CHAPTER 5 - Vegetarian Nutrition - Getting Everything Your Body Needs
At this point you’re probably starting to get worried about how you’re going to make sure you get the right balance of nutrients that your body needs, and thinking that you’ll need a spreadsheet to keep track of everything you eat. But it’s not as difficult as it may seem from the outset – you just need to bone up on a few nutritional basics to keep in mind when you plan your meals.
Some people spend their entire lives studying the science of nutrition, but you don’t have to make it your life’s work. The truth is, despite what the meat industry repeatedly tells you, vegetarian diets aren’t nutritionally inferior to meat-based diets. There’s no need to worry that you’ll be lacking the vitamins, minerals and protein that your body needs. Which isn’t to say that it’s not possible to eat badly as a vegetarian – many people have lousy diets, even vegetarians. But if you eat smart, your vegetarian diet can be the healthiest way you’ve ever eaten.
Protein – Am I Getting Enough?
Your first concern on starting a vegetarian way of life is that, without meat foods in your diet, you’ll lack protein. So you’ll be happy to discover that it’s almost impossible to eat too little protein on a vegetarian diet.
Protein is, of course, of the utmost importance to a healthful diet. Your bones, muscles and hormones all contain protein, and eating enough of it helps keep your body strong on the most fundamental level. Unfortunately, the importance of eating animal protein has long been made unrealistically important. Man once believed that eating the flesh of other animals would make him stronger and healthier – but now that we know what we do about cholesterol and the dangers of eating saturated fats, it’s obvious that limiting animal proteins is the healthy choice.
Vegetarians can, of course, be protein deficient – but that comes from undereating, or relying too heavily on junk foods. In most case, any diet adequate in calories from a variety of healthful sources provides enough protein. Grains, vegetables, beans, seeds and nuts are all protein-rich foods, easily providing what the body needs.
Contrary to what many vegetarians believed in the last couple of decades, they don’t need to weigh and balance arcane combinations of foods to get adequate protein. This myth goes back to Frances Moore Lappe’s 1971 book “Diet for a Small Planet,” in which she wrote that vegetarians needed to balance foods based on which amino acids they were lacking, creating “complementing proteins.” For some time, there were even nutritionists who created complex charts to help vegetarians pick foods that went together, and concerned meat-free eaters made sure to combine beans and rice, or rice and corn, or grains and cheese … and it was an awful lot to remember!
But we now know that combining types of protein isn’t nearly as important as simply eating enough calories to maintain a healthy weight – Lappe even revised later editions of her book, admitting that she was wrong about the importance of food combining. No, if you eat enough food from different sources, you’ll probably be getting plenty of protein.
If you want to get technical about it, health professionals recommend that you eat 0.8 grams of protein each day for every kilogram of body weight. A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds – so to find your recommended amount of daily protein, multiply your ideal weight by 0.8, then divide that number by 2.2. If you prefer a quicker method, just divide your ideal weight by 3. But even then, you don’t need to eat that much protein to stay healthy – keep in mind that recommendations like these always err on the side of safety, so the number you get will actually be higher than what you realistically need.
But you, as a vegetarian, should strive to meet the recommended daily requirement of protein – because plant proteins are, unfortunately, less efficient foods for providing nutrients. For one thing, they’re somewhat more difficult to digest than animal proteins, and they also lack the amount of amino acids present in meat. If you get most of your protein from beans and grains, this is especially true – ovo lacto vegetarians consume a similar amount of protein to omnivores, and vegans who eat a lot of soy products also get plenty of protein.
It’ll always be true, however, that as a vegetarian you’re eating less protein than people who eat both plant and animal proteins. A 1984 study found that a typical omnivore diet consists of between 15 and 17 percent protein, while lacto-ovo vegetarians generally eat about 13 percent protein and vegans around 11 to 12 percent. Despite needing more protein and eating less, the vegans still had an adequate amount of protein in the diets. So don’t worry about doing anything fancy to meet your protein requirements – just eat from a variety of sources and get enough calories and you’ll be fine.
You will, in fact, be better than fine – because meat-eaters generally eat too much protein! Studies have shown that replacing animal protein with plant protein in your diet can help lower your blood cholesterol levels, decreasing your risk of heart attack. Most people are by now aware of the danger of saturated fats in red meat and its effect on blood cholesterol – people recovering from heart attacks are prescribed diets which replace the beef with skinless chicken or fish. That is a good move, to be sure, but these people could lower their cholesterol even further by switching to a vegetarian diet and reducing the amount of fat that they eat. Plant proteins are lower in saturated fat than animal proteins and dairy products, and free of cholesterol.
There are also studies that show that eating slightly less protein than is optimal is far superior than eating too much – and in this era of supersizing, most meat-eaters eat far more than they need. When we eat too much protein, it’s up to our kidneys to filter out the excess. In the process, calcium is lost, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. Since plant-based diets are lower in total protein, vegetarian diets are better for your bones! Excess protein is also, understandably, hard on the kidneys and unhealthy for people with kidney disease.
Plant proteins contain all the same amino acids, to differing degrees, as animal proteins, and eating enough of them gives you all the protein you need. Studies have shown that people can meet their protein needs just by eating rice, wheat or potatoes so long as they meet their caloric needs. By eating a variety of plant foods throughout the day and consuming enough calories, you’ll be getting enough healthy plant protein. You’ll have a lower risk of heart and kidney disease, and you’ll be eating protein that’s more efficiently produced besides, using less valuable resources than animal protein. It’s what people call “win-win!”
