Added sugars are definitely processed and definitely unhealthy, but completely optional for many good vegan recipes. Canola oil is processed, but also easily swapped for olive or peanut oil. And sure, I guess tofu is processed… but it’s also a 2000 year-old dish that has been consumed as part of a healthful diet in multiple Asian cultures for centuries. The common denominator among all the things you mention here is that they’re also optional in a healthy vegan diet.
Fair points! I guess my cooking rarely requires a smoke point above 350. Looking at the internet, it seems like avocado oil and light olive oil (as opposed to EVOO) have high enough smoke points to use for frying. But I suppose vegetable and canola oil are ideal for frying and switching to other sources requires some tradeoffs
if I was cool with getting my protein from processed food I'd be better off with a protein shake. If you believe processed food is optional in a vegan diet, feel free to enumerate any whole-food sources of protein in a vegan diet.
It sure feels like every argument with a vegan ends with "you don't need protein" or "<insert processed vegan thing> is actually good for you" or "1 kilo of kale has just as much calcium as a glass of milk!"
legumes, grains, potatoes, seeds, nuts (if you can afford them).
plenty of protein in all of those things.
I've been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for the past 19years. I've never once had to think about getting enough protein. Having never eaten real meat and I don't much care about the fake processed stuff. I mean I'll eat it, but I don't buy it much. lentils and rice is a lot cheaper and tastes better imho.
I guess if it matters, I would say I'm a fairly active person. I bike for transportation when ever possible, I backpack and hike a lot, and typically work jobs in the trades or farming. So not a pro athlete but just keep active and moving.
You don't need as much protein as most people get on omnivore diets, and you can easily still get more than enough protein on a vegan diet anyway, and plenty of processed foods are fine even if you don't stick to whole foods. Multiple things can be true. There are very few things that are remotely difficult to get from a vegan diet, and a B-Complex vitamin covers most of them.
Tofu is not actually very processed. It's an ancient dish, on the order of 2000 years old, that is essentially just cheese making but with soy beans instead of milk.
> processed sugars aren’t vegan because the whitening stage uses bone meal
This is a good rule of thumb for North America, but not true all the time.
In the USA, organic sugar cannot be processed with bone char. Also, beet sugar is never processed with bone char, only cane sugar.
Also, not all non-organic cane sugar is processed with bone char. For example, in Canada, neither of the two main sugar companies (Rogers/Lantic and RedPath) use bone char for processing their sugar anymore (RedPath never did, and Rogers/Lantic stopped within the last few years).
Finally, all sugar in Australia and the EU (and probably other places) is processed without bone char.
