The vegan shopping list

What foods do you buy to safeguard body composition and health whilst following a vegan diet?

Where is the steak? My kitchen top after a vegan food shop

I’m currently following a flexitarian diet. It’s been, uh, interesting.

Flexitarian means you eat as few animal products as possible so, meat once a week or once a month depending on how hardcore you are. In practice I’ve been eating only vegetable based products at home and when eating out I go with meat choices – this makes life a lot easier as vegans are so poorly catered for in restaurants.

However, given the fact that if you go vegan you’re not going to be eating a lot of food we were (arguable) designed to eat, what do we do to guard against nutritional deficiencies? By structuring our diet choices and looking at macronutrients and the sources and types of micronutrients that we’re getting from our diet we can try to cover the bases and work from there.

Missing Micronutrients

There’s a few things that we get from meat, also present in dairy and eggs, that are essential for health. The distinction you have to make here is ‘can we NOT get it from a vegan diet‘ or can ‘we not get it EASILY from the vegan diet‘.

IRON is of course an obvious one, in fact most people (especially men) who eat meat get more than enough iron from their diet, this is because ‘heam’ iron is very easily absorbed by the body. ‘Non heam’ iron, the type you find in vegetable matter, is less readily absorbed by the body but you can increase the absorbency by consuming combination such as iron containing foods with vitamin C containing foods.

B12 is another obvious target, sourcing this vitamin from a vegetable based diet is very difficult although some used products are available that to contain it I prefer people supplement with a good quality B12 supplement.

Fats, fats, fats.

‘I thought that fat from meat was bad for health?’

Right for those not in the know; ‘fat’ is actually a collective name for a big glass of different compounds.  It easy to get enough fat in your diet when subsisting solely on plant products but you need certain varieties in your diet to maintain health, and on a vegan diet there are two fats you should pay particular attention to:

Saturated fat

saturated fat from products like coconut oil are actually quite a beneficial additive to the daily diet and like any other macronutrient as long as you eat them in reasonable quantities, not a problem. To be more specific lauric acid is what we’re talking about here. Coconut oil is as I say a great source and a very good choice for cooking with.

Omega-3 fat

Grains, seeds and the like carry with them reasonable quantities of poly unsaturated fatty acids (pufa) but it’s mostly 0mega-6 fat so no need to worry about sources of that, however there are two problems 1) if you’re eating a western style diet you are probably getting too much omega-6 already and 2)  omega-3 is a little bit more difficult to get hold of. True nuts like walnuts are high in omega-3 however they still carry omega-6 so it might be worth looking at supplement products like flaxseed or chia seed oil which really help tip the balance a little further back in the direction of omega-3 of n-3 fats as they are sometimes known. Check my article on pufa/n-3 choices HERE. More info on omega-3 balance HERE. The O3 containing foods provide the raw material we can used to construct or own types of speciality fatty acids.

Of specific worry is the pufa DHA which we might normally get from fish. Men in particular seem to be less able to make this fatty acids from the raw materials above and it is widely used in our bodys. Sourcing an aquatic veg DHA supplement may be a bonus for some,

The protein problem

Plant matter is, generally, a fairly rubbish source of protein.

When you eat concentrated sources of protein (like lean meat) not are you getting the protein without loading up on either carbs or fat (or both) but also you’re changing the way that you body uses the food and also the way it behaves. Protein stimulates the release of glucagon in the body, this is the antagonist hormone to insulin. We all know that chronically elevated insulin levels are bad, so in these carb heavy times a little glucagon wouldn’t go a miss – there is a catch though: you need concentrated protein sources to produce the glucagon.

So, ensuring high quality, concentrated protein sources are included in your diet is something that everybody should do. These include tofu, TVP, seitan (if you tolerate gluten), quorn and supplements like pea and  rice protein.

Sample shopping list

Below is not a complete shopping list, but one to get you started -  covering the bases.

Vegetables

Of course micronutrients and phytonutrients are extremely important, many herbivores actually forget to eat veg! Many vegetarians I have met should actually call themselves ‘grainetarians’.

• garden veg: broccoli, cabbage, savoy, bok choy etc. Cauliflower courgettes, sugar snap peas,  etc etc
• peppers red, green and yellow. Fresh and frozen
• Salad vegetables: baby spinach, lettuce, red and salad onions etc
• preserved veg like kimchi and sauerkraut (very good foods we ignore all too often)
• More nutrient dense, lower GI starchy foods like sweet potato pumpkin (as opposed to white potatoes)

Pulses/beans

Decent sources of fibre but also help to increase ‘background’ or non concentrated protein in our diet

• Mixed beans, bertolli beans etc
• Chick peas, lentils (red, green puy)
• Hummus

Nuts and seeds

• almonds, walnuts, brazils whole and in ‘butter’ form (as opposed to peanuts)
• pumpkin and sunflower seeds
• Chia, flax
• quinoa

Grains

Careful not to overeat grains, it’s easy to do and go for the highest fibre choices you can.

• wholegrain rice
• quinoa (technically a seed)

Seasonings

a much ignored source or very interesting a useful compounds.

• chili, turmeric, herbs, pepper, cumin, cinnamon etc

Other special products

• gluten flour
• Braggs aminos
• Egg replacement powder
• nutritional yeast
• coconut oil

Sample supplement list

• Vit b12
• Flax/chia seed oil
• Rice protein
• pea protein isolate

When you reduce your food choices you have to look at what this means for the different markers of health and adjust things accordingly. Making the most out of the options left to you. The above should help you in the first steps to dialing in your vegan diet.