Ketogenic Diet For Vegans*

If you are into health and diet in any way then the last 10 years or so has been an amazing time to play around and experiment with the fuel you put into your body. What happens though when you are attracted to more than one kind of diet at the same time but they seem to diametrically oppose each other?

Well, you either have to pick one or compromise, right?

I had this dilemma about 18 months ago. I wanted to lose some weight quickly but I was also considering going vegan. Now I’d had some incredible success back in the early 2000s with the Atkins diet (anyone remember that one?), so I was attracted to what, in my view was the modern, seemingly hugely popular version – the ