Chicken Nuggets are made with pink goo- fact or fiction?

Probably most of you by now have seen the picture of pick goo coming out of a silver machine claiming to be what chicken nuggets are made of.

(pause)...ahem...how to avoid writing this post without feeling nauseous?...not sure if it can be done.

Anyway, actual Chicken McNuggets are actually made with white meat just so you know.
I came across this lovely post concerning what is true and what is not about the "pink goo claim". I love how they ended with a video from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution show - I highly recommend watching it (and other clips availabel from that show on YouTube.

American Dietetic Association Position on Vegetarianism

I picked up a copy of a 2010 issue of Vegetarian Journal, which is published in Baltimore, Maryland. This issue had enough vegan content to satisfy me. I am constantly being pleasantly surprised that the "vegetarian" magazines I pick up are often have more vegan friendly content than just being primarily vegetarian. My favorite section of this magazine is called Scientific Update: A review of recent scientific papers related to vegetarianism, as I never get tired of hearing about all the health benefits and good reasons to be vegan. One of the pieces talked about The American Dietetic Associations 2009 position on vegetarian diets. There was a link to the complete position paper at the bottom of the piece but It didn't seem to work, so I am just going to pass on the quote that they published, as it is pretty good on it's own. "...appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatments of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy,lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."

What an excellent position! However, take note of the words "appropriately planned" and "well-planned" - so important that they had to mention it twice. A lazy vegan diet lacking in nutrients is not healthy and eating that way not only won't give you any health benefits, but if you are vegan because of moral issue, you are certainly not doing anything for "the cause" for the general public to see such a sickly representative.

Vegan Groceries Revisited

Something has been bugging me. I blogged yesterday about a website that listed some (mostly) processed foods that were vegan.

When you visit the homepage, you are greeted with a perky little write-up that begins with the following sentence. “Being vegan doesn't mean you have to eat wheatgrass and alfalfa sprouts.” My thought as I read this was, “Why wouldn’t you want to eat wheatgrass and alfalfa sprouts?” I am not saying I would want to eat these things all day every day, but they are two very healthy choices that would be a great addition to a healthy diet. I personally didn’t think a sandwich was quite complete without alfalfa sprouts long before I was vegan or had a relatively healthy diet.

Am I alone, or in the minority, of wanting foods that are as natural as possible, that are not made with chemicals, that are going to be the best for my body and let my body perform and function at its most optimal level? Yeppers, I am the first to admit that I sometimes many times want something that I absolutely know is not good for me. I will search the house on occasion to find that bag of chips or sugary something that someone else missed. I am, however, not going to put those kinds of things on my grocery lists or aspire to incorporate them into my diet on purpose. When I do indulge in those things I feel like I have let my body down and many times eating foods like that zaps some of my energy and happiness too.

Vegan Grocery Hunt

I found a pretty neat website ( I Can’t Believe It’s Vegan!” ) that lists foods that are vegan from an assortment of categories. It is nice, especially for beginning vegans, to have a place to look and find familiar foods that you know are going to not have animal products in them. It is also good for not-so-beginner vegans to just know a list of convenience foods that can be purchased when you are in a hurry (or for non-vegan husbands to pick up on their way home who do not know healthy food lingo). I post the link for those reasons. However, most of the foods are processed gunk, likely using or containing a really gross amount of chemicals, so please take the list with a grain of salt and make sure you don’t eat these foods too often.

Are you a Healthy Vegan/Vegetarian?

First of all, hello. I have been away a while. I went to Texas on a mission trip with my oldest daughter to do some construction work for some families in need. This is also the busy time of year with my business. I should have some frequent posting going on now though.

I have read quite a few articles in the last months about people who become vegan, but don't know how to do it healthily. In these cases, being vegan is possibly worse for one's body than actually eating meat/dairy/eggs, as likely those foods were replaced with processed junk and a billion chemicals.

This article is from a lady who is not a vegetarian, but she sure has some good things to say about nutrition and how a healthy, balanced diet, eating natural foods helped her body recover from a heartbreaking diagnosis.

She also has a blog called Saving Naturally about eating and living healthy on a budget.

Thrive (with a plant-based diet)

Planet Organic is our local organic food store. I was shopping there a couple weeks ago and they had samples available of Vega Shake and Go Smoothie, created by Brendan Brazier. One serving is supposed to be 2 tbsp, and all you need to do is add some water, shake, and drink. That little serving has 3g of dietary fibre, 11g protein, 4% of your daily calcium, 30% of your daily iron, 2500 mg of omega 3-6-9 and 1 billion probiotic cultures. Nice.

I have been adding it to my blender smoothies instead of mixing it with water. it takes some of the pressure off to come up with foods to eat that will give me all that this smoothie does.

Brendan Brazier is a heavy-duty marathon runner and developed his vega drinks over a period of about 15 years while trying to reach peak body performance as an athlete, while maintaining a plant-based diet.

I am currently reading his book, Thrive, which I first heard about in Alicia Silverstone's book, The Kind Diet. I am really intrigued by the fact that Brendan began eating a plant based diet at the age of 15. My main thoughts at age 15 involved boys, more boys, a few more boys, maybe some alcohol, and scattered with thoughts of music. I long to have been a deep and mature teen who knew where they were going and had their priorities straight. I cannot even imagine being in that frame of mind back then, and so I am always interested in stories of people who accomplish things at young ages.

