[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).

[Cushman]

I’m not vegan so it’s none of my business, but: Sure! if you’re not eating processed foods, and you don’t want to spend hours a day cooking, everyone needs supplements.

Don’t forget that our salt and our flour and our milk and — “raw ingredients” — are supplemented by default with micros the standard diet is deficient in.

If the standard diet was vegan, there’d be taurine in the lentils and we’d be saying a meat-and-dairy diet is impossible without “supplements”.

[adrian_b]

Which kinds of food are supplemented by default varies from country to country.

While table salt is supplemented by default with iodine almost everywhere, flour and milk are supplemented by default only in a few countries and I consider that this is a very good thing and that they should not have been supplemented by default anywhere.

This forced supplementation is stupid, because it will not achieve an appropriate daily intake, except for a few people who happen to eat a certain amount of floor and milk, while for all the others it will be either too much or too little.

The right way to help the poor is to subsidize the price of vitamins and essential minerals, not to waste them by adding them to a certain kind of food, so that everyone who eats something else will not get them.

And the argument that the government should supplement some food ingredients because people have become too stupid to eat what they should, is even more ridiculous. Even supposing that modern people have become more helpless than their ancestors, so they would not be able to identify or catch anything edible when left alone in a forest, that does not mean that they should not be able to at least have the survival skill of buying the right food from a supermarket.

If it is believed that most people are not capable even of doing that, then they should be educated instead of hoping that the solution is that the state should feed them with food ingredients whose composition they no longer understand.

There certainly are few things more important for any human to know, than how to choose what to eat, in order to not die and to remain healthy.

[rjaco31]

Do you have any source on that?

[cesnja]

Seems quite complicated. I think you set your protein goals too high if you need to be so careful about what you eat. In general, a diverse enough diet that gives you enough calories also gives you enough protein.

[adrian_b]

There have been many studies that have discredited the older recommendation of a daily intake of protein around 0.8 g/kg. Their conclusions correspond to a recommendation around 1.1 to 1.2 g/kg.

The majority of the people living in developed countries eat 1.4 g/kg of proteins per day or more.

Eating 1.2 to 1.3 g/kg of proteins per day from a balanced diet restricted to vegetable food to which no special methods for separating the proteins from starch or fat are applied, results in over 3000 kcal per day.

If I eat more than around 1800 to 1900 kcal per day, I gain weight very quickly.

Removing about 75% of the starch from my bread removes at least 1000 kcal per day, which brings the total to less than 2000 kcal.

I have experimented twice with eating only around 0.75 g/kg of proteins per day, and after a few weeks the concentration of albumin in my blood has decreased (low albumin levels in blood can be noticed even without a blood analysis, because they cause swollen feet).

While this was a little lower than the old recommended value, it was close enough that bad effects were not expected. Now I always eat at least 1 g/kg of proteins per day, and up to 1.3 g/kg.

The only parts of plants that have high protein content are the seeds. Excluding soy, the other seeds of legumes have at least a 3 to 4 times higher calorie content than corresponding to the protein content, while most cereals have at least a 6 to 8 times higher calorie content than their protein content.

When someone does heavy physical work, so 3000 kcal per day or more is OK, then yes, a diverse vegan diet without any special cooking methods is good enough.

On the other hand, for a sedentary life it is not possible to reduce the energy intake from vegan food to 2000 kcal/day or less, without some special protein extraction method.

[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.