Nutritional Review of "Eat Vegan on $4 per Day"

Would you be able to eat healthfully on a food stamp budget?  Here in Colorado, a household of 2 is eligible to receive a maximum of $5.91 per day per person.  That's 5.91x2x7=$82 per week for two people.  The average American spends about $151 per week.  That is consistent with our current food budget.   More than 47 million people in the U.S. use food stamps.  I would imagine that sometime in my future career as a dietitian I'll need to consider such a restrictive budget when making meal recommendations for my clients.

Ellen Jaffe Jones has authored a book called Eat Vegan on $4 A Day. I purchased this book and decided to do my own experiment to determine if it is possible to eat a satisfying and vegan diet that meets the MyPlate specifications on a food stamp budget.

After reading through the first part of the book which covers the benefits of a vegan diet and gives tips on eating healthfully on a very strict budget, I jumped to the section of the book that contained a 7-day food plan. I scanned the plan and really felt like it was not enough food for me. The meal plans consist of 3 small meals with one or two items, plus a small snack. I normally eat three meals plus 2 snacks each day. Many of the recipes seemed to have a mexican influence. Lots of beans with cumin and whole grain tortillas. I've included a listing of the meals below. The author listed the price for each meal, but did not list the nutrient or calorie content. So I took on the task of painstakingly entering the entire week of recipes into the the free online application created by the USDA on the MyPlate.org website. The SuperFoodTracker on this site allows you to track your daily food and activity intake, and has a feature that allows you to enter your own recipes and calculate the nutritional value of a single serving. I must say, this application contained only about 95 percent of the ingredients for very simple recipes in the book. If you are attempting to figure out the nutritional content of gourmet-style recipes with unusual ingredients, you may want to try to using another app rather than this free one. But for my purposes, this free application was fine.

It took me about 2 hours to enter the data for the 7 day plan, and when I was done I was able to generate reports for the week. I didn't do a a daily analysis, simply because I think you get a better result if you use weekly averages. We all tend to eat a bit differently each day, and if you are eating a variety of foods from all of the food groups, your daily intake of nutrients will vary from day to day. The reports provided showed a comprehensive comparison between the meal plan I entered and the federal nutrition guidelines. The Nutrient report is also shown below.

Did the 7-day plan meet the USDA MyPlate requirements? In some areas, yes, in some areas no.

Low Calories - too low?

First of all, the daily caloric recommendation for someone of my age (50) and activity level (moderate) was not met. My daily energy intake should be around 2000 calories per day to maintain my current weight. This plan only provides 1127 calories per day on average. So if I followed this plan, I'd end up losing a little more than 1.5 pounds per week. Even when dieting, I rarely consume less than 1500 calories per day since I try to exercise for at least 75 minutes each day. The 1127 calorie average concerns me.

Plenty of Protein

 The guideline recommends that I get an around of 46g of protein each day, somewhere between 10% and 35% of all calories should come from protein. The analysis shows that this plan will provide an average of 42g of plant-based protein each day, about 15% of the daily calories. So even on an extremely low-cost, vegan diet, you can see it's possible to meet the AMDR for protein. The analysis of this eating plan shows that most of the protein comes from beans and the rest comes from whole grains and soymilk.

Low Fat/High Carb.  As Expected

This plan provides for an excess of calories from carbohydrate. The USDA AMDR for calories from carbohydrate is 45%-65% of calories with 25g coming from fiber. This plan provides 71% of calories from carbohydrate, and 37g grams coming from fiber. This was not a surprise to me since this is a low-fat diet so most of the energy will come from carbohydrate and protein. Very little oil is used in the plan. And most of the grains eaten are whole-grains rather than highly processed, so I expected the fiber content to be quite high. Again, the majority of carbohydrate comes from the starchy vegetables and whole fruits, such as beans, bananas, plus the whole grains such as whole wheat bread and tortillas.

