posted on: 2009-08-29 10:27:38
Sugar and the Vegan Diet
By Brett R. Ston
We all know sugar is bad for us. It rots the teeth, causes weight gain, leeches minerals from the bones, and is a strong contributing factor to adult onset diabetes. On a vegan diet, especially, sugar can be even more damaging.
Although protein requirements for humans are low— 10 –15% of our diet, and can easily be obtained from grains, beans, nuts, and seeds—if you consume large amounts of sugar, chances are you are consuming less of the healthful foods needed to reach minimum requirements of protein, vitamins and minerals. Then the stage for deficiency is set. Meat-eaters tend to eat larger amounts of protein than vegans, in fact too much, so their reserves are greater. So whereas a meat-eater consuming the same large amounts of sugar as a vegan will only suffer deficiencies of vitamins and minerals, not protein, a vegan will suffer deficiencies of all three.
If that isn’t reason enough to get you off sugar, consider this: sugar may not even be an entirely vegan food. Most cane sugar, white and brown, is processed in a method that uses char (crushed animal bones) as a filter. Whether or not a food processed in this way is technically vegan is a subject of debate (even the harvesting and transportation of produce causes tons of insects to bite the dust) but, personally I find it much more acceptable to lose some insects in a natural process than to deliberately crush animal bones and use them as a filter. A craving for sweets is natural, even necessary for survival. In a plant-based diet, getting enough carbohydrates is easy to do. Fruits, vegetables and grains are all full of the vitamins and minerals we need to be healthy. All these foods have a natural sweetness. Nature has set it up so we would reach for these foods first when we are hungry by giving us a craving for sweets.
Getting the refined sugar out of your diet is a painless process these days since there are so many wonderful, unrefined (some even healthful) substitutes. Succanat is great in baking. It's made from cane juice, which is then evaporated to remove excess water and crystallized. Through this process the minerals are retained. Others are date sugar, maple sugar, barley malt and brown rice syrup.
Brett is an Earthsave member and registered holistic nutritionist. He can be contacted through his company, Success Nutrition, at brett4success@hotmail.com.
Reprinted by permission from the Canada Earthsaver, September/October 2001.
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