[adrian_b]

No, spinach is only rich in oxalic acid, not in calcium.

No vegetable is really rich in calcium, which is why it is recommended for vegans to take calcium supplements.

After you ingest oxalic acid, it will find calcium in your body, where it is abundant in blood and in the other extracellular fluids (like sodium and chloride, most calcium stays outside the cells).

Too much oxalic acid will form insoluble precipitates of calcium oxalate, i.e. small stones, which may happen to form in undesirable places, from where they cannot be eliminated.

[cesnja]

You are completely wrong. There are many quality sources of calcium in plants. For example legumes, nuts, seeds, dark leafy greens including spinach.

[adrian_b]

Most living beings contain calcium, including all plants, but in quantities that are too small for the needs of anyone who has a calcium-based skeleton, unless you eat daily larger quantities of plants than are practical for most humans (e.g. eating between 1 kg and 2 kg of nuts each day, depending on what kind of nuts they are).

Dark leafy greens are not "quality sources of calcium". One would need to eat several kilograms per day. No human does that. The quantity that needs to be eaten is greater than it could seem from the elemental analysis, because a part of the calcium will be lost during cooking and another part will remain bound in insoluble compounds that will not be absorbed in the intestine. Moreover, eating many kilograms per day of dark leafy greens is guaranteed to cause health problems due to oxalic acid and other substances that are present in excess.

All the studies that I have seen have shown that the vegans who do not take calcium supplements have significantly less amounts of calcium in the body than non-vegans and are more prone to osteoporosis.

This kind of false information about plants that are "quality sources" of substances that are really deficient in all plants is very dangerous for vegans. Any vegan must take up to a dozen supplements to maintain optimal health and those who are not aware of this develop sooner or later various health problems and many go back to a traditional diet, without understanding what they did wrong.

[hombre_fatal]

I'd encourage you to go to cronometer.com and put in reasonable servings of the food items they listed (not several kilograms of just one food and washing your hands of the conversation) and seeing what nutrients you end up with. You may be surprised.

Add some nut milks in there, too.

> Any vegan must take up to a dozen supplements to maintain optimal health

This is some bottom tier anti-vegan flame bait. Had I seen this sooner, I wouldn't have even responded.

[adrian_b]

I happen to be a vegan myself, so it is weird to be accused of "anti-vegan flame bait".

Precisely because I am a vegan and I am aware of the difficulties that I had to surpass when switching to a vegan diet and also of the health problems encountered by some relatives who followed a vegan diet, but without adequate supplementation, because they believed the bad advice that is easy to find on the Internet, I felt the need to reply to these comments that perpetuate myths.

Much of the advice for vegans that can be found on the Internet is completely BS, some of which must have been written by false vegans who have never followed their own advice, while the other suggestions must have been written by rich vegans who do not care whether they pay $5 or $50 for a meal, so they believe that e.g. buying plant protein extracts that are 5 times more expensive than animal meat is a rational food choice.

Now I am happy for switching to a vegan diet, but this change took several years, until I have found adequate methods to ensure the correct daily intake for all nutrients, without paying more for food than before and without gaining weight rapidly.

[hombre_fatal]

> they believed the bad advice that is easy to find on the Internet

I'm with you 100% on this. But vegans needing a dozen supplements for optimal health is a different claim than bad internet nutrition advice leading people astray from optimal health.

If you personally feel like you need a dozen supplements even as an informed vegan, I would give you some resources or at least refer you to a dietitian.

A controversial point of my own to some people is that vegans should and often must embrace "processed foods" to hit optimal protein goals. Foods like seitan, textured vegetable protein, tofu, and ultra-processed vegan products have the highest protein density. Yet the fear of processed foods is vogue on social media, and there are plenty of green mommy vegan blogs that will list a cup of lentils as a protein heavy-hitter yet never mention TVP, seitan, etc. There is also plenty of other vegan cringe online like the no-oil vegans who minimize dietary fat.

But that wouldn't mean you can't get sufficient protein on a vegan diet.

Social media and Youtube nutrition advice is horrible for everyone, I think. My own father has been convinced that butter is a superfood by Youtube quacks. They also convinced him to quit his blood pressure meds and that the carnivore diet is so healthy that you can dispose of any cautionary blood panel markers—they simply don't apply to you anymore.

[adrian_b]

If there are no constraints, then it is easy to get sufficient protein on a vegan diet.

