Get Ready for Veganuary!
Are you joining in with Veganuary? Are you ready to go plant-based?
Here at the NCA Nutrition Clinic, we work with a wide range of eating styles, from meat-lovers right through to 100% plant-based vegans – and all shades in between. Our aim is to provide personalised nutrition support for your health and wellbeing.
The keys to thriving on a vegan diet are knowing where to find the nutrients you need, and including a wide variety of real foods. Switching to a vegan diet filled with processed vegan “alternatives” and convenience foods is just as bad as any junk food diet.
A common pitfall people encounter during Veganuary is not including enough plant-based protein. Meat, eggs, and fish provide us with a balance of proteins well suited to human health. It’s perfectly possible to find plant sources of these proteins too, so long as you include a wide range of pulses, beans, quinoa, chickpeas, nuts, and seeds every day. Some people experience wind and bloating when they start eating more beans and pulses as they contain starches that can be hard to digest. You might find it easier to gradually phase out animal products while gently increasing pulses and beans to allow your digestion time to adapt. Another tip is to soak these foods before eating as this helps breakdown some of the tougher starches.
On a long-term vegan diet, it’s important to consider these key nutrients:
Iron – menstruating women may need to supplement with iron as plant sources are less bioavailable than animal foods. Absorption of non-haem iron (iron from plant sources) can be improved by combining it with vitamin C foods. Good combinations include broccoli with a squeeze of lemon juice, Swiss chard and parsley, a fruit and seed salad with pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and kiwi fruit.
Vitamin D – the main sources of D3 (the most active form of the vitamin) are animal products. Vegans can find some D2 in sun-dried mushrooms, though this isn’t enough to sustain health and supplementation is advisable.
Vitamin B12 – again, the best sources are animal foods. There are small amounts in some plant foods but these forms are not well absorbed so supplementation is advisable.
Omega 3 fats – many plants contain the ‘parent’ omega-3 fat alpha linolenic acid (ALA), but this needs to go through several conversion processes to become the omega-3 fats EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) which are readily found in fish. On a vegan diet it’s important to include plenty of ALA-rich foods each day such as flax oil, ground flaxseeds, hemp oil, pumpkinseed oil, and walnuts.
If you’d like help and guidance with Veganuary, or with optimising your health and wellbeing for 2021 get in touch today to book your nutrition consultations in our friendly supportive teaching clinic.
Blog contributor – Sally Duffin
Sally is Nutrition Course Leader and Clinic Supervisor at the NCA, as well as running Nutrition in York.