How To Avoid Nutrition Gaps On Plant-Based Vegan Diet | Ronan Oliveira

What happens when you cut meat and all animal products? Some people live the best life they ever lived. Some people get bloated, lose energy and gain weight and lose strength because, you know, pasta and bread and sugar is also part of the vegan diet. So what I want to tell you in this video, if you're getting a try, what are the things that you need to do alongside with cutting animal products to make sure that you don't fall into the beginner's mistake of a vegetarian or vegan diet? I'll get less excited. I did a vegetarian diet for more or less a year and a half and vegan diet in between in the middle of this time. And a couple of things that I learned was that one, the most common nutritional deficiency that we see by cutting all animal products is something that is very common. If you start reading more about the vegan diet, that is the deficiency of vitamin B12. And you know when you remove an entire food group, like removing all animal products, there is always a need that this type of food was covering. That doesn't mean that the vegan diet will not cover. It will. But now you need to think of other alternative ways to cover those needs that are unfulfilled now. And vitamin B12 is one of the most common ones. What do you do to fulfill that need? In specific, this case of vitamin B12, it's a lot more common so to have this vitamin coming from animal products. So if you are trying a vegan diet, you will find a good support on types of food like enriched, different types. You can find oat milk or rice milk like this case, or maybe some cereals that are enriched. Most of these vegan products that are enriched, they bring vitamin B12, they bring other types of nutrients that you don't usually that you don't easily find without animal products. So enriched products may be a good friend. As you are trying the beginning of the vegan diet and adapting to this lifestyle, Then another thing that can help is nutritional yeast. It has a cheesy flavor. It's a very nice thing that you can add to any dish to substitute that cheese flavor and has a lot of different B vitamins, including B12. But for a lot of people who tried these vegan diets, they still find very convenient to supplement with vitamin B12 because it's hard to eat the right amount or the enough amount of nutritional yeast or drink a lot of enriched rice milk to get all type. Yeah, to get all this type of vitamin E, D12, this is how the rice milk agrees with me. So don't abuse on this guy. A supplement may be very useful for that. This is one. The next nutrient to keep in mind is calcium. We usually get it from dairy. And if you're removing all animal products, you're removing dairy as well. So you need to think of other ways to get calcium in your diet and best options for you here in the beginning of this vegan diet journey will be again, our friend fortified soy milk, fortified almond milk, fortified cereals, or things like tofu, or some green leafy vegetables like kale that can offer a calcium that's a little bit less bioavailable. So it's not as absorbable as the calcium that you get from yogurt or milk, for example. So if you only rely on kale for that, you may need to have a lot of this. So then mixing with some tofu, mixing with some fortified types of food will help cover that need for calcium. And then we sort out that nutrient as well. Then the next nutrient you need to pay attention, especially for women, is iron, because you usually get them from red meat as well, and now you're no longer getting them. Where can you fulfill this need? In a vegan or vegetarian diet, some of the best options would be things like lentils, beans, oatmeal, bringing back our friend tofu. But the main thing here about iron is that iron in non animal sources is it's less absorbable as well. So to increase the absorption of iron from these foods, you also want to combine at the same time that you're having maybe lentils or beans or tofu or oatmeal, some type of vitamin C. This can be either some drops of lemon or citric fruit or something like some green vegetables. If you have beans and lentils with broccoli or spinach or cabbage, you're giving the vitamin C here to increase the absorption of of iron that these foods can give you. And then you covering that need as well with iron also covered. Now you need to go for the Omega 3s because you know they are the type of fatty acids that a lot of your brain structure relies upon. And you get these guys from things like, you know, salmon or sardines or different types of fatty fish. If you don't have these things now in your diet anymore, you need to give a second thought of where to get from vegan sources. And there are great sources of Omega 3. You just need to make sure that are always part of your diet. And I'm talking about things like chia seeds that I can make A lot of different types of, you know, smoothies and desserts, even with chia seeds, and they give you fiber and a lot of Omega 3 flaxseeds. And you want always to blend this thing and make a powder so it's more absorbable. Whatever comes from the flaxseed and walnuts, six halves of walnuts per day cover a basic need of omega 3. So you can totally do this on a vegan diet. Just make sure that you are adding these types of food to the beginning of your journey so you don't have any food deficiency and you can really give it a try and see if that type of diet is for you or not. With all these vitamins now covered in the vegan diet, now you need to pay attention to perhaps the most common possible nutritional deficiency. When you remove all types of animal products, you are removing all easy sources of high quality protein. You can totally fulfill them in a vegan diet, but you need to give it a deeper thought on how to do this. So let me show you how this works. The first thing to keep in mind is that a protein is a combination of other smaller things that we call amino acids. And there are a bunch of these types of amino acids and we need all of them in our bodies. Imagine a protein as if you had a Lego piece. You