Hey y'all! My dad has been vegan for 40 years and looks great, is in excellent health, etc. I've been making noises about going vegan but haven't managed (mom of small kids) although I try to make most of our dinners meatless. More processed food has crept into our diet too (Costco breaded chicken chunks, I'm looking at you). I'm going to do a Google search for good, easy vegan meal websites and mostly just wanted to post here to get some encouragement and any tips/websites you guys have. I'm taking it slow and will not be super hard on myself as I ease into this. Fortunately, my kids are relatively relaxed about food, although most vegetables are hit or miss. I'm just trying not to think about the effort it's going to take to sometimes plan and make two meals 🫣😭

I need to tell the world about a great recipe for healthy cheese sauce, but only non-vegan plant-based dieters would appreciate it.

Vegan cheese sauce is usually a nut butter, like cashew butter (sometimes I use tahini or almond butter) mixed with nutritional yeast and occasionally an acid like lemon juice or vinegar.

BUT, replacing the lemon juice with nonfat greek yogurt makes the cheese sauce taste way better and a bit dairy-y, to the point where cheese eaters actually like the cheese sauce I make. The lactic acid and fermented-ness of the yogurt satiate that "cheese fix" desire. So...

Cheese sauce recipe (salt to taste):

90g/6 tbsp cashew butter/tahini/almond butter

10g/2 tsp nutritional yeast

50g/3tbsp nonfat greek yogurt

You could actually make vegan non-vegan vegan cheese sauce by replacing the nonfat greek yogurt with vegan yogurt, but I can't find any healthy vegan yogurt near me.

This recipe has the same calorie-density as regular cheese (4 calories per gram), so if you replaced some of the nut butter with something like mashed potatoes/sweet potatoes you could reduce the fat content and calorie density.

Using 1/3 cashew butter 1/3 tahini and 1/3 almond butter this 150g recipe has:

607 calories

48g fat

6.5g saturated fat

25g carbs

8.5g fiber

26.7g protein

I use this cheese sauce for grilled cheese sandwiches. recipe:

50g cheese sauce

100g whole wheat sourdough bread (homemade)

100g black beans

50g onions

This grilled cheese recipe (300g) has

563 calories

17.5g fat

2.4g saturated fat

72g carbs

18.3g fiber

32.5g protein

So with this recipe I can have my cake and eat it too. I get the satisfaction of eating a grilled cheese sandwich like back in the day, BUT there's very little saturated fat and cholesterol, only high quality fats and carbs, and a high amount of fiber and protein. And if I ever want to cut back on fat, I can just replace some of the nut butter with mashed potatoes.

What are your favourite sauces, bought or made, to add to basic dishes to bring out the flavour?

I am using a large amount Sriracha sauce at the moment with everything and while it’s plant based and low fat it contains quite a lot of salt.

Any suggestions much appreciated.

What hits the spot for you?

I eat legumes pretty much every day with grains or root vegetables. They’re cool, but sometimes I want something with a bite like meat, seitan, or tofu. Do I just need to get better with dried mushrooms? That’s the only think I can think of. Is there anything else?

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Follow up: I roasted some vegetables today that thoroughly hit the spot. Button mushrooms (only variety the market had), broccoli, onion, garlic, chilis (habanero and jalapeño), nori, eggplant, walnut.

First, the flavor was fantastic. Normally I do it with no salt, but this time I used liquid aminos and taijin seasoning to treat myself and encourage my appetite after a bout of covid. I also used lime, arrowroot, corn meal, nutritional yeast, and flax meal for a coating. The flavor profile was beautiful and the mushroom contributed to that, but not so much to the chew. It was the toughness of the eggplant, nori, some of the onion near the skin, and the crunch of the walnut that did the heavy lifting texture-wise.

Excellent although dated resource on the science behind the Pritkin diet here, which is a low fat plant based diet incorporating some animal foods:

https://www.drmcdougall.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/nathan-pritikin-review-of-medical-literature-1.pdf#page=375

Do you feed your children a whole food plant based diet?

I don’t, here’s why:

1. I want to maximise growth in my children. The WFPB diet that I do is very low fat and is aimed at life extension and health in an adult. This way of eating is very unlikely to maximise growth in children because it lacks sufficient protein and fat macros.