This meal plan is close to the recommendation for fat intake. According to the USDA recommendations, 20-35% of your calorie intake should be from fats, and that less than 10% of your calories come from saturated fat. Nineteen percent (19%) of total calories are from fat sources on this diet, and less than 2% of the calories are coming from saturated fats. There is no cholesterol in this diet due to the absence of animal products. The recommendation for Omega 6 and Omega 3 fatty acids was met, but since the sources are plant based, the EPA and DHA intake was zero.

Minerals and Vitamins

The 7-day plan provided ample copper, magnesium, phosphorus. The amount of selenium and zinc were very slightly under the recommendation. The plan provided insufficient amounts of calcium, potassium, and iron.

Recommendations for vitamins B6, C, K, folate and thiamin were met, but the plan did not meet the recommendations for Vitamin A, B12, D, E, riboflavin, niacin and choline. I believe a multi vitamin could provide for the missing nutrients at a lower cost than it would take to get these from food sources. A once-daily multivitamin supplement is sold for about 33 cents per capsule. While I normally would not recommend obtaining nutrients through supplementation, vegans do require B12, most people don't get enough Vitamin D, and if the budget does not allow for plenty of nutritious food, a supplement might actually be beneficial.


Thinking about the types of foods I might be tempted to buy if I were on a food stamp budget, I can imagine that the nutritional content of this plan far better than what most food-stamp recipients are consuming.   There are no convenience foods included.  Foods are whole-foods, and very little fat and oil is used.  The recipes in the diet look pretty simple, but the plan does require food preparation for every meal.  The ingredients in the recipes are easily found in any grocery store, making a special trip to a health food store unnecessary. 

Below are the nutritional analysis reports and meal listing for the 7-day plan. 

Nutritional Analysis for the sample 7-day Plan from "Eat Vegan for $4 a Day"

Meals form 7-day Plan from "Eat Vegan on $4 a Day"

Starting Tomorrow - Eat Vegan on $4 a Day

After a nice hike in the mountains dripping with golden, red and green aspens we went to the grocery store to buy groceries for our $4 / day experiment.   I am following the menu plan in the book.  I bought only for the first 4 days because I didn't want the vegetables to go bad. Here is what we bought:

Not too bad!  Our bill $64, which was more than the $4 x 2 people x 4 day budget of 32, but we did buy organic and we did buy a few items that will provide for many meals in the future.  Each day I will calculate the total for each serving to see how close we come to $4 per day.

I have also calculated the nutritional value of the sample 1-week plan.  It provides 1175 calories per day, which is about 800 calories below what is recommended for someone of my age and activity level. My next post will cover the nutritional analysis in more detail.

Got the book - now to prepare

The new book was delivered today.  Funny, I looked online at my Amazon order status to see if it arrived rather than walking upstairs to look at the front door!  Do you ever do that?

The book is much thinner than I expected.  Only 146 pages.

 I skimmed through the first few pages right to the menu plans that the author has developed.  My first impression is that it won't be enough food for me.  Three small meals plus one snack.  And if it's not enough for me, it won't be enough for Dave.    I tend to eat breakfast, second breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner and then final snack.

I have a visitor from Israel coming into work for three days next week, so I will have to decide whether Dave and I start this plan over the weekend, or if we wait until the visitor is gone.  I want to be a good host for my coworker and take him out to lunch a few times while he is here, especially since he has never been to Colorado before.  But then, if the company is paying for lunch, it doesn't come out of the $4 day budget, does it? 

Also, looking through the book, I see she uses a lot of beans.  There are two problems with beans.  The first is that they take so long to cook!  She gives a timetable that shows cooking times for each type of bean if cooked on the stove, or cooked in a pressure cooker. The pressure cooker is much more efficient, for example, it takes 5-8 minutes to cook black beans in a pressure cooker vs 1 hour on top of the stove.  I don't have a pressure cooker right now.  Well, I do, but it's so old I'd be afraid to use it.  It always made me nervous, anyway.  I think the newer ones are safer. 

The second problem with beans is their sometimes painful and annoying side-effects.  I have learned in the past that if you completely rinse the beans after soaking,  cook the beans thoroughly until they are really soft and add a thumb-sized piece of kombu to the pot while cooking, it can eliminate much of that.

