shunning meat altogether, but do urge people to eat meat no more than two or three times a week, with total weekly intake not exceeding about 210g – the equivalent of half a sausage a day. Average weekly intake at the moment is between seven and 10 70g portions.

Doing so would save 45,361 lives a year, according to research by Rayner and his colleagues in the British Heart Foundation health promotion research group at Oxford University.

They calculated that a switch to eating meat a maximum of five times a week would prevent 32,352 deaths, but another 2,509 people a year will die by 2050 if current meat consumption patterns continue. There are currently 228,000 deaths a year from three major conditions in whichfood intake plays a key role: heart disease, strokes or diet-related cancers, such as bowel cancer.

"We don't need to go vegetarian to look after ourselves and our planet, but we do need to cut down on meat," said Craig Bennett, FoE's director of policy and campaigns. "While the government has ignored the environmental aspect of high meat and dairy consumption, it can't ignore the lives that would be saved by switching to less and better meat."

Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners, agreed: "People shouldn't stop eating meat but they should eat less meat, especially processed meat, due to their salt and saturated fat content, and eat more fruit and vegetables."

Rachel Thompson, deputy head of science at the World Cancer Research Fund,, which has publicised the potential cancer risk of eating a lot of meat, said: "These figures add weight to what we have been saying about red and processed meat – that there is convincing evidence they increase the risk of developing bowel cancer, the third most common cancer in the UK. WCRF recommends eating no more than 500g of cooked red meat per week and to avoid eating processed meat – such as bacon, ham and salami."

Meat producers criticised the report. "The vast majority of consumers eat less than average recommendations of red meat already," said Chris Lamb of BPEX, which represents 20,000 pork producers in England. "It is over-simplistic to say that changing one element of the diet can have such a dramatic result. Red meat has a valuable role to play as part of a healthy, balanced diet."

Jen Elford, of the Vegetarian Society, added: "I find myself wondering why an organisation as courageous as Friends of the Earth can't bring itself to recommend a vegetarian diet. Of course less meat is better than more, but we can't address the scale of the environmental and health problems facing society without a wholesale shift away from animal protein."

Source : The Guardian

Ohio Dairy Farm Brutality

On September 24, 2010, Billy Joe Gregg, Jr., a worker at Conklin Dairy Farms caught on hidden camera during a Mercy For Animals investigation maliciously abusing cows and calves, pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of cruelty to animals.

Gregg was sentenced to eight months in jail, ordered to pay a $1,000 fine, and is barred from contact with animals for three years. Gregg must also receive counseling through a program that specializes in treating individuals involved in animal abuse cases.

Gregg's arrest and conviction stem from chilling undercover footage recorded during a Mercy For Animals investigation earlier this year at Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City, Ohio.

During a four-week investigation in April and May, MFA's investigator documented farm workers:

• Violently punching young calves in the face, body slamming them to the ground, and pulling and throwing them by their ears

• Routinely using pitchforks to stab cows in the face, legs and stomach

• Kicking "downed" cows (those too injured to stand) in the face and neck – abuse carried out and encouraged by the farm's owner

• Maliciously beating restrained cows in the face with crowbars – some attacks involving over 40 blows to the head

• Twisting cows' tails until the bones snapped

• Punching cows' udders

• Bragging about stabbing, dragging, shooting, breaking bones, and beating cows and calves to death

After viewing the footage, Dr. Bernard Rollin, Distinguished Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, stated: ""This is probably the most gratuitous, sustained, sadistic animal abuse I have ever seen. The video depicts calculated, deliberate cruelty, based not on momentary rage but on taking pleasure through causing pain to cows and calves who are defenseless.""

Sadly, cruelty to farmed animals in Ohio – no matter how egregious – is classified as a mere misdemeanor. Ohio has some of the weakest animal protection laws in the nation – ranking 43rd out of all 50 states. Further, no federal laws provide protection for farmed animals during their lives on the farm. Such inadequate state laws and the absence of federal laws lead to rampant abuse.

The deplorable conditions uncovered at Conklin Dairy Farms further highlight the reality that animal agriculture cannot be trusted to self-regulate and that meaningful federal and state law must be implemented and strengthened to prevent egregious cruelty to farmed animals.

"Gregg's punishment is a slap on the wrist compared to the unimaginable suffering endured by the animals who were victims of his malicious abuse," says MFA's Executive Director, Nathan Runkle. ""It's an outrage that in Ohio it's a mere misdemeanor to sadistically punch, beat and stab farmed animals, break their bones and otherwise torture them. This case should serve as a wake-up call to all compassionate citizens that Ohio must do more to strengthen its animal cruelty laws.""

Although many of the abuses documented at Conklin Dairy Farms are expressions of Gregg's sadistic pathology, numerous MFA undercover investigations at dairy farms, pig farms, egg farms, hatcheries and slaughterhouses have revealed that violence and abuse to farmed animals – whether malicious or institutionalized – run rampant nationwide.

Compassionate consumers can end their direct financial support of farmed animal abuse by rejecting dairy, and other animal products, and adopting a vegan diet.

Source: http://www.mercyforanimals.org/ohdairy/

4 Ways to Replace Eggs in Your Diet

1. Tofu

2. Bananas, Applesauce, Pumpkin

As Tania Asnes tells us, these fruity substitutes are best for use in denser baked goods like loaves to create egg-and-oil-free treats. "Make sure to use a light hand when choosing applesauce and banana, since in large amounts they can make a recipe mushy, says Asnes. "Pumpkin, on the other hand, can create a very dense loaf."

