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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 100g lentils: 3.3mg iron, 116cal
- 100g spinach: 2.7mg iron, 23cal
- 100g cooked tofu: 2.7mg iron, 110cal
That's more than 50% of the day's iron recommendation for women in about 250 calories or about 1/8th of the day's calories for the average woman.
Biolavailability
For men of average size, the recommended daily intake of iron varies between countries, but it can be as large as 14 mg, which would need at least 400 g of cooked lentils per day, according to your list, which corresponds to lentils cooked with an unknown amount of water, so it is difficult to compare it with lentils cooked in different ways, though it seems that these 100 g of cooked lentils correspond to about 40 g of raw lentils with about 60 g of water.
Though I don't see the point of quibbling here. My point only gets stronger and stronger as I add in more foods and calories, even packaged grain foods that are incidentally fortified with iron.