I'll probably wait and do a bit of planning before we begin.    There are 7 days of menu plans included in the book.  I think I'll go through the plans, calculate the caloric and nutritional profile for the week and devise a shopping list.  Based on the nutritional profile of the plan, I'll decide whether to try the author's plan for two weeks, or use her plan for the first week and devise my own improved plan for the second week.  It will depend on whether or not I think the author's  plan is sufficient to meet the recommended caloric an nutritional needs for us.

I'll begin the experiment next Friday.

Vegan on a Budget

Today I was reading my facebook feed and an old high school friend of my posted the following:

"6 dollars and 83 cents for mcDonalds tonight.  Getting expensive".

It got me thinking....

The $6.83 price tag for that meal is probably nothing compared to the long term costs of managing the chronic diseases (high blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes) that can be prevented with a plant based diet.   I don't think most people really think about those costs when they are hungry and want a fast, cheap meal though.

One day I hope to help seniors decrease the number of medications they require through  proper nutrition.  I know that many seniors in our country really struggle to put food on the table due to budget restrictions.  Many rely on government programs, such as SNAP to supplement their weekly grocery budget.  Looking at the SNAP program in Colorado, the maximum monthly benefit amount for a household of 2 people is $367 per month.  That amounts to a mere $5.91 per person per day.  You could not even have my friend's meal at McDonalds for that.

I have been following the posts and blogs of an author in Florida - Ellen Jaffe Jones - for a few years now.  She has written a book called "Eat Vegan on $4 a Day".  I've decided to give this a shot.  So I ordered the book this morning.  It was really reasonably priced at $10.38 through Amazon.  Hopefully it will be here this week so we can begin an experiment next week.  I'm going to try to feed Dave and I a balanced, plant-based diet with a weekly budget of $56 per week.  For me, this might be a challenge.  Not the vegan part - we've been following a plant based diet for nearly 4 years.  But I'm definitely not a budget-minded shopper when I enter the grocery store.  If it I want it, it usually just makes its way into our cart.  But if I ever plan to really help people improve their diet, I need to experiment with various methods and eating plans to make sure they provide adequate nutrition and satiety within the limits of a very strict budget.  Plus, we'll save a bit of money in the process!  I think our normal food bill, including dinners out, has been averaging about $150-$200 per week.

Stay tuned as I use Ellen's book to come up with a weekly plan within the $56 per week budget, analyze the nutritional profile of the plan, and report back here our reactions to the plan.

Marine Knife

A week or so ago I purchased a couple of marine knives for Dave and I to take with us on our sailing trip.    I got them in the mail a few days ago.  At first, I ordered just one for him, but then I called them back and asked them to modify the order so I could have one for myself, too.   On past trips, we've always carried on our baggage and so we didn't even considering bringing a knife.  However, for longer trips and on trips in which we will fly into larger island airports, such as St Martin, we end up checking our bags.  So I thought it would be a good idea to equip ourselves with knives for this trip.

I actually didn't know much at all about the type of knife we should have, but my primary concern was that one of us or one of the crew could become entangled in the lines on the boat, and we needed a way to cut the lines.  The kitchen knives that are stocked on the boat are not suited to cut even a dill pickle,  let alone a line. 

I ordered these knives from Mauri Pro Sailing (http://www.mauriprosailing.com), an online sailing shop that I used once before to order some sailing gloves.  While they don't have a huge selection of knives,  it's fine for our purposes.    I ended up ordering the Gill Marine Tool for a very reasonable $29 each.  This tool has a knife with a 6cm serrated blade, a marlin spike, and a shackle tool.   It comes with a carrying case that attaches to your belt.  Some marine tools come with a smooth blade, but I felt the serrated blade would be a better choice for cutting through lines.  I think the marlin spike will come in hand for removing knots from lines that were overlooked by the boat preparation team.   

