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In celebration of Vegetarian Awareness Month, the non-profit group Oldways interviewed me and my colleague Mark Rifkin, MS, RD, LDN to get some historical and practical perspective on vegetarian diets. Oldways, while not a vegan or vegetarian organization, promotes traditional plant-based food patterns for health.

I was especially happy to be teamed up with Mark for this interview. He and I bring some different perspectives to our work, but we agree on most of the important issues—in particular that nutrition guidance has to be based on current research, […]

It’s sometimes hard to imagine what a vegan world might look like, given our dependence on animals for all sorts of uses. Convincing people to simply eat more beans and rice, and wear cotton and hemp will be a big part of it. But so might innovations for products and processes we can’t even imagine.

One of those innovations in the works is for Real Vegan Cheese, using the milk protein casein but without the input of a cow. It boggles the mind (or at least my mind) but […]

When I was collecting stories for Never Too Late to Go Vegan about how and why over-50 vegans transitioned to a plant-based diet, a response I heard many times was this: I wish I had gone vegan a long time ago. I get that. I was well into adulthood before I stopped eating meat, and then it was still some years before I went vegan.

I have had a heart for animals for as long as I can remember. I was always “rescuing” baby birds. (Those poor birds!) And […]

One of the big food stories this past week was Tom Philpott’s article in Mother Jones on almond milk. Philpott deplores the current popularity of almond milk because 1) It’s not an especially nutritious food and, 2) Almond-growing is not friendly to the environment. He says that it’s just a bunch of “ignorant hipsters” who have made almond milk a bestselling beverage.

It’s true that almond trees are thirsty plants. But, from an environmental standpoint, almond milk is still […]

JL and I are celebrating the first anniversary of the release of Vegan for Her with a pretty amazing giveaway.

First prize is a brand new Big Buddha “Arlene” rosette satchel, a signed copy of Vegan for Her, a Plant Plate refrigerator magnet and 3 notepads.

Two second place winners will receive a signed book, the magnet and three notepads.

Head over to the Vegan For Her website to enter. And yes, the contest is open to guys, too! All of these items make great […]

Low-carb diets are nothing new. The first book promoting carbohydrate restriction for weight loss, Eat Fat and Grow Slim, was published in 1958. And I can remember the wildly popular The Drinking Man’s Diet of the 1960s (which restricted carbs but allowed as many martinis as you wanted).

Carbophobia gave way to fatphobia in the 1980s (it seems like we’re always scared of something), but it’s an approach that never really went away. Today, however, low-carb proponents are much more likely to embrace a so-called Paleo-style diet. It’s a different […]

“Vegetarians Found to Have More Cancer, Allergies, and Mental Health Disorders.” That’s the alarming headline from a website called Science 2.0 (which also declares vegetarianism to be a “fad diet.”)

They are referring to new research in Austrian vegetarians published in the journal PLoS One. The study compared self-reported health among 1,320 subjects who were divided into groups according to the type of diet they consumed. Although the media jumped all over it, there has been plenty of more thoughtful discussion among nutrition experts […]

I’ve eaten a lot of truly exceptional vegan meals in my life. But I have absolutely no trouble recalling the single best meal I ever had (truly the single best one!). Prepared in an ancient restaurant in a little town on the island of Sicily, it was a big bowl of chickpeas that had simmered on an open hearth in a sauce of tomatoes, garlic, herbs and olive oil. The beans were served along with an impossibly delicious home baked bread, the world’s freshest salad, and a tumbler of Chianti.

The […]