3. Flax Seeds

Here's the deal, as explained by Post Punk Kitchen:

How to use it: 1 Tablespoon flax seeds plus 3 Tablespoons water replaces one egg. Finely grind 1 tablespoon whole flaxseeds in a blender or coffee grinder, or use 2 1/2 tablespoons pre-ground flaxseeds. Transfer to a bowl and beat in 3 tablespoons of water using a whisk or fork. It will become very gooey and gelatinous, much like an egg white. In some recipes, you can leave the ground flax in the blender and add the other wet ingredients to it, thus saving you the extra step of the bowl.

When it works best: Flax seeds have a distinct earthy granola taste. It tastes best and works very well in things like pancakes, and whole grain items, such as bran muffins and corn muffins. It is perfect for oatmeal cookies, and the texture works for cookies in general, although the taste may be too pronounced for some. Chocolate cake-y recipes have mixed results, I would recommend only using one portion flax-egg in those, because the taste can be overpowering.

Tips: Always store ground flaxseeds in the freezer because they are highly perishable. This mixture is not only an excellent replacement for eggs, it also contributes vital omega-3 fatty acids.

4. Egg "Replacer"

The most commonly used brand is Ener-G, which "mimics what eggs do in recipes, Greatly simplifies baking for people who cannot use eggs. It replaces egg whites as well as egg yolks in baking."

Read More : 4 Reasons to Avoid Eating Eggs

4 Reasons to Avoid Eating Eggs

Have you ever realized there's no such thing as a vegan refrigerator? Try opening the nearest fridge and you'll find an egg rack along with a clearly marked butter tray and meat drawer. Eating animals and animal by-products is not just accepted, it's expected. As I've documented here several times, what's expected is not always grounded in reality.

4 Reasons to Avoid Eggs

1. Chicken Abuse

Most people don't know this, but chicken are inquisitive and intelligent animals. Chicken abuse not only happens in the U.S., it happens all over the world.

2. The Free Range Myth

As the good folks at Compassionate Over Killing explain: "The popular myth that 'free-range' egg-laying hens enjoy fresh grass, bask in the sunlight, scratch the earth, sit on their nests, and engage in other natural habits is often just that: a myth. In many commercial 'free-range egg farms, hens are crowded inside windowless sheds with little more than a single, narrow exit leading to an enclosure, too small to accommodate all of the birds at once. Both battery cage and 'free-range' egg hatcheries kill all male chicks shortly after birth. Since male chicks cannot lay eggs and are different breeds than those chickens raised for meat, they are of no use to the egg industry. Standard killing methods, even among 'free-range' producers, include grinding male chicks alive or throwing them into trash bags and leaving them to suffocate."

3. The Protein Myth

How much protein do you think we need? The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition says 2.5% of our daily calories should come from protein. According to the World Health Organization, it's about 5%. How does that work out in grams? A lot lower than the US average of 100 grams a day, that's for sure. "To consume a diet that contains enough, but not too much, protein, simply replace animal products with grains, vegetables, legumes (peas, beans, and lentils), and fruits," clarifies the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine. As long as one is eating a variety of plant foods in sufficient quantity to maintain one's weight, the body gets plenty of protein."

4. Cholesterol

Check this:

• Rise in blood cholesterol level from consuming one egg per day: 12%
• Associated rise in heart attack risk from consuming one egg per day: 24%
• Risk of death by heart attack for average American male: 50%
• Risk of death by heart attack for average vegan: 4%

Read More : 4 Ways to Replace Eggs in Your Diet

Physical Benefits of Going Vegan

In addition to good nutrition and disease prevention, eating vegan also provides many physical benefits. Find out how a vegan diet makes your body stronger, more attractive, and more energetic.

1. Body Mass Index. Several population studies show that a diet without meat leads to lower BMIs–usually an indicator of a healthy weight and lack of fat on the body.
2. Weight loss. A healthy weight loss is a typical result of a smart vegan diet. Eating vegan eliminates most of the unhealthy foods that tend to cause weight issues. Read more about weight loss and a vegan diet here.
3. Energy. When following a healthy vegan diet, you will find your energy is much higher. This blog post in Happy Healthy Long Life describes how NFL tight-endTony Gonzalez started eating vegan and gained energy–while playing football.
4. Healthy skin. The nuts and vitamins A and E from vegetables play a big role in healthy skin, so vegans will usually have good skin health. Many people who switch to a vegan diet will notice a remarkable reduction in blemishes as well.
5. Longer life. Several studies indicate that those following a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle live an average of three to six years longer than those who do not.
6. Body odor. Eliminating dairy and red meat from the diet significantly reduces body odor. Going vegan means smelling better.
7. Bad breath. Vegans frequently experience a reduction in bad breath. Imagine waking up in the morning and not having morning breath.
8. Hair. Many who follow vegan diets report that their hair becomes stronger, has more body, and looks healthier.
9. Nails. Healthy vegan diets are also responsible for much stronger, healthier nails. Nail health is said to be an indicator of overall health.
10. PMS. When switching to a vegan diet, many women tell how PMS symptoms become much less intense or disappear altogether. The elimination of dairy is thought to help with those suffering with PMS.
11. Migraines. Migraine suffers who go on vegan diets frequently discover relief from their migraines. Read more about the food-migraine connection in this article.
12. Allergies. Reduction in dairy, meat, and eggs is often tied to alleviation of allergy symptoms. Many vegans report much fewer runny noses and congestion problems.