Ve-can Do It!!!

This is the fourth, and final, installment of Naughty Nutrition Does National Nutrition Month by partaking in a new diet. For this final week I am trying out the vegan diet. A vegan diet is more of a lifestyle choice and there is no shortage of them here in Madison. A vegan diet is also a suggested medical nutrition therapy for arthritis. However, it is not an official medical nutrition therapy seeing as the evidence that suggests it is more anecdotal than scientific. One theory is that people lose weight on the vegan diet and when people lose weight there is less pressure on the joints. It could also be that vegan diets can be higher in omega-3 fatty acids, which can produce an anti-inflammatory response.

People on the vegan diet not only do not eat any animal flesh, but no animal products either. These animal products include eggs, milk, cheese, and even honey. You read that right, bees are spared the anguish of having their honey stolen from them. I am pretty confident though that a bee cannot tell the difference between a vegan and an omnivore. Vegans are probably stung by bees just as much as people who do eat honey. Unless of course the vegan is wearing pachouli, then everything with a sense of smell in a 100-yard radius stays as far away as possible.

What does one eat on a vegan diet? Fortunately the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans come to the rescue with recommendations. The guidelines do eliminate eggs, milk, and milk products. Similar to the lacto-ovo vegetarian diet, nuts and seeds, soy products, and beans and peas are the main sources of protein. Instead of milk, it is suggested that one consumes calcium-fortified plant based beverages. These include soy, almond, and rice milks. It is also recommended that people on a vegan diet take a supplement containing vitamin B12. This is because B12 is produces by microbes in the gut of animals. When you consume other animals and their products, you get some B12 from them. If B12 is eliminated from one's diet it can lead to neurological disorders. Fortunately these issues can be prevented and corrected by simply taking a B12 supplement. You may also want to take an iron supplement as well just to ensure you are receiving adequate nutrition.

Starting with where I usually start my week, we'll begin at the grocery store. I was in power grocery shopping mode, determined to get of the store in record time. However, my impending vegan-ism provided me with enough hurdles to ensure I wouldn't be out of there in a reasonable amount of time. I really only spent an extra 15 minutes there, but the greatest obstacle was food labels. I found that some frozen meals in the organic and natural food section were kind enough to put "Ingredients (Vegan):" on their labels. Now had I not been in the habit of reading labels in reverse (i.e. from the end to the beginning) as a random form of amusement, that would have saved me some time. I also ended up purchasing three different types of milk because I was unsure of which type would suit my fancy... or could tolerate. As for the total bill, it was once again about $20 more than my usual bill. For someone trying to avoid buying a ton of ibuprofen or other anti-inflammatory prescriptions, a vegan diet may not only save them money, but the stomach and intestinal distress those drugs may cause as well.

Day one was a little rough for me, as I have never used soy milk for more than on cereal before. I first tried 8th Continent Light Vanilla Soy Milk. I attempted to get myself excited about trying soy milk by telling myself that it was going to be better than cow's milk. Just awesome. At first it tasted a little bit like suntan lotion, as I drank more I found that it was better to follow each gulp with food or to hold my breath until after I had finished drinking. After I completed my first glass I thought that maybe soy milk was an acquired taste, maybe at lunch it would better. Nope, not better. Fortunately I also purchased Chocolate Silk, which was way better than the vanilla soy and I had that with dinner. Then I decided to have a gluten free Choco Loco bar for dessert, the chocolate from the bar negated the taste of the chocolate in the soy milk leaving me with just a soy milk taste. The next day I decided to make a smoothie with the soy milk in order to make it tolerable. This proved to be the best way to disguise the soy milk's taste.

