jraejen wrote:Hi y’all. My name is Jennee, and I’m 23. I grew up in Dallas, TX but recently moved to NYC.
Where to begin…I’ve never really needed to/ had the chance to explain this so thoroughly (most of my friends are not vegan and don’t appreciate my road to success), but I feel like it gives a pretty good summary of myself.
Food-wise: I grew up eating mostly processed foods. When I was 14 I became vegetarian. I ate a lot of “healthy” processed food—crackers, peanutbutter (a lot of PB!), yogurt, and cheese. I’ve always loved fruit (I could literally eat grapes every meal of every day and still be in love with them), and over the past two years I have slowly transformed to very near 100% plant-based. My diet evolved to vegan when I moved to NY four months ago (harder than my vegetarian transformation: letting go of the (psychological) attachment to eggs and froyo was rough).
Welcome, jraejen. It's always good to see another person join who's interested in Veganism as well as bettering their diet. It's also nice when they put a good amount of effort into their contributions to the forum here, as you apparently have for your introduction. I'm not an expert when it comes to nutritional/diet knowledge, but people like brimstoneSalad and others on here seem to have quite a good grasp of this knowledge, based from a scientific perspective.
I've been bettering my diet myself over the past while, and have had the way I treat my diet shift quite dramatically over the past couple years, (I had a similar emotional attachment to cheese, which took some time to break, and had later eaten a "for-taste" Vegan diet for quite some time until becoming really interested in the health benefits of a well planned Vegan diet,) and I would like to somewhat quickly share with you some of the knowledge I've gained. Also, since I'm not an expert, I'm expecting and hoping for others to give a more in depth explanation, or rather touch on things which I haven't addressed and correct me where I may be wrong, when they see this thread.
jraejen wrote:Now, as a vegan, I find myself being very gullible. I think the issue is that I am not very knowledgeable in the science of nutrition so I find myself believing whatever it is I read. For example, this weekend I was watching youtube videos of various vegans and it went like this…”Yeah! Vegan power!”…”wait, no! I’m not achieving optimal health!”…”okay, nothing processed. No oil, no nothing”…”Paleo-vegan stuff makes sense! Legumes are bad!”…”Oh raw vegan is the answer! I don’t like cooking anyways!”…”tf? I can eat as much fruit as I want? Is this real life?”…”But starches, too! I like starches!”
So yeah, this is where I am food-wise now. Could anyone maybe point me to some good baseline books/websites/threads I can read maybe more so on a semi-layman’s terms of the science side of things? Unless someone is really nice and wants to explain/debunk it all for me
. Generally, I’m most interested in learning about fruit (not types per se (unless that is necessary, idk), more along the lines of healthy quantity), beans and legumes (I’ve read so many contradictions!), raw vs. not raw, and nuts and seeds (again…contradictions…).
To start on giving you some resources for useful information regarding diet. Here's nutritionfacts.org it's a website centered around science based nutrition and has a lot of quality videos regarding different nutrition/health topics and the man who essentially runs the site, Dr. Michael Greger, apparently takes a good scientific and transparent approach to gathering and presenting the information in his videos.
Then there's cronometer --
https://cronometer.com/ -- which from what I've heard is a quality utility for compiling all the macro and micro-nutrient values together in your diet (which you enter into the site) and presenting you with what nutrients you are reaching adequately and which nutrients you may be deficient in. (I've still yet to use it as I sometimes have some silly arbitrary inertia around things, a habit of sorts which I'm trying to break, but there seems to be a pretty strong consensus around the website's quality.)
As for diet advice. Well rather than saying generally how much fruit you should eat, I'm pretty sure that it does actually come down to which ones are worth eating regularly and which ones should be avoided or eaten as treats, since the nutritional quality of various fruits varies quite a lot.
As I understand it, when it comes to striving for a healthier diet, you should be mindful of how you spend your calories, (imagine it like a backpack with a limited amount of space, the space being approximately 2000 calories for the average person,) well, for optimal health you're going to want to reach the recommended (or sometimes higher than the recommended) levels of essential or rather beneficial macro and micronutrients, and things like sugar just plain aren't essential but do take up space in your limited carrying capacity. So when something has a lot of sugar and is lacking in anything essential which doesn't scale to the amount of calories. Like, instead of if something is 1200 calories but gives you 100% of each of the beneficial/essential nutrients, which's actually quite good, it's something which is 200 calories and hardly gives you any nutrients, where if you multiplied the 200 by 10 to get your daily carrying capacity and multiplied the nutrients by the same value but they still didn't meet your requirements then, then that's bad.
(Edit: I was thinking of going more in depth with the backpack analogy, but I guess I got carried away with typing the rest. I could try to go through with making an analogy around it, but I'm not sure how necessary or useful it would be, but I'll try to explain anything here, including that further if you want.)
Fruit like apples, bananas, pears, etc. all have a lot of sugar, and not much of anything really worthwhile. Yes they have vitamin C, but that can be gotten from better places like cruciferous vegetables which have excellent amounts of essential nutrients not found in those poor fruits.
Some fruits like berries, as I've heard particularly; black berries have better nutrient profiles. Black berries also have anti-oxidants which may make them preferable to other fruits.
