The number 1 principle I tell my vegetarian clients is the same one I tell everyone, whatever their diet – Eat Real Food.
The big companies wanting to make money out of you don’t care what effect their products will have on your health. Meat-free fake food is the current band-wagon to jump on and marketing departments are going wild to sell you ultra-processed rubbish.
Ignore the pretty pictures and cook from fresh ingredients. To be a healthy vegetarian you need to eat vegetables.
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Last year at the Public Health Collaboration Ambassadors’ Conference, I heard a talk by Viv Hamilton titled How to be a Healthy Vegetarian.
Here are her main points:
– Eat Real Food
– Eat low carb with healthy fats (ie not seed oils like sunflower oil)
– Eat more protein as plant sources are inferior.
– Increase bioavailability by including complete proteins with incomplete ones eg mushrooms, yeast and eggs.
– Get plenty of magnesium from eg microgreens and seeds to balance the calcium in dairy.
– Eat more eg flax seed and chia seed instead of grains.
– Look after your microbiome – it will make some nutrients for you and deal with some of the anti-nutrients. That means eating a wide variety of vegetables.
– Cut out ‘predigested’ ultra-processed foods eg refined carbs, fruit juices and smoothies.
Many thanks Viv for letting me share your wisdom.
Viv is one of the contributors to the Freshwell Vegetarian meal guide – it’s a great resource for vegetarians giving information on protein content of different foods and lots of recipes.
They do other versions too.
You can read Viv’s story as part of this Daily Mail article.
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We are all different
The key feature of my nutrition coaching is biochemical individuality – the premise that we are not all the same. The peoples of the north evolved to eat only meat and fat for most of the year – and they are healthy. The peoples near the equator evolved eating lots of the lush plant growth (none ate only plants) – and they are healthy. Looking at one healthy group of people in one part of the world and trying to expect similar results by imposing their eating habits on a different group of people somewhere else is always going to fail.
As an international sportswoman I suffered greatly following the nutrition advice on the national squad. I ate lots of plants but little meat or fat and spent 10 years overweight, tired all the time, hungry all the time, moody and miserable, with bad skin, athlete’s foot and dizzy spells. 20 years ago I found out what I really need to eat to feel great. Any time I drift towards the current culture, I feel terrible again.
People at the carb end of the spectrum should fare OK on a vegetarian diet. Anyone at the meat/fat end of the metabolic spectrum where I am, will struggle without meat. In Britain we’ve been invaded by everyone which is why I always offer to test for the mix of food that will suit each client. It’s life changing.
Top tip: If your food grows as a plant, eat it. If it’s manufactured in a plant, don’t eat it.
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