Healthy Vegan Children and What They and Their Families Eat

I was SOOOO happy to see this. There's plenty of healthy vegan children and adults. These people are not removing fat from their diets among other strange things. You have to have fat. If you are vegan for animals, be the healthiest you can be by clicking over to VeganHealth.org to learn more.

http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/realveganchildren

Here's an excerpt:

Jonah's mom enjoyed a nicely varied diet during her pregnancy, including plenty of the following foods: nutritional yeast, flax oil, blackstrap molasses, iodized sea salt, almonds, cashews, macadamias, brazil nuts, almond butter, cashew butter, almond, rice, hemp and soy milks (particularly the "Silk Plus Omega3 DHA" variety soymilk), black, pinto, white, lima, and garbanzo beans, hummus, avocado dips, tofu, tempeh, seitan, tvp, green peas, broccoli, quinoa, rices, whole grain pastas and breads, raisins, prunes, mango, figs, bananas and other fruits and juices, kale, collards, bok choy, spinach and other greens, a wide variety of other vegetables, everything organic as much as possible, as well as a vegan prenatal vitamin daily.

YES. YES. YES. When you visit this page, pay close attention to these regular birth weight, healthy vegan children and parents who are eating the correct way to help animals. When a person becomes a vegan after meeting an animal at a farm sanctuary, or some other empathetic way, they are healthiest of them all. These are the long term vegans who are really quite healthy not just because of their diet, but because their inner most heart is aligned with their actions. They seek out advice, they listen to long term healthy vegans, they learn about nutrition.

They didn't get in to it for purity, they did it for love.

Tooth Decay on the Vegan Diet

There's a guy with a book called Cure Tooth Decay and he applies the principles of Weston A. Price to cure tooth decay and remineralize teeth. Apparently it works. It is not vegan. The book covers a vegetarian way of doing it, but not vegan. From what he writes about the vegan diet, you can see that he does have bias against it and who could blame him? He has heard his share of stories of tooth decay. And hey, if I didn't meet the family at the vegan potluck on Thanksgiving, I might write him off but he's telling the truth. Now not all vegans have major tooth decay. This is also true with followers of modern diets devoid of fat and/or filled with crap food and too much sugar. But he has a theory that may be that once the body's stores of fat soluble vitamins get used up, and that varies from individual to individual, then perhaps that's when the health issues, such as tooth decay crop up.

He's got some vegan sources of fat soluble vitamins:

Vegan sources of fat-soluble vitamins. Avocado, natto (Japanese fermented soy beans), cold pressed olive oil, coconut oil, some oils in nuts.

http://www.curetoothdecay.com/Tooth_Decay/tooth_cavity_vegan.htm

On this page he has free tips on reversing tooth decay on the vegan diet, but as you read it's not really the vegan diet because Quorn comes up. The person who did manage to reverse included some ghee and eggs in her diet and became a vegetarian. If you are vegan for animals, just don't get all up in arms about his philosophy, just read the nutritional tips and mull them around. No one has the perfect diet, but damn we don't need to be closed minded nut jobs about other people's ideas even if they are not pleasant or even appalling to us. Just be nice and learn, learn, learn.

If you want to maintain a vegan diet or at least not start eating meat again, read his tips on the teeth.

And then there was Lysine and how that works with calcium absorption as well as improves mood, supports people who work out a lot, and so forth

If you eat a vegan diet high in grains and low in legumes, or eat foods high in L-Arginine and low in L-Lysine, then will you probably not get the amount of L-Lysine you need. This post is very quickly put together but I encourage you, especially if you want to be successful on the vegan diet or a near vegan diet, to read it and learn, learn, learn!

L-Lysine is a necessary building block for all protein in the body. L-Lysine plays a major role in calcium absorption; building muscle protein; recovering from surgery or sports injuries; and the body's production of hormones, enzymes, and antibodies. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/southfacts_lysine.htm

Here are the sources of Lysine according to BodyBuilding.com. They are really, really knowledgeable about protein:

Brewer's yeast, legumes, dairy, fish, and meat all contain significant amounts of lysine. Most people, including vegans (vegetarians who also avoid dairy and eggs), consume adequate amounts of lysine. Athletes involved in frequent vigorous exercise have an increased need for essential amino acids.

http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/lysine.html

Quinoa is a great source of lysine. Here are some other sources and information about lysine http://jacknorrisrd.com/?p=1630.

