Saturday, November 09, 2019

Why Don't I Eat More Vegan Food?

I talked a few posts back about the reasons I'd like to eat more vegan food: health, environment, flavor, adventure. When I wrote about systems for eating, that implied that one reason I wasn't eating more vegan food is that I didn't have a vegan cooking system.

I'm still mulling and brainstorming on that.

Meanwhile, let's look at some of the other reasons I don't eat all vegan meals for clues to eating more of them.

Some reasons are other facets of needing a system: inconvenience, lack of knowledge, old habits. If I had a system, it would include making some vegan meals easily, knowing their recipes by heart, and having the habit of including vegan meals on a regular basis.

Then there are health concerns. Doug, my husband, is diabetic. I like to cook food that helps him regulate his blood sugar. Our best results so far have been with a low-glycemic diet that tightly limits grains, potatoes, and other starchy vegetables. This makes a lot of vegan recipes problematic. When I read vegan recipes for rice bowls, polenta dishes, pasta, stuffed potatoes and shepherd's pies, or even sandwiches, they frequently look far too glycemic to serve to him. Our experiments have seen him doing well with spaghetti squash or broccoli as a pasta substitute. Small amounts of homemade, whole-grain bread also seem fine for him.

We are accustomed to generous quantities of protein, and "not enough protein" can be a concern with vegetarian or vegan diets. Although we are in no danger of kwashiorkor, we feel better with protein in our meals. How much of that is biologically optimal and how much of it is custom and changeable, I don't know. We made a large batch of lobia (with olive oil rather than ghee) from Urvashi Pitre, and ate it lunch and dinner for several days, along with our usual vegan breakfasts. After the last meal, I said, "It doesn't feel like we've been eating vegan." Aha! A clue. This is a fairly high protein vegan dish, with both the black-eyed peas and spinach contributing. So it's possible that the feeling of eating vegan comes from getting less protein than I am used to, and if so, keeping the protein up could help vegan food feel more sustaining. Our experiments around Doug's blood sugar led us to meals with about 30% calories from protein in them for him. Vegan meals run lower than that on average. It's easy to include enough protein to avoid protein deficiency. There is not yet a consensus on how much protein an optimal diet includes, and there is some evidence that the optimal diet varies widely from person to person. So we might be able to adapt our diet to run higher in protein, like the lobia recipe does, or we might be able to adapt to less protein, as some very healthy traditional diets contain.

Another reason is comfort: eating the food I grew up with feels supportive. If I feel ill or stressed, I often crave my childhood favorites. I've made some progress on leaving the ground beef and cheese out of the burritos from our family table. I gave up cheese with few pangs when I stopped digesting milk well. We spent some years mixing half TVP into our taco meat, and trying ground chicken, pork, or turkey instead of beef, and it tastes better to us now that way. The burrito recipe always contained refried beans, and the vegan ones taste better to me. On the last version, I tried adding corn kernels and sunflower seeds to the refried bean filling to round out the protein and add some fat to satisfy my expectations for a burrito. With plenty of seasoning and salsa, I found that comforting. Adding avocado makes any burrito more appealing, too! Matching the protein and fat content I'm accustomed to may make vegan food more comforting as well as less glycemic.

Typing out these thoughts has given me some good ideas. I can see why people want paleo vegan recipes. Their high-protein emphasis might solve some problems for us.


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