On Protein

Apparently the number one comment people get when they start a vegetarian diet is "Where will you get your protein?" I guess nobody was paying attention in health class when they covered nutrition. Many other foods contain protein, and the USDA in their Dietary Guidelines lists Beans, Tofu, Nuts and Seeds as alternative forms of protein.

Here is today's lunch:

Flatout wrap with Avocado, Italian Tofurky, Spinach and Cheese	22 g.
2 Arnold's Sandwich Thins, one with Avocado and one with a little Almond Butter	20 g.
Total:	42 g.

So you see, there I have more than 46% of my USDA recommended daily intake of protein. As a comparison, let's take a look at something I might have eaten a few years ago:

McDonalds Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Large Fries and a Coke:

54 g.

Wow, that's not a big difference. Plus, the McD's meal comes with 1590 calories, 67 grams of fat, two grams of sodium, and a whopping 102 grams (that's 7.5 tablespoons) of sugar, but only 10g of fiber.

Most people probably consume too much protein. Overconsumption of protein can adversely affect kidney function, may lead to diabetes, and may lead to kidney stones. Too much protein can cause your body to crowd out carbohydrates, causing you to use protein for fuel, a very metabolism-inefficient process.

The standard way to calculate how much protein you need is to take your body weight and multiply by 0.37. For instance, a woman who weighs 120 pounds only needs 44 grams of protein - as much as I've eaten in just one meal.

In short, protein isn't a problem.

Veg Pledge

This is somewhat out of the blue, but I've decided to join my wife in PETA's Vegetarian for 30 days pledge. I'm open to the idea of being vegetarian; in fact, I predict that our diet will be mostly vegetarian in the next fifty years. As I become more environmentally conscious, I've started to realize just how unhealthy our baseline lifestyle has become.

Saturday after the race and the Farmers Market, my wife Amanda and I decided to try a local Thai restaurant called Green Papaya, which you really should try if you live in the area.

I had Panang Curry with Tofu, and she had Massaman Curry (pictured), also with Tofu. As we ate, we realized that that was the third vegetarian meal we had had in a week, and that it was possible to eat out normally as a vegetarian.

Ultimately I'd like to settle on Flexitarianism, which emphasizes moderate meat consumption. I'm not ready to completely drop the mantle of meat-eater, but I'm willing to give it a go for a month.

What's in season?

Keeping with the last point of my Six Point Plan, I've been looking for a guide to the produce that's in season. The top hit in Google was About.com (sorry About.com, you have too many ads and not enough content), so I skipped down to the next one, a site called Fruits & Veggies More Matters that has a list of foods broken out by season. Somehow the Sponsors link caught my eye, and it turns out that this is an informational site set up by farming industry.

Halfway down the second page of hits, I found a link to Good.Is which has an infographic that has the information I'm looking for. I was astonished that in my search on Google that the US Department of Agriculture wasn't at the top of the list. After putting the USDA Web Site into the query (a neat trick that everyone should know), I did come up with a Pamphlet on how to buy vegatables, and a very interesting web site by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service. I'm going to have to explore that site more.

Incipio

This morning my wife called me on her way home from work (she works nights), and posed me a question: "can we try out a conscientious diet?" We had been watching Food, Inc. at lunch the day before, and both of us were kind of uneasy about it afterwards.

I'm not a squeamish person. I understand that the chicken, pork and beef in the neat Styrofoam tray at the grocery store was clicking, oinking or mooing at some point in the near past. What I don't like is the idea of mutant chickens that can't stand up and who haven't seen the light of day or pigs and cows that go to their death covered in their own feces. It's not very appetizing.

So here's the plan:

• Try to purchase food in it's most basic form - i.e. oranges instead of orange slices, heads of lettuce instead of bagged lettuce, etc.
• Buy organic whenever possible
• Buy Non GMO whenever possible
• Buy cruelty-free meat and dairy whenever possible
• Buy locally grown as much as possible
• Buy produce in-season as much as possible

Oh, and I live in the middle of nowhere, Alabama, so I have to find as much as I can in my small-town grocery store.

My goal for the next year is to eat a well balanced, environmentally responsible and somewhat tasty diet, and record it here.