For general things to eat to meet your essential nutrients. Eating about 100 grams of walnuts each day (although the amount as with all of these amounts may scale based on your size/amount of calories/nutrients you need in a day to sustain yourself) is a good way to get adequate amounts of the two essential polyunsaturated fats Omega 3 and Omega 6. (There are different types of Omega 3, ALA being the kind found in plants. I'm a bit more uncertain about this, but supposedly as long as you get a good balance of Omega 3 to Omega six, somewhere between 1:1 for every gram of each, to 1:4 for Omega 3 to 6, which should allow you body to convert some of the ALA Omega 3 to the other essential kinds EPA and DHA(?), although I'm still not very clear on this part in brackets, so my understanding may be off here.)
Bean and legumes are excellent sources of protein and various nutrients. I personally eat about a litre (4 cups) each day of canned beans (if I measured from dry, the values of nutrients and amount would be higher, but I'm getting about 80 grams of protein from them as is.) I would generally consider eating at least a couple cups of beans and legumes each day to be a good part of the foundation of a person's diet.
A little while ago there was a thread I think on how much protein should a person eat if they want to do more exercise/muscle building compared to a generally sedentary or light activity person, and if I recall correctly, it seemed as if the average person if not exercising much should eat about 0.33 grams of protein for each pound of body mass they have. So, for me that'd be approximately 53.3 grams a day, (and for building up muscle and such, it seemed what was recommended was for it to be somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body mass,) although maybe that's assuming it is complete protein, (all the recommended values reached for the essential amino acids,) so eating more may be better as to assure you're getting enough. Someone else can come in to clear up how this works if you're curious about learning more.
As mentioned earlier, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, collard greens and mustard greens are excellent sources for various nutrients, including protein considering their caloric value. The thing is that the volume consumed would need to be very high to get the amount of protein to be a body builder with just eating them, so eating beans and other protein/nutrient dense foods along with a large but manageable amount of cruciferous vegetables may be more practical. One thing that I've recently come to hear is how spinach may be something to avoid if you plan on eating large amounts of leafy greens as it has a large amount of oxalic acid in it, which from what I've read makes the nutrients you consume harder to be absorbed by your body, so low oxalic acid vegetables like broccoli and mustard greens would likely be preferable to spinach.
Whole wheat/grains are pretty good. They tend to have a good or at least decent amount of fibre and protein as well as good amounts of a number of other nutrients. If you're interested in hearing more about them, then maybe someone else could tell you or I may in some time. But I personally don't eat a lot of them, though I do eat about 100 to 150 grams of whole wheat a day.
Adding something like unsweetened soy milk to your diet may be a good way to get your daily value of calcium, which would also come with a good amount of protein from the soy and other nutrients fortified in like vitamin d2 usually (for some people Vegan d3 may be preferable, or getting out in the sun if you can, most d3 around is derived from animals to my knowledge, but I'm pretty sure that there're some Vegan ones around) as well as vitamin b12 which is an essential and very important nutrient to make sure you're getting adequate amounts of.
That's all I've got for now regarding that, but I hope I may have been helpful with this.
jraejen wrote:After much thinking, I now consider myself atheist. I don’t have any issues with religious people, albeit I find my way of thinking superior to theirs. I do, however, think religion is helpful for certain people in certain circumstances.
How do you think religion is helpful for people? Do you have some examples?
jraejen wrote:* I am VERY ignorant in most religious debates, though. So, if y'all have any advice on books or threads on that topic, I'm all ears.
tl;dr: vegan, whole-food diet; confused about: fruit, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, starches, raw, calories in vs. calories out; atheist
It's good to hear that you're interested in learning more about this stuff. I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the in depth side of arguments for or against religion, though I'm partially acquainted with it, learning further about it hasn't been a priority, though I may change that. It may be difficult to learn about this here in one way, if you're hoping to debate a theist since there aren't many around here, but I'm sure that others could provide good discussion and info on this which would be at least part of what you're looking for, as it seems.
I guess to end this I'll say; welcome again, and I hope you enjoy the forum here!
Edit: I realized that for a good portion of this that I was missing some of what you wanted to know about. Regarding confusion and misinformation around nutrition and diet.
Well, as it seems. High bean and legume consumption should be fine, at least for the average person. As a question for others, is it because of the protein being assumed to be tough on the kidneys? Might beans/legumes be recommended to be eaten in smaller amounts for kidney damaged/failure patients, or is it not even a concern there? I remember seeing a study where kidney failure patients were put on a vegan diet and did better, although I'm not sure what the bean/legume amounts were for that, I think I may have heard implications that it's really only animal protein which would be bad for them? But, I don't know that, and would like this to be clarified.
Sorry, that I didn't address much of the confusion stuff. How I've been practicing my diet has been around meeting all of the essential nutrient requirements, and avoiding things which either take away from meeting the requirements, plus avoiding things which add harmful stuff to my diet, like how meat, dairy, and eggs have a lot of bad toxins and saturated fat, high amounts of bad (in above recommended levels amounts) protein too, (although I avoid animal products for other reasons, too) and for other things like the oxalic acid in spinach and such, as well as eating things like berries which have stuff which isn't essential for life/function but can be helpful in minimizing cancer risk as I understand it. I guess that you may have wanted more of an explanation around what foods may have harmful properties and are worth being avoided? I'm feeling a little silly now, and I guess a better approach may have been to ask you to specify further what you were concerned about, although other people would certainly be better on here than me with debunking that different stuff. So, I'm sorry if I provided a whole lot of nothing...
But, I figure that others should be able to clarify this stuff for you just fine.
) topics so we don't get too cray. 
lol I'm sure a lot of it had to do with my not so organized way of thinking/writing. I do appreciate all of your advice though! Very helpful. I think a lot of my issues revolve around trying to figure out everything myself and just falling into what one person tells me because i dont have anyone to acknowledge their flaws. 