On the other hand, with constraints, which in my case were that I was not willing to spend more money for a vegan-based diet than for a meat-based diet, and that I was not willing to spend more than one hour per day with cooking, cumulated for all the meals of a day, while also wanting to eat mostly, if not exclusively, food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in order to have complete control over the composition of the food, then it becomes difficult to find a solution for adequate sources of vegetable proteins.

At least in Europe, where I live and where tofu and the like are expensive, I could not find a solution within these constraints for a long time.

You have mentioned seitan, which is just another name for gluten protein extracted from wheat floor. This has been the start of my solution, because gluten is the only vegetable protein that can be extracted at home from a cheap food, without any special equipment and without any chemicals except water.

However, while gluten a.k.a. seitan is cheap, extracting pure gluten from wheat dough requires more time and more water than I was willing to spend. The breakthrough happened when I have realized that I do not have to keep washing the dough until all the starch is removed and I obtain seitan. It is enough to wash for a few minutes until I remove about 75% of the starch.

Then I can bake the dough and I obtain a home-made bread that is highly enriched in proteins, with about a 40% to 50% protein content. Now I make every morning for breakfast such a bread from 500 g of wheat floor (much of which is dumped as starch that does not remain in the baked bread), which provides a little more than a half of my daily protein intake. The rest of the proteins come from various vegetables, including enough legumes for an adequate daily intake of lysine.

The number of supplements that a vegan needs to take depend on the cooking methods that are used. For instance I use some cooking methods that remove some undesirable substances from vegetables, but they also remove some of the necessary nutrients, so I add some supplements to compensate for that.

With other cooking methods, the supplements would not be needed, but then the substances that are not removed by cooking could be harmful.

A few other supplements are optional, but without them it is difficult to compose a daily menu with enough of everything, especially when you have a sedentary work so you must eat little to keep your weight. Such optional supplements allow much more varied daily menus.

Besides the supplements mentioned above that can be omitted, there are supplements that are needed by any vegan, because they either do not exist in plants or they exist in a too small quantity and they either cannot be produced by humans or they can be produced only in a too small quantity, so the studies made on vegans have shown that these substances are present in smaller quantities in the bodies of vegans than in those following a traditional diet.

Among this last kind of supplements are: sodium (table salt is the most ancient nutritional supplement, it is strictly needed by vegans, while with enough animal food it may be not necessary) and calcium, iodine and selenium (some plants that are rich in sulfur, like garlic or onion, may contain some selenium because they extract it from the soil together with the sulfur; however this selenium content is unpredictable because it depends on the soil that happened to be used for cultivation; whoever does not own a chemical analysis laboratory cannot count on a known selenium content, so a supplement is necessary), vitamin B12, creatine and choline and taurine, DHA and EPA omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 (the humans make vitamin K2 from the vitamin K1 that is found in green leaves, like they also make vitamin A from the carotene found in plants; however while the efficiency of conversion from carotene to vitamin A is known, so e.g. 100 g of carrots per day are certain to provide enough carotene to cover the need for vitamin A, the efficiency of conversion from K1 to K2 is not known and it is not known whether it is possible to eat enough K1 to eliminate the need for an addition of K2; so until further data the prudent choice is to also take K2).

So the above list counts 12 chemical substances that are needed by all vegans, at least until new studies will determine more accurately if they can be substituted in any way. That does not mean that one needs to have in house 12 different supplements, because many of them can be found combined. For instance I use an oil with DHA+EPA and another oil with D3+K2, which I mix in small quantities with the vegetable oil added to food, while the others are either powders that I mix in small quantities with the table salt, or they are taken in a capsule per day (B12, iodine and selenium).

[darkclouds]

> until I have found adequate methods to ensure the correct daily intake for all nutrients,

I use gut feeling, but am mindful of stimulants in the diet, so I mega dose with supplements to get a better idea of what something is doing.

I can highlight the pitfills in the so called double blind placebo gold standard of scientific study on lab animals.

[mminer237]

You would have to eat like 5 cups of legumes every day to get enough iron that way if you're a woman. That's almost two pounds. Nuts or greens would be an even higher amount.

[hombre_fatal]

They were talking about calcium. But let's plug some iron sources into cronometer:

- 100g lentils: 3.3mg iron, 116cal

- 100g spinach: 2.7mg iron, 23cal

- 100g cooked tofu: 2.7mg iron, 110cal

That's more than 50% of the day's iron recommendation for women in about 250 calories or about 1/8th of the day's calories for the average woman.

