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Nutrition "Vegetarian month" and trouble falling asleep at night

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i'm back to vegetarian again, and i'm already on it for 3 months since May. Base on my experience, eating enough salt and fat is essential for keeping my overall health. 3-year miso, tamari sauce are my choice for adding more salt to the diet. Hope it help in someway
 
As time goes on, vegan cheese substitutes become better and better tasting. You might try someplace that carries a lot of these things and do some experimenting.

-S-

Surely, consuming less saturated fat might be a good idea. Do you have any specific recommendations for vegan "cheese"?
 
By the way: The problems with falling asleep have more or less vanished!
My physical performance does not seem to have suffered this month. I have lost a little bit of weight, but feels that my recovery from hard training has actually increased. Smoothies and "cleaner" eating seems to be good stuff.
 
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Do you have any specific recommendations for vegan "cheese"?

I think the cheese part is a tricky one in a plant-based diet. Most vegan cheeses demand quite a lot of acquired taste, and even that helps only so much. Also, vegan cheeses' fat profile is often pretty bad. I've found nutritional yeast to cover most of the cheese's functions in the kitchen regarding the umami flavor. Eg. grounded salted nuts with nutritional yeast make a great mock parmesan on top of your pasta.
 
Most vegan cheeses demand quite a lot of acquired taste

And a sense of smell.
Admittedly proper mature cheese does not feature well in the perfume department but at least the smell is 'cheesey'.
Vegan cheese just stinks in a bad 'something isn't right with this stuff is it a risk to my health' way. Tastes alright though.
 
Surely, consuming less saturated fat might be a good idea. Do you have any specific recommendations for vegan "cheese"?
I can ask my wife.

I can tell you that we have made a few visits to a local restaurant that serves a variety of dishes labelled vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free. I had a vegan lasagna there a week or two ago that tasted good to me.

My wife has started making a cheese-like substance from cashews - apparently all one needs to do is soak cashews and the resulting mush can be made into vegan cheese. I don't know more than that, sorry.

At home, I don't eat any of the vegan stuff, but she and my oldest son are both eating dairy-free, and since we also have good friends who are various sorts of vegetarian and vegan, I've been out to eat with them at restaurants that have things they can eat. There is a very popular Chinese restaurant in Teaneck, NJ, that I understand has at least one or two more outposts, and you'd hardly know everything in it was vegetarian or vegan. Veggie Heaven, I think it's called. We took our friends, and my vegan nephew, there for a birthday dinner and all the vegan/veggie people were delighted, and the rest of us didn't complain, either.

-S-
 
I never had any problem getting to sleep my problem was I would wake up 2 hrs later and couldn’t go back to sleep for hours. It would literally take me 15 hrs to get 8 hrs sleep. I started a keto diet a few weeks ago and I’ve never slept better. I now sleep straight through the night other than getting up a time or two to pee and I’m able to go right back to sleep afterwards. Cheese and butter is the only dairy I consume and doesn’t seem to affect me negatively at all. In fact my snack before bedtime is usually a hunk of cheddar cheese and a handful of mixed nuts.
 
cheese-like substance from cashews - apparently all one needs to do is soak cashews and the resulting mush can be made into vegan cheese

And very delicious it is too.
I dunno about using it as a direct sub for cheese but as a 'cheesecake' with coconut it is the bees knees.
I make a fruit and nut base...not dissimilar to a fruit and nut bar, dates, pecans, hazelnut, whatever.
Soaked cashews, whizzed up in a blender to get a paste, add cream coconut to thicken, chuck it on the base, chill it. Decorate/garnish in whatever fancy pants way your culinary finishing touches allow.
The problem.... You need a good, powerful blender. I've burned out 3 of them. A large hadron collider, if you can pick one up somewhere, would be ideal.
 
I tested Vegan-cheese for the first time last week, and it was...fine. Tasted very similar to a mild not that flavorful cheese, like a cheap gouda. No weird aftertaste or anything. I'd bought some white toast bread and vegan-butter and I couldn't taste any difference to a "normal" cheese-on-toast. Sure I've had better and looking at the ingredients it's not that much healthier than regular cheese. Coconut oil, flavorings and corn strarch.
2344.jpg

It's Vegan Junk Food.
It's hard to beat white bread with lots of butter and cheese, so better to replace it with something else. Like fresh baked whole spelt wheat bread with a pumpkin seed and sun dried tomato-pesto and cucumber. That tastes good and is much healthier.
 