know, if you make a house out of Legos, you can use different types of shapes of pieces. You can use squares and rectangles and triangles and circles and all these kind of things. So all these little different shapes, shapes are amino acids. And when you put all of them together, you make a house, and the house is a protein. So when you eat protein from animal sources, you're eating all these little houses and then you break them down into the smaller pieces into the amino acids, and you use them for different functions in your body. And all animal sources will come from with all different types of amino acids, which we call them complete sources of protein. Which means that a house made of a chicken breast will give you all the triangles and the circles and the rectangles and the squares and so on and so forth. When you get protein from a vegan source, this source is most of them is what we call incomplete protein sources. That means that it is a house that is only made of squares, and then you have another source of protein that is a house only made of triangles and another one only made of circles, and so on and so forth. So when you are in a vegan diet, you need to make sure that you are combining different sources of protein. So at the end of the day, when you break them down, you're getting all the amino acids that you need. And this is a chart that shows all the amino acids that we need in our bodies and different types of food that offer these amino acids in different quantities. In this table over here, you see all the amino acids listed on the left and different types of food like legumes. And then you have vegetables, have grains, and you have seeds and you have different nuts and what type of amino acids they are strong in and what types of amino acids they are medium or weak in. And in this top row, then you're seeing that most of your protein in a vegan diet will come from foods that are like legumes. So I'm talking about beans, I'm talking about lentils, for example, a couple of them from grains. And you also have all the things that, for example, tofu that comes from soybean and is a not so highly processed type of food that can give you high quality protein for your body. And some of them will have more amino acids than others. And so you see that, for example, if you have most of your protein coming from legumes, so beans and lentils and things like this, you get a good amount of phenylalanine, you get a good amount of isoleucine, but you're not going to get too much methionine. Where are you getting this guy from? Ah, but then you see that, for example, grains and seeds can give that amino acid in a higher quantity. So you combine a good amount of legumes with a maybe smaller amount of grains. So this is why, for example, we have oats here, then you can have a complete ish panorama of amino acids. If you add a little bit of seeds, like chia seeds that you already had from omega 3 or flax seeds as well, then you complement with the amino acids that were left. And a couple of vegetables, like broccoli, for example, will give whatever is left. So when you are building or sourcing your body with protein in a vegan diet, you want to make sure that there's a majority of different types of legumes. They are complemented with a amount of grains. It doesn't need to be in the same meal. You just want to do this on the same day and a little bit less of seeds. You can still look that seeds are very high in most of the amino acids. And then you can ask me, so why don't I get all my protein from seeds? Because they have all, almost all the amino Acids. The answer here is because seeds do have a high quality protein, but they also have a lot of calories. So if you're getting all the proteins that you need only from seeds, you see that you start to gain weight because the amount of calories that you get to achieve all the protein level will be way too high. So instead you get mostly from legumes and supplement them with seeds and then the vegetables that will be indefinitely part of the vegan diet will give whatever is missing. So here is where you pay a little bit more of attention. Most of the people when they start the vegan diet, they just cut the animal products and then later on they start, start feeling that they lose strength and they lose energy and, you know, they're losing muscle mass and they don't know why they think that the vegan diet is not working for them. No, it's just that because you remove the whole food group now, you need to be a bit more careful to think what are the needs that are now uncovered and how can I, how else can I cover those needs with the types of food that I have available in my diet? Another option that you have for protein, of course, course are vegan protein blends. And these are products that you buy like a protein powder that instead of being whey or being casein, and they are both animal products, they are a mix of pea protein and rice protein and oats protein. All these mixes are already done for you. All the amino acids are already complete and you can use consume it as a protein powder, as a supplement that will give the same type of protein that I get from food. If it's a great option, if getting all your protein from lentils or beans seem too much, or if you're looking for something that is a little bit more convenient, every now and then you can have a portion of a vegan protein blend that is already designed to give you all the amino acids that you need. This topic of protein is very important not only for someone who is in a vegan diet, but for everyone because it tends to be one of the most common nutritional deficiencies across the board. So to go into a little bit more detail, I'm gonna make another video only about how much protein do you need? Where do you get protein from? How do you get a meal that provides everything that you need in a day? So subscribe for these videos. If you like this type of insights on nutrition, hit the bell button and then you will know when the next video is coming up and I see you there. Hit the hell, hit the hell. So if you are right.