Legumes, quinoa, and pistachios are the only plants foods high in the amino acid lysine. If you are not eating them every day, you might be falling short of lysine needs. Read more at JackNorissRD.com.

The best bet, since legumes is up there on the list at VeganBodyBuilding.com no less, combine your beans and rice to get a complete amino profile or eat beans on the same day as you eat the grains.

Lysine Info:

-Lysine controls herpes virus and outbreaks.
-Lysine is a precursor to carnitine
-can boost human growth hormone.
-can reduce Lipoprotein (a) and protect from heart disease.
-Good immune booster
-increases Glutathione (proximo20)

Quote:
Biomed Res. 2007 Apr;28(2):85-90.
Oral treatment with L-lysine and L-arginine reduces anxiety and basal cortisol levels in healthy humans.Smriga M, Ando T, Akutsu M, Furukawa Y, Miwa K, Morinaga Y.
Institute of Life Sciences, Ajimoto Co. Inc, 1-1 Suzuki-cho, 210-8681 Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki-shi, Japan. miro_smriga@ehq.ajinomoto.com

Dietary supplementation with an essential amino acid L-lysine has been shown to reduce chronic anxiety in humans with low dietary intake of L-lysine. A combination of L-lysine and L-arginine has been documented to normalize hormonal stress responses in humans with high trait anxiety. The present study was carried out in one hundred eight healthy Japanese adults. The aim of study was to find out whether a week-long oral treatment with L-lysine (2.64 g per day) and L-arginine (2.64 g per day) reduces trait and stress-induced state anxiety and basal levels of stress hormones. We confirmed that, without regard to gender, the amino acid treatment significantly reduced both trait anxiety and state anxiety induced by cognitive stress battery. In addition, we found that the treatment with L-lysine and L-arginine decreased the basal levels of salivary cortisol and chromogranin-A (a salivary marker of the sympatho-adrenal system) in male subjects. These results of this double-blind, placebo controlled and randomized study confirm the previous findings in humans and animals and point to a combination of L-lysine and L-arginine as a potentially useful dietary intervention in otherwise healthy humans with high subjective levels of mental stress and anxiety.

PMID: 17510493 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Quote:
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Jun 1;101(22):8285-8.

Lysine fortification reduces anxiety and lessens stress in family members in economically weak communities in Northwest Syria.

Smriga M, Ghosh S, Mouneimne Y, Pellett PL, Scrimshaw NS.

Institute of Life Sciences, Ajinomoto Co., Inc., 210-8681 Kawasaki, Japan.

Lysine is a limiting amino acid in diets based on wheat as the staple. In experimental animals, prolonged dietary lysine inadequacy increases stress-induced anxiety. If observed in humans, such a result would have a strong implication for the relationship between nutrition and communal quality of life and mental health. As part of a 3-month randomized double-blind study, we tested whether lysine fortification of wheat reduces anxiety and stress response in family members in poor Syrian communities consuming wheat as a staple food. In the lysine-fortified group, the plasma cortisol response to the blood drawing as a cause of stress was reduced in females, as was sympathetic arousal in males as measured by skin conductance. Lysine fortification also significantly reduced chronic anxiety as measured by the trait anxiety inventory in males. These results suggest that some stress responses in economically weak populations consuming cereal-based diets can be improved with lysine fortification.

PMID: 15159538 [PubMed - in process]
GABA, the (benzo-like) inhibitory neurotransmitter requires adequate Lysine in order for its conversion from GABA's precursor - Glutamate - to take place.

And to quote a poster on a muscle mass forum, one who likely eats meat:

This makes me wonder. What is happening to our food? We seem to be deficient in everything. We're not getting enough magnesium, taurine, thiamin...Lysine? The list goes on....

Scroll down on this page http://www.traditionaloven.com/tutorials/l-lysine_amino_acid.html and find the list that is titled "Food containing high L-lysine and low L-arginine quantity amount". When you see the list, which is mostly fish at top of the list, then you will see why people who become ex-vegan crave fish if their vegan diet is not filled with sources of L-Lysine.

SOOOO, that's why it's been traditional to combine the grains and the beans. I will go back in time and say "I WAS WRONG" it's better to combine.