Give It Up For Health

Today's' recipes are for some healthy, crunchy vegan snacks. Potato chips for one! I have a huge bag of oily but delicious kettle fried potato chips from Costco sitting unopened in my pantry. Oh, have I been good or what resisting the not-infrequent urge to get stuck in. Susan Voisin, the "Fat Free Vegan", posted these three recipes on her blog today. I like the fact that the potato chips are actually cooked in the microwave oven! Sounds convenient and easy to clean up. Here's the link to the recipes:  http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2008/08/healthy-crunchy-three-guilt-free-snacks.html . By the way, Susan's Facebook page is on my Facebook "Whole-Food Plant Based Lifestyle" interest list. You can subscribe to it to get more of Susan's recipes on Facebook, as well as recipes and health advice from many others. Here's the link for that too. Why not subscribe and add it to your newsfeed. https://www.facebook.com/lists/10200716363291744

How about some vegan mayo to go with that? It seems that someone has come up with a recipe that substitutes for all those favorite things that we thought we'd have to give up when we adopted the WFPB lifestyle. I saw someone with a post making vegan bacon yesterday. Today I ran into  Jaymi Heimbuch at treehugger.com who has three recipes for vegan  mayonnaise  to chose from.  http://www.treehugger.com/easy-vegetarian-recipes/3-recipes-homemade-vegan-mayonnaise.html

Here's my map of vegan and vegetarian restaurants in Southern California (Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura , Santa Barbara, Riverside, and San Diego Counties). Please help me improve this map by letting me know about vegan and vegetarian restaurants in your area, and also please let me know if any of these restaurants close or move. Hope this helps! View Vegan and Vegetarian Restaurants - Southern California in a larger map

Once you start out on the WFPB diet you will soon have a fridge full of fresh fruit and veggies. We in fact even had to get a second small fridge for the garage to store everything, especially since we buy a lot of our stuff at Costco, and if you're a member of Costco, you'll know that a bag of broccoli from there is a big bag of broccoli! One thing with all these fresh fruits and veggies is that they will often start to perish before you get to use them all up. Some things are worse than others of course, chief among them being berries, celery, cucumbers, mushrooms, and broccoli. Not to mention left over soups and sauces that have a habit of growing "beards" if left too long. When I was looking for some storage containers at Amazon several weeks back I chanced on some  that contain nano silver particles in the plastic which extends the life of perishable produce. Silver is a known antibiotic. I bought a starter set to check them out, a little skeptical, but was a

If you ever become vegetarian or vegan it won't take very long before someone asks you how you can get enough protein without eating animal protein. This is one of the great myths of our time popularized by the meat, dairy, and egg industries. I like to answer it with Dr. Joel Fuhrman's approach of pointing out that elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes all eat nothing but plants and seem to get big enough on leaves and grass. A report produced jointly by the United Nations and the World Health Organization ( “Protein and Amino Acid Requirements in Human Nutrition”  (pdf)) recommends an adult needs 0.83 grams of protein per kilogram of lean mass body weight per day. (Divide your weight in pounds by 2.2 to get how many kilograms you weigh). For a 170-pound adult, this is about 64 grams of protein per day. Not so much, and a target that's not that hard to hit when you consider the average person in the United States consumes over 100gm/day. Of course for many of us, cal

Ok, I'm not sure quite what is holding me back from trying to make some cheese at home, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps it's time. Anyhow, I just saw another list of cheese recipes on The Flaming Vegan website. Why should you bother with vegan cheese? Well, the first answer to that is that regular cheese is made from the milk of various animals: cows, goats, and sheep, and for health reasons, in adopting a whole-food plant based diet (WFPB diet) you give up eating animal protein and fat. What is wrong with consuming animal protein found in milk? There are several reasons. Animal protein and fat contains cholesterol. Our livers manufacture all the cholesterol we need in our cell walls, so the cholesterol we consume from animal protein and fat creates and excess of cholesterol in our blood.  In "The China Study" Dr. T. Colin Campbell writes that while he was working in the Philippines he  observed that children exposed to a mold in peanuts of

I read this powerful account on the Engine 2 Diet blog this morning. It is the personal story written by a once-obese woman about the lies she told herself about how she would quit over-eating and lose weight. It is such an honest accounting of the struggle she had with overeating and obesity. I find such stories of personal struggle with weight and health issues that result in ultimate success with the adoption of a whole-food plant-based diet just so motivating. In the world we live in, if we just go with the flow we all end up with weight and health issues. For me at one point I was overweight and had high cholesterol. At just 20 lb overweight I started to feel tired and found it difficult to get up when I had to get down on the ground for some reason; I had to start pulling myself up and using my arms instead of just my legs. Climbing the stairs was difficult. I can only imagine the fatigue and difficulty people experience who are obese. My story comes nowhere near this the strug

I happened upon a new website tonight called the Recipe Renovator. The author turns animal protein based recipes into vegan or vegetarian equivalents. I've added her blog to my blog list on the lower right sidebar. I ate yogurt on my breakfast cereal or oatmeal practically every day of my life, so that's a long time! Until of course I adopted the WFPB diet. I haven't yet tried a soy yogurt, but now that I ran across this recipe for cashew nut yogurt on the Recipe Renovator site I'm keen to try making some of my own yogurt. Did you know that cashew nuts are a great vegan resource. They can be used to substitute for cream, or used to make vegan cheese and obviously from above, vegan yogurt too. I get my cashew nuts through Amazon's "Subscribe and Save" program. That way I can get them raw and organic at a good discount. Of course if you are going to start making yogurt at home yourself, it's probably best to get a yogurt maker to avoid the hit

While meditating, the Buddha heard the sound of a stringed instrument being played on a boat as it floated by and came to understand that his life of asceticism had him "wound too tight" and that the road to enlightenment was actually the middle path.  The same goes for coconut oil, the latest fad food product out there that some people seem to think they should cook with all the time. If you have ever bought coconut oil you will have noticed that while it sits in your cupboard it is solid. That is telling you that coconut is unusual for a plant fat in that it is a saturated fat. Whatever the source of saturated fat, be it animal or plant, saturated fats are to be avoided. So don't be fooled into believing that you can and should cook everything in coconut oil because it's the best and healthiest oil! Perhaps for an occasional treat you could use it in some baking, but other than that, like all oils, it is best avoided for health, to be used sparingly. Here'

So you think vegan food means boring, tasteless food, or weird foods you can't imagine eating? Then that's just because we all need to relearn how to cook after a lifetime of planning meals around animal protein. I will scour the internet on a daily basis and share the best sounding vegan recipes I come across. Up here in the northern hemisphere it is mid-summer, and mangoes are on sale. So what better than mango mint ice-cream? Remember, this is a treat! Coconut oil is a saturated fat that should be consumed only occasionally and in small quantities. Same goes for white sugar, but now and again we all deserve a treat. http://www.greenerideal.com/lifestyle/0801-vegan-mango-mint-coconut-ice-cream-recipe/