@Erin… *That’s* the understatement of the year! ;>)

Great care is taken by vegan parents in planning their children’s diet.

I guess I’m suggesting that extra care must be taken when taking a diet that has been found to be suitable for adults and applying it to kids…

1) There are plenty of animals that can be classified as vegetarians and vegans (i.e. herbivores). They appear to be perfectly healthy and do not suffer from problems associated with protein deficiency.

Regarding Lisa’s comments and the articles she linked:

2) Soy foods, along with rice, are a staple of many Asian diets. This consists primarily of soybeans, tofu, and soy drinks. Milk and other traditional dairy products were, up until recently, rarely available and consumed. This is first-hand observation, as I grew up in Taiwan and have travelled to China.

3) People in the more developed Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all have life expectancies that are the same as or higher than the U.S (74+). Other asian countries like China and Thailand have slightly lower expectancies (68+).

Reasonable conclusions that can be drawn are:

1. It is not necessary to eat meat (and/or dairy foods) to be healthy.
2. While soy may increase your risk for certain health problems, it is not as dramatic as those articles would lead you to believe.

Regarding the articles themselves:

Additionally, the articles contained numerous flaws in logic. In one article, the claim is that soy products are a miniscule percentage of the Asian diet. The article supports this claim by observing that soy products, in an area of China, account for 1.5% of the caloric intake, in comparison to pork at 65%.

A direct comparison of calories is invalid. Soy consists of carbohydrates and proteins, which contribute about 4 calories per gram. Pork consists of proteins and fats, the latter of which contribute 9 calories. Thus equal amounts of soy and pork do not have equal calories.

In addition, many vegetables and fruits are rich in nutrients and have relatively little calories. Thus, it is not necessary for soy (and other fruits and vegetables) to have a dominant contribution calorie-wise.

http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/soy.htm
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/soydangers.html

There are many other articles on the net about this too. Just do a google search on it.

I don’t know who he is, but ONE case means nothing. If one has bad genetics, he or she can eat right and exercise, and still “drop dead” at an young age.

One of my professors at university “dropped dead” at 48 with stroke, in spite of the fact that he was a health fanatic. In his family many people had heart problems in their youth.

Bodybuilders with huge muscles usually have heart problems, just like people with huge bellies. This happens because muscle makes the heart work a lot harder even while resting.

However, I’m not advocating PowerBars (I don’t even know what they are) or other chemical foods.

One thing I noticed when doing weight training is that as a vegan my lifting endurance is much better than it was when I ate meat. So I can work out longer and harder. I used to do 2.5-hour workouts. But I noticed the biggest boost in endurance exercises like running.

Supplements and protein bars and shakes are entirely unnecessary and unhealthful. Take a hint from Brian Maxwell, the founder of Powerbar, who dropped dead of a heart attack at age 51. His company was sold to Nestle for $375 million, a company which uses more than 2.6 billion (yes, billion) pounds of sugar per year. Think your health is foremost on their mind?

Protein powders and shakes are about money and marketing, not health. Last time I checked, virtually all of the major muscle magazines were owned by supplement makers. The information they contain thus has a heavy pro-supplement bias.

Whey protein is among the more disgusting things you can put in your body. It’s illegal to dump into sewers because it’s 200x more toxic to water supplies than raw sewage, so instead they’ve engineered a way to feed the stuff to humans. And with clever marketing, people actually buy that junk and think it’s doing them some good. Most people who consume it don’t even know where it comes from or how it came to be developed and marketed. They buy it purely because of the marketing buzz with little or no knowledge of what it actually is.

Engineered nutrition isn’t. It isn’t intelligently engineered, and it isn’t nutritious. Human beings simply don’t have the technology yet to achieve the proper nutrient balances that nature has. Digestion is an extremely complex and delicate process, and trying to out-engineer an apple or a carrot isn’t yet possible. You can’t merely separate out macronutrients and consume them in an unbalanced manner without negative health consequences. The China Study has some great info on why this is so.

I remember reading a story about a guy who won the Body for Life championship, but he was disqualified because he didn’t use any EAS supplements. Instead he ate a raw vegan diet. Marketers of these products protect their own interests — they have way too much money at stake to be receptive to people and information which threatens their cashflow.

If you’re curious you can do a Google search on “vegan bodybuilding” to find a number sites on vegan bodybuilders. Jack LaLane was a vegan, for instance.

I think part of the reason you don’t see more vegan bodybuilders is that there just aren’t that many vegans with an interest in it. The last estimate I saw was that about 0.2% of Americans are vegan, so that’s a fairly small percentage of the overall population, only 1 out of every 500 people. Chances are pretty good that among the people you see weight training in a gym, none are vegan.

One of the best sites that I know of with ethical reasons for vegetarinism and lots of essays and quotations (and most important, some wonderful vege recipes!) :

http://www.kurma.net/essays/index.html

Quotations:

http://www.kurma.net/vegetarianism/index.html

Your 2 articles on rising early in morning are great! Incidentally this site also has a wonderful essay on “why” rising early in the morning is great with personal experiences of the author shared.

Today vegans rely on B12 supplementation. Soy or rice milk, tempeh, tofu, fortified juices, supplements, fortified cereal, etc. Some B12 is found in meat analogues. Also, sea vegetables contain B12 but some say those sources are not as readily absorbed by humans, so it’s best not to rely on them.

The body needs very little B12, a years worth wouldn’t even fill a thimble, they say. And there are those who say the body will produce its own B12.

It’s so easy to get 100% of the RDA simply by eating fortified foods that I don’t give it too much thought anymore myself.