I am only about a third of the way through Thrive, but I loved this analogy of coffee drinkers so much that I must share it here.

I view coffee drinking as a form of credit, similar to shopping with a credit card. You get energy now that you don't actually have, then you pay for it later. When the 'bill' comes it might keep you down for a few days (unless you drink more coffee to put off the inevitable - kind of like paying off one credit card with another). You'll most likely pay a high interest rate as well, needing more time to recover than if energy were not 'borrowed'.(Thrive, Brendan Brazier, page 29)

Craving sweets?

Many of the articles and books I have been reading about vegetarian/veganism have talked about "detox" and craving the foods you are trying eliminate. I haven't experienced any of this, which has really been surprising for me as in the past I ate a lot of food just for the action of putting food in my mouth and had absolutely no willpower if anyone left sweets or similar things around the house. I have been a very good girl.

I replicated the table below(taken from the June 2009 issue of Natural Solutions Magazine), which has a healthy solution for each of the common craving foods. I know it has meat on it, but there is at least one vegan solution in every category.

Sorry about the weird space between this and the table- can't figure out why that happened. If anyone knows, please send me a note.

If You Crave:	What you Really Need is:	Eat the Healthy Source Instead:
Sweets	Chromium Carbon Phosphorus Sulfur Tryptophan	Broccoli, grapes, cheese, dried beans, chicken Fresh fruits Chicken, beef, liver, poultry, fish, eggs, nuts Cranberries, horseradish, cruciferous veggies, kale, cabbage Cheese, liver, lamb, raisins, sweet potato, spinach
Chocolate	Magnesium	Raw nuts and seeds, legumes, fruit
Salty foods	Chloride	Raw goat milk, fish, unrefined sea salt
Soda and carbonated drinks	Calcium	Mustard and turnip greens, broccoli, kale, legumes, cheese, sesame

Daily Doses

After my doctor visit yesterday, I spent some time last night looking up daily food requirements and how to achieve them. Protein requirements are pretty hard to judge from one calculation, but the method I like best is to multiply 0.4 x your weight in lbs to get your recommended daily protein requirement.

I am 130 lbs, so I should need about 52g. Some other important daily requirements are 1000-1200 mg calcium, 15 mg iron, 2 mcg B12, 1.3mg riboflavin, 5-10 mcg vitamin D, and 12 mcg zinc. All of these numbers were taken from The Vegan Sourcebook and apply to women only. Men are slightly higher in all numbers (except iron is lower- 10mg). I figured out that as long as I make sure to eat a cup of nuts and seeds and a cup of beans every day, I will have my iron and protein mostly covered. Almonds, flax seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkins seeds and some walnuts thrown in to cover some omega 3, are pretty much the "super seeds" as far as I can gather from the amount and variety of "good stuff" that they carry (especially those sesame seeds with their amazing calcium content).

It looks like I should also make sure that I continue to have my daily cereal with my milk substitute of choice - for me this is Ryza brown rice milk - as that milk just has all sorts of good stuff in it that I might not get much of elsewhere. It also looks like eating Bran Flakes or Raisin Bran as my cereal will give me good doses of B12, vitamin D, zinc and iron, but I have yet to actually look at the nutrition labels for these cereals and confirm this.

One problem that I might have is getting all the calcium I need. My Ryza milk will give me about 300mg per cup, which is very good. I usually have a pretty big bowl of cereal in the morning so it is possible that I might be getting 2 cups of milk, but I need to remember to measure so that I know for sure because the difference between 300 and 600 mg is too big to just let go. My one cup of beans per day should add 70-100 mg to my total. If almonds and sesame seeds are part of my cup of nuts/seeds, I should get about 150mg from that. This still leaves me with a short fall. Blackstrap molasses has 187 mg per tablespoon (and also is a good source of iron). I am going to see about adding this wherever possible to my daily foods (some ideas, but don't know if they will all work/are all appropriate: smoothies, desserts, stirfrys?, beans). Raisins and oranges have a small amount of calcium (56 mg for an orange, 2/3 cup raisins have 53 mg), so we will try adding those in as regular snacks.
I'm off to eat some nuts and an orange.

Doctor's Orders

I went to the doctor today for my very first physical. I come from a small town and I don't think anyone really did that sort of thing, but my hubby is a city boy and he has been very concerned that I have one done. My doctor said that my last bloodwork ( a couple years ago) showed fairly low iron levels. I have only been eating mostly vegan for a month, so it will be very interesting just to see how my levels are different from back then to now. I am also getting bloodwork done again in about 3 months so that I can get the diabetes and cholesterol tests as well (which you need to fast for 12 hours for), so it will also be interesting to see which things change between now and three months from now.

The Kind Diet

My favorite part of this book was a section where Alicia talks about the ways you can get your nutrients from a vegan diet. I am still not sure that this is the way I will be going, but it was a real eye-opener for me to read that you can get every single nutrient that your body needs from a plant-based diet (including calcium, omega 3s, and iron).

Today I found a wikipedia entry on vegetarianism that has a lot of the same information.