[burmanm]

Isn't iron in spinach insanely difficult for humans to actually absorb? Quick googling says it's around ~2% of total iron in spinach which we can absorb, so instead of eating 100g to get 2.7g you'd need to eat 5kg of spinach per day.

[DropInIn]

The topic every vegan refuses to discuss:

Biolavailability

[adrian_b]

That might be the recommendation for a very small woman.

For men of average size, the recommended daily intake of iron varies between countries, but it can be as large as 14 mg, which would need at least 400 g of cooked lentils per day, according to your list, which corresponds to lentils cooked with an unknown amount of water, so it is difficult to compare it with lentils cooked in different ways, though it seems that these 100 g of cooked lentils correspond to about 40 g of raw lentils with about 60 g of water.

[postmodest]

100g is a large volume of loose spinach and dry lentils. That's a hearty entree for a hungry lass once cooked.

[hombre_fatal]

That's 100g of cooked lentils and 100g of raw spinach. 100g of raw spinach cooks down to about the size of a deck of cards.

Though I don't see the point of quibbling here. My point only gets stronger and stronger as I add in more foods and calories, even packaged grain foods that are incidentally fortified with iron.

[mastax]

How does cow's milk contain so much calcium when they only eat plants?

[teruakohatu]

In New Zealand where cows are all grass fed, they eat 50 kg of grass each day. Milk is concentrated nutrients.

[adrian_b]

Correct.

Moreover, the lactating dairy cows which are kept in industrial conditions usually receive mineral supplements with calcium and/or phosphorus, in variable quantities, depending on the composition of their food, to achieve a maximal milk production, unlike the cows which graze freely.

[sva_]

> No vegetable is really rich in calcium, which is why it is recommended for vegans to take calcium supplements

Or just drink German tap water ...

[darkclouds]

> from where they cannot be eliminated.

Ultrasound breaks them down, a fast non invasive procedure, much like women having an ultrasound scan (and skip over any effect on the foetus). Either way though, you'll end up with shards in your kidneys.

[vanderZwan]

Do you have a source for that? Because while looking up this spinach thing I've come across half a dozen websites, most of them from health institutes that look fairly responsible, stating leafy greens do have calcium. Although in the case of spinach it's barely absorbed, apparently

https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-calcium-vegetables....

[adrian_b]

Having much calcium among vegetables does not mean having enough calcium as a human food.

Your link uses the silly "cup" unit of measure from which it is hard to assess which is the real calcium content.

The right way to show the content of a nutrient in some food is to show how many kilograms or pounds you must eat daily to provide enough of that nutrient.

In the case of calcium the best case that I have seen for various vegetables is that you would need to eat at least 1 kilogram per day, based on the elemental analysis.

However this is far too optimistic, because when cooking the vegetables a part of the calcium may be lost and another part will be bound in insoluble compounds and it will not be absorbed in the intestine after eating.

So a more realistic estimation is that even for the vegetables with the highest content of calcium you might need to eat at least 2 or 3 kg per day.

For nuts and legumes it is impossible to approach even 1 kg of daily intake, as that would include too much energy in starch or fat.

So only leafy vegetables would avoid gaining weight, but eating kilograms per day would be not only unpleasant, but also harmful.

I happen to be a vegan, so I have studied carefully my alternatives and the best for me is to add some calcium phosphate powder to my food, together with the table salt. I use phosphate and not another calcium salt, because even if all seeds and nuts, including all legumes, have large amounts of phosphorus, most of it is contained in phytic acid, which is harmful, so I use preparation methods that remove much of the phytic acid, but they also remove most of the phosphorus, so I compensate that by adding the calcium as calcium phosphate.

[vanderZwan]

Thanks for the information. Upon closer inspection the authors of the link are a nutritionist and an osteopath, so yeah, not quite as reliable as I thought at first.

[hombre_fatal]

It's often most convenient to incorporate any fortified nut milk into your diet which is what I recommend to most vegans.

My Costco-brand soy milk gives me 60% of the day's calcium and vitamin D in my morning smoothie.

[adrian_b]

True, but I prefer to fortify my food myself, because this is not only cheaper but it also allows me to have complete certainty about the composition of the food.

Fortified food is a reasonable solution, which trades off price for convenience, so whether it is chosen or not depends on personal preferences.

[fouc]

do you aim for 500-700 mg/daily?