Since my knife  purchase, I have found out that the TSA  will begin to allow passengers to carry on small pocket knives beginning April 26, 2013.   I checked on the regulations for these knives, and I believe this knife will pass through the security checkpoint if we do need to carry on.  The TSA regulation permits knives that a a maximum 6cm non-locking blade that is up to 1/2 inch wide.    I am not sure if the marlin spike will be permitted, but the knife should not be a problem.

Now I just need to figure out how I'm going to attach mine to my bathing suit!

Welcome to the new Blog!

Welcome to my new blog!

I think you will enjoy this blog if you are a fairly new to cruising, if you are interested in easy to prepare vegan meals, or if you just like to read about food and sailing!

My partner Dave and I are amateur sailors and have been sailing for about 4 years now.   We decided a few years ago that sailing would be a great way to see the British Virgin Islands, so we signed up for a few classes at our local sailing school here in Colorado (http://victoriasailingschool.com/), got our basic certifications, rented a boat in the BVI and went sailing for a week!  Now we are hooked and take every opportunity to we can to get away and enjoy a sailing adventure.

We were omnivores when we first began to sail.  Late in 2009 we switched to primarily a plant-based diet, eliminating all animal products from our diet.  Our first sailing adventure as vegans meant that we ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly while under sail, and a lot of salads while relaxing on the boat.  Grilling vegetables just didn't seem to have the same appeal as grilling a fresh-caught snapper.  And scouring the tropical grocery stores for ingredients to use in a vegan recipe is not exactly how I prefer to spend my free time on the island.   When eating at restaurants, it's often difficult to order items that are strictly vegan, so we'll often ask for a vegetarian option. 

We have really improved both as a team and individually.  Every trip we go on we learn something new about sailing or about ourselves.  While I really intend this blog to be focused on the challenges of preparing healthful, simple vegan meals while on a sailing excursion, I think that there will be several opportunities to discuss what we are learning with regard to sailing and vegan cooking in general  so other new sailors and new vegans can also take advantage of my experiences.  Please feel free to comment on any post!  I'd love for you to share your experiences, too!

Preparations for the Trip: Let's Tie one on!

Today felt like a good day to begin organizing the trip we are going to take with  5 other friends in May.  We are headed to St. Martin for a 10 day bareboat charter with Sunsail.    Dave and I sailed there a few months ago for the first time and had a really great time.    We liked the island, the French Flair, and all of the little anchorages around the island.  Anguilla was really beautiful, too, and an easy sail from St Martin.  We did not get down to St. Barth's on that trip, so we need to go back.

We decided to ask a few of our friends to join us on the next trip.  We have found that as newer captains and first mate, it's best if we go someplace on our own before asking a crew to join us.  That way we will know what we are in for!

This time we will have two people on our boat that have never sailed before - Marty and Nikki.  We are excited to introduce them to this new experience.

Since it has been well over a year since our last group trip and because we have some new crew members, I thought I would send out an email today with instructions on tying some of the knots we often use while sailing.

The knots I suggested everyone learn are:


Cleat Hitch: (may be difficult to practice without a cleat, but take a look at how a good one looks).  This knot is used for various things, such as tying the dinghy to the boat, securing a mooring harness.
http://watercraft.wonderhowto.com/how-to/tie-cleat-knot-easily-250534/

Clove Hitch:  This knot is used for tying fenders to the boat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aewgmUeHpuE


Bowline: A secure loop knot used for various things, such as man overboard.
http://www.animatedknots.com/bowline/index.php?Categ=boating&LogoImage=LogoGrog.jpg&Website=www.animatedknots.com

Round Turn and two half hitches: One of the many knots that can be used to secure a boat or dinghy to a piling:
http://www.animatedknots.com/roundturn/index.php


I actually enjoy learning how to tie knots.  I think it's one of the fun parts of sailing.  I hope the rest of the crew will agree.

The most problematic knot for me is the darned cleat hitch.  I can get it perfectly right about 3/4 of the time, but sometimes it is just impossible.    I wish I had a cleat mounted to a board so I could practice.  They don't sell them at Home Depot here in Colorado, and I've searched online but they are going for $40-$70 (and more!)

I am also beginning to think about the menu for our trip.  More on that later!