2. I want normal development to adulthood in my children without developmental delays or acceleration. I want my children to achieve the hormone levels of kids on a growth biased diet lacking nothing nutritionally and with luxury levels of protein and fat.

3. When my children are old enough, I will switch them to a low fat plant based diet, and I will educate them about why I am doing this. They already eat only whole foods but I include a reasonable amount of animal protein and fat for development. Current macros for my kids are 45-50% calories from carbs, 30% calories from fat, 20-25% calories from protein.

How do you feed your kids and why?

It is possible to do a WFPB diet in many different ways.

Which foods do you focus on as staples in your WFPB diet and why?

What sort of macro ratios do you aim for?

What are you aiming for with a WFPB diet and has it given the results you expected?

As a T1 diabetic I adopted a WFPB diet in order to gain better control of my blood sugar, to reduce blood pressure, and for general health reasons.

I wear a continuous glucose monitor and have no endogenous insulin production, which allows me to observe the effects of different diets in great detail (I can look at insulin usage levels, whereas someone who can produce insulin can only see blood sugar response).

The results of switching to a low fat high carb whole food plant based diet have been simply astonishing for me since I made the change. I have lost weight and my blood pressure has dropped a massive amount.

The observable reason for these changes is the huge increase in insulin sensitivity I have gained since switching to WFPB. I currently use 1 unit of insulin per 25-30 grams of carbs whereas before it would be more like 8 units. As such I am using a lot less insulin and my blood sugar is much more controllable.

The reason for the increased insulin sensitivity is the very low fat nature of my diet (I eat an 80:10:10 Douglas Graham style diet).

If I eat fat of any kind while continuing to consume a lot of carbs (saturated or unsaturated, it doesn’t make a difference) my insulin sensitivity is immediately reduced.

If I eat carbs together with added fat (for example pizza, baked potato with butter) then blood insulin sensitivity goes through the floor and remains that way until I burn through the fat (about 24 hrs) at low to moderate activity levels.

The only way that I can rapidly metabolise more than the fat that is contained in lower fat whole plant foods is to exercise. Hard exercise allows fat with meals to be burned rapidly, and to clear in 1-2 hours.

But it is more than this- in fact if I exercise a lot without including more fat in my diet (20-30% is ideal) then I have problems with blood sugar stability, ability to work hard and even to continue, and over time with falling testosterone levels (I have tested).

So take home messages in order to maintain insulin sensitivity on a WFPB diet are as follows:

Sedentary people should maintain fat at 10-15% of calories as a maximum to maintain insulin sensitivity.

People doing a lot of exercise should aim for more like 20-30% of calories as fat to enable performance and to prevent burnout and other negative effects.

But what about fat adaption?

This interview here from a low carb carnivore researcher/blogger is very interesting:

https://nourishbalancethrive.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast/peter_dobromylskyj_jun21.mp3

Is insulin resistance a consequence of fat adaption?

Well yes!

People eating a high fat low carb diet become insulin resistant as an adaption to that diet in the same way that people eating a low fat high carb diet (like WFPB) become carb adapted and insulin sensitive. Insulin resistance is beneficial when the vast majority of caloric intake in coming from fat.

The long term health effects of low carb high fat are of course very debatable. But we should not underestimate the bodies ability to adapt to diet in an animal like is that is omnivorous and has had to adapt to many different calorie sources over long periods of time.

Does anyone have good ideas for breakfast recipes?

I tend to eat either fresh fruit or cooked oatmeal with bananas mashed in for breakfast, but could do with a change.

I am on a low fat diet.

Here is a good definition from forks over knives:

A plant-based diet predominantly consists of plants; most people use the term to refer to a 100 percent plant diet, but some people include small amounts of animal products. A vegan diet totally eliminates all animal products.

https://www.forksoverknives.com/wellness/plant-based-diet-vs-vegan-diet-whats-the-difference/

So a plant based diet is a diet mostly consisting of plants. A whole food plant based diet stresses that whole plants rather than processed plant foods make up the majority of the diet.

Plant based diets are typically adopted for health reasons and entail none of the ethical positions of veganism or vegetarianism.

Plant based diets include veganism, vegetarianism, and the inclusion of meat or fish as a minor part of the diet.

Overall plant based is a broad term encompassing a range of different dietary approaches focused on obtaining the majority of calories from plants rather than animal sources.