Examples of high protein vegan diets

Last week, I posted examples of vegan diets that attempt to be healthy, yet are deficient in protein. Today, I'll show that getting enough protein on a vegan diet really is not problematic at all. This is the final part of the series about protein. The other posts in this series are: Protein in a vegan diet and Examples of low protein vegan diets.

This is Joan's diet. Joan is (again) a 125 pound woman who needs a minimum of 56 grams of protein a day. Like Mary from the previous post, she eats between 1800 and 2000 calories a day. I added tempeh to her dinner, but it is easy to see that even without tempeh, or without the lentils, this diet would still have enough protein. I think this is a reasonable diet, I allowed for plenty of fruit and even a tablespoon of oil.

And here is Carmen's diet. Carmen is, again, a 125 pound woman. She thinks carbs are not that great, and tries to eat a relatively low carb diet. While it is possible to make such diets without soy, I think most people who would eat such a diet, would include soy, so I have two servings of soy here. I did try to make this diet not too contrived, and I did make sure to include four servings of fruit (if you count avocado as a fruit) and plenty of vegetables, so it is quite a healthy diet. I do not recommend this diet however, because I think there is nothing wrong with carbs. If these meals seem even more dull than the others, it is because I did not include spices and preparation methods in the tables. Carmen actually eats scrambled tofu for breakfast, lentil soup with a huge salad for lunch, and chili beans with spinach for dinner. The berries are for dessert.

I hope these sample diets demonstrated that it is easy to get more than enough protein on a vegan diet. Go eat your greens and beans!

July 4, 2006