On day two I went to dinner with a friend. I did my research beforehand and we decided to go to Monty's Blue Plate Diner, which is known for it's vegetarian options. According to their website, they had a vegan menu as well. I was little nervous because all their vegan options seemed to include tempeh. Tempeh is a fermented soy product, meaning it's soy beans held together by mold. Kind of like the blue cheese of soy. I had only tried it once prior to this in a food science class when we made chili with it. I wasn't a fan then and was hoping that the amount of seasonings I saw on the menu in the TNT BLT would fool me. Then our waiter came along and suggested a different tempeh containing sandwich. It didn't have any special seasonings, the tempeh was simply pan-fried with mushrooms and onions. I decided to put on my big girl pants and go for it. It was at that point that I decided I would opt for the waffle fries as well. He mentioned that they may contain animal products and he would go check for me. I did not want to be that pain in the butt customer that had my waiter running to the kitchen every time I had a question, so I confided in him that I wasn't really vegan. So we decided that waffle fries were a safe vegan food.

When the waiter came back with my sandwich he told me he was tempted to have them put the provolone cheese on it and say it was his mistake. The sandwich was a little intimidating at first glance. Like most restaurant sandwiches it was so full with fillings that the hoagie bun wouldn't close. This meant I would have to dare to eat tempeh not hidden in bread and other ingredients. The sandwich looked a lot like a philly cheesesteak minus the cheese; I bet it would have been awesome with the cheese on it. My fork managed to stab one lone piece of tempeh about three bites in. I took a deep breath and went for it. This tempeh tasted way better than the the tempeh I had in the chili. It was a little savory, with a slight meaty taste to it. I finished my entire sandwich and was still hungry. The other thing that Monty's is known for are their pies. Low and behold, they did have some vegan pies on their menu. Who was I not to try one of these pies out. I opted for the apple pie and by the time I finished it I felt full for the first time in over a week.

Later in the week I tried a few other products to get my calcium in with. Now I could not have the soy cheese because it contained casein, which is a milk byproduct. I was somewhat disappointed but to be honest I knew it just wouldn't be the same. Who really wants a cheese made from soy anyway? I did try a soy yogurt though. Here is where being vegan got a little tricky. I didn't find much of anything about vegans not containing microorganisms, like cultures in yogurt or alcoholic beverages. Probably because vegans wouldn't be able to move without killing or hurting these little bugs. The soy yogurt I bought was made with soy products, but the cultures used in the yogurt were grown in milk. I decided that the bugs used to make the yogurt only used the milk to grow on (because microorganisms aren't vegan) and it was okay to eat the yogurt. This proved to be a wise decision because the soy yogurt wasn't bad and it then cut out one glass of soy milk for that day. Looking at the nutrition label of soy products, most of them are full of sugar. I'm going to assume that this is done to make them tolerable. I tried a chai latte with soy milk as another option to get my soy milk in, but it didn't work. The combination of the tea and the soy milk made my chai latte taste more like dirt than usual. I also tried almond milk after I ran out of soy milk. I heard from numerous people about how great almond milk was. I tried it once, but I had made the fatal mistake of buying the unsweetened version. Almond milk also contained a ton of sugar and was really low in protein, which is probably why it doesn't leave you feeling satiated after drinking it. The almond milk wasn't bad alone, but it was even better when I mixed it with the chocolate soy milk.

When I first started telling people about this nutrition experiment, one person asked how my boyfriend felt about all this. I hadn't really thought about it until that point. What kind of person really puts these types of limits on themselves? Why would someone purposely restrict what types of foods they could eat? Out of the numerous vegans I have known, I have only met one of two that were actually pleasant. Most of them just question why you eat what you do and get all high and mighty about how moral they are. Around Madison there are billboards and ads on buses for simplyvegan.net, which for some reason utterly annoy me. Which probably makes this all the more perplexing on why I would do such a thing. I apologized in advance to the people I normally come in contact with that I may not be the most pleasant person to be around the last week of the month. But you know what? I haven't been too bitter or crabby this last week. The only time I started to get a little bitter was when I watched a show about BBQ and admittedly that was my fault. In fact I was joking around about it with people, albeit these were really bad jokes that one's uncle might make. For example, when I was telling my coworkers my theory about getting myself excited soy yogurt I told them it was "going to be soy good!" (Heck, just take a look at the title for this post.) From this I gathered that my good mood and lame jokes were being caused by the fact I was hungry and becoming delusional.

Being vegan probably was not the cause, but I needed to blame it for something.