New vegans more than anyone should track the nutrition of their diet. When you switch over to a diet that’s radically different from your standard diet (keto, vegan, etc.), it’s always a good idea to track your diet and see if you’re missing anything. It’s also a good idea if you’re trying to lose or gain weight. When looking for a vegan food tracking app, 3 kept coming up over and over:...
Cramps in general are not well understood. We know that certain things cause them in certain situations, but it can be hard to immediately know the cause of cramps. For example, the most common causes of muscle cramps are: Extended periods of sweating from heat or exercise – Your electrolyte levels get low and may result in cramps. Dehydration – One of the most common causes of cramps...
When I was looking for a food tracking app, a few names kept coming up… Cronometer and MyFitnessPal were the 2 big ones, but other newer ones like Lifesum were also often mentioned. So I gave Lifesum a try, and this is my review of it. You can see my Cronometer vs. MyFitnessPal comparison if you’d rather stick to the “big” ones. Back to Lifesum, what does it try to be...
This was a question that peaked my curiosity, so I dug into the research. Most of the studies around digestion kinematics focus on ruminants (typically cows), which isn’t too useful for us. Luckily, I found one study that looked at the digestion speed of fiber in chimpanzees and humans. What they did: They fed 24 adult males various types of fiber, marked with blue plastic pellets so...
Vegetables are a great source of fiber, most of them have a mix of both insoluble and soluble fiber. Both types of fiber contribute to good health. Here’s a table from a review study that breaks down how much fiber is in 100 grams of a variety of vegetables: Overall, bitter gourd and beetroot had the most fiber by a substantial amount. But as you can see, pretty much all vegetables have at...
Obviously it’s a bit more difficult to bulk on a vegan diet, but gaining mass is still doable with a little extra work. To make it a little easier for you, I’ve compiled the best vegan bulking recipes on this page. 8 recipes with a high amount of calories and protein, the 2 ingredients for packing on lean mass. Before we get to the recipes, I’ve also compiled a list of about 20 vegan whole foods...
Beans are an awesome source of nutrition whether you’re vegan or not. But…they aren’t perfect. You shouldn’t rely on them for all your protein needs, because as we’ll see, beans are deficient in certain types of amino acids. Using detailed data from the USDA’s food database, I extracted the amount of each essential amino acid in the most common beans. First, we’ll look at them altogether to...
A ketogenic was something that always interested me, but I ruled it out once I went vegan. While I still have no plans of following a keto diet, I’ve seen that many do without any problem. To create a vegan ketogenic diet food list, I collected data for about 120 vegan whole foods using the USDA food database. The results are broken down on this page. There’s 80 foods in total here that I believe...
Many people believe that you can’t be a vegan athlete because a vegan diet lacks certain amino acids. If you were under that impression, it’s false. But there is a grain of truth to it. If you don’t vary your protein sources, you’ll likely end up with a suboptimal amount of certain amino acids. In particular, many vegan protein sources (but not all) have a relatively low amount of these 4...
Valine is one of the most important amino acids to athletes. It’s one of the 3 branched chain amino acids (BCAAs), important for building and repairing muscle cells. There’s no set recommended daily amount to aim for with valine, but common values in literature are between 12 and 24 mg per kg of bodyweight. So for a 77 kg (170 lb) person, that’s 924 – 1848 mg per day. Athletes should aim...