Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Vegan sausage rolls and Morgans

https://www.fgr.co.uk/visit-us/matchday-food-and-drink

I wish he'd buy the catering at Villa Park, it looks light years ahead of ours.

Can I come over for dinner?

Stewart I agree with the general comments and would add one missing element due to travel and a recent visit to a nutritionist.

You mention that people like to promote the best diet based on regional health and longevity. However this is also a regionally developed diet over centuries and prior to the advent of cheap travel and work relocation.

Diets were heavily renationalised and the body adapted to them over 100's of years based on resources. Now with people rearing next generations in different locations you see problems. Chinese and India/West Indian diabetes rates are not only much higher but far easier to trip with western diets. This was from a food nutritionist I have been to see recently. They have a chart which appears to show the medication levels needed for the different genetic chains.

When they say which part of the world is healthiest and point out their diet it only works if the body is adapted for that diet making it a hollow in many ways?

The displacement effect is considerable.

Cheese? hardly vegan

No indeed, but then I have never claimed to be vegan, just that we eat a lot of vegan food.

We use proper organic cheddar from Melissa Ravenhill's herd at Woefuldane Farm. Woefuldane is a tiny hamlet just outside Minchinhampton, just across the valley from us. I often ponder that the original woeful Dane must have been a right miserable old sod if 1,000 years later people still refer to the place where he lived in that way.

Decent cheese is one of those things that is completely impossible to recreate using vegan ingredients.

Been a vegan for about 16yrs, and a vegatarian for 15yrs before that.

It is so much easier these days. Even Guiness is now vegan.

Cheese substitute has always been a struggle, but in recent years there have been a few varieties that are palatable (rather than tasting like earwax and window putty). I even had a cheese board at christmas this year!

Healthwise, I'm 6ft, 17st and an ex-doorman. I do Ok

This thread has produced some good and thoughtful debate. I'd like to throw another food related topic into the discussion, the gut biome. All our food is digested in our gut, partly by the enzymes released but also by the billions of bacteria that live in the gut. The products of bacterial fermentation are re-adsorbed and play a vital part of our nutrition.

Before I talk about the gut biome a last though on a vegan diet. Humans cannot source sufficient of the following from a Vegan Diet, unless the vegan person is very careful to ensure blood levels are maintained by taking supplements and in some cases eating plant based foods that have other side effects.

Vitamin B12.
Vitamin D (actually even carnivores can be deficient as they need sunlight to make it)
Long Chain Omega 3 fatty acids.
Iodine
Iron
Calcium
Zinc

Well-planned vegan diets can fulfil nutrition needs for all stages of life.
That said, certain nutrient requirements may be difficult to achieve through diet and fortified foods alone.

This is especially true for vitamin B12, vitamin D and long-chain omega-3s.
All vegans unable to meet their dietary recommendations through diet alone should seriously consider taking supplements. Unfortunately for Vegans some of the supplements are animal based extracts... And a lot of medicines contain non vegan components.


The composition of our gut flora evolves, quite rapidly, to take best advantage of the food we eat. It can be destroyed by antibiotics and it has been suggested that the obesity crisis we see today is as much to do with a compromised gut biome as the food we eat. I read a paper recently that suggested that artificial sweeteners used in "zero calorie" drinks cause humans to feel thirsty, so drinking more. The only safe zero calorie drink is water.

My take on all this is that we must feed ourselves and our gut bacteria with unprocessed food, prepared as needed. If we want to eat animal products then we have a duty of care to the animals that provide the foods.

We should try to reduce food miles, although it can be difficult to fully understand the CO2 burden inherent in food miles. For example the CO2 burden from tomatoes grown in hot houses in the Netherlands and the UK is actually higher than the CO2 from trucking tomatoes from Spain.

Use common sense, eat what works for you and enjoy life!!

True, but a typical meat-eater's diet can also be deficient in such things.

You can generally get sufficient Omega-3 by ensuring you eat stuff like chia seed, hemp seed, or walnuts, and of course you can get sufficient Vitamin D by simply making sure you are outdoors for a good few hours every day.

B12 is a definite problem, though for a strict vegan. As you say, a lot of the supplements are animal derived.

A good way of supporting the gut biome is to consume fermented foods like kimchi or kombucha.

I have been a vegetarian for over 70 years- no moral/ethical/health reasons, just don't like meat or fish. You can imagine how awkward it was being a veggie in the 50s especially with school dinners being what they were, even the veg was horrible.
As a teenager i earned an undeserved reputation as I was (I am told) apparently 'pale and interesting' however it was nothing illegal, just a poor diet.
No significant health issues to date other than (as Peter says) the all but inevitable B12 deficiency, the older you get the less able your body is to absorb B12, so injections or if you are lucky, tablets and fortified foods are required. I determine from this that being a strict veggie/ vegan is not ideal as you have to use unnatural methods to keep healthy.
What will happen to farm livestock if everybody becomes vegan and what will fertilise the soil for growing vegetables?

A very good question! There are green fertilisers that contain nitrogen fixing bacteria on the rood nodules, and which can be ploughed back in.

One of the reasons I support a vegetarian, rather than a vegan approach is that in an organic high welfare farm system milk and egg production does produce fertiliser, but what do we do with all the make cattle and chickens?

But I like meat.... so in the imperfect world there will still be meat from male animals to eat. I just wish we didn't waste all the male chickens. But they are nasty, brutish things that cannot easily be raised as meat, without castration.