I have, on a few occasions, tried out the vegan types of "cheddar" avaliable here, and I tend to agree with Dekapon. They don't taste bad, nor artificial. However, they are nowhere near "real" cheddar in terms of taste, and they contain similar amounts of saturated fat. So their legitimacy must be rooted in ethical arguments, I guess.

Speaking of which, I find myself eating very little meat more than a month after finishing my vegetarian project, due to ethical considerations.
 
there are just a few thing which are woree than vegan cheese...either you are vegan or you have real organic cheese. IMHO

If you have trouble falling asleep I would recommend to eat your carbs for dinner (potatoes/ warm soaked oats) and veggie soups with oil/butter and if you can handle them: well cooked legumes.

Have the protein earlier during the day and just a mouthful for dinner.

Look for things which are easier to digest and eat a round three hours before going to bed.
Magnesium might help too.

Stop drinking smoothies consisting of fruits - too much sugar. Berries are okay but do not overload on fruits, veggies are the better choice.
 
Not necessarily. The foundation of saturated fat being bad for you was built on a house of card by Ancel Keys over 50 years ago. That misinformation is unraveling.

Kenny Croxdale

I find the avaliable data as somewhat less consistent. Do we have conclusive metastudies on the subject?
 
I find the avaliable data as somewhat less consistent. Do we have conclusive metastudies on the subject?

Research Data

There is plenty of data on the misinformation on Saturated Fat. I have posted some information on this site, as well as others.

Secondly, one of the main issue is...

Knowing How To Read Lipid Profiles

The majority of individuals, as well as many physicians, are inept at reading a Lipid Profile.

I posted information this in...

Post #75
The Case for a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet

Due to a metabolic condition, I've been on the high fat Ketogenic Diet, consuming a large percentage of Saturated Fat.

That drives my Total Cholesterol and LDL reading up into the "Red Zone" based on the outdated method of determining cardiovascular risk.

Total Cholesterol and LDL as stand alone number mean nothing. That information is addressed in Post #75 in more depth.

Kenny Croxdale
 
The foundation of saturated fat being bad for you was built on a house of card by Ancel Keys over 50 years ago. That misinformation is unraveling.

Is this the misinformation that turns out Key's was right after all?

A good overview here:

Ancel Keys, Ph.D. Was Right (and Nina Teicholz was Wrong): We Eat Too Much Sugar and Saturated Fat

Me just a messenger, the author a cardiologist
Admittedly other cardiologists may disagree. However, nutritional scientists and public health guidelines derived from the science available since Key's study have never endorsed a diet of excess sugar - ever - nor have they endorsed a diet of excess saturated fat.
So what is the misinformation?
 
So it follows then.....Ancel Keys phd, whose phd was in physiology had no business in conducting nutritional research or interpreting the results either?
Leaving aside the nutritional research he formulated and the data collected who should interpret this data?
Independent researchers? Statisticians? Other scientists?
And indeed they have. In the above article there is a link to a white paper reviewed by a range of phds way back in 2017:

"Overall, though, based on both data he generated,
and data generated by others, Keys evolved positions remarkably consistent with those
reached independently on the basis of the most current evidence on: overall dietary
pattern; total dietary fat; saturated fat; unsaturated fat; sugar; LDL; and dietary
cholesterol, which Keys recognized as relatively unimportant to serum cholesterol levels."

And on fat particularly:

"Keys routinely did with such observations what good scientists should do: turned them
into testable hypotheses, not immutable convictions.
49
He proceeded to test this
hypothesis himself, and concluded long before the dawn of the “low fat” diet era that
total dietary fat quantity was unimportant, while the sources and quality of fat were
important."

"When public health nutrition in the modern era
has gone awry, it has never done so in accord with the findings and positions of Ancel
Keys. It has done so because such findings have been distorted; such positions
misrepresented; and the important lessons of this period of nutrition history, and the
singular contributions of Ancel Keys, forgotten and replaced with false narratives."

Discuss.

"Keys and colleagues did not cherry-pick the
participating countries; they did not
exclude France; they did not
present or graph their data selectively; they
did include dietary intake surveys in Greece during Lent intentionally, for reasons clearly articulated at the time, and with proof that this did not
introduce any distortions; and they
did analyze sugar in all the same ways they analyzed
saturated fat, and reported just what they found.
The popularization of flagrant falsehoods about all of the above is possible for several
reasons:"

cherry-picked summaries from 64 pages relevant to the discussion here. Plenty of charts and stats for your own ponderings and analysis should you choose to indulge. The paper even includes some limitations so it's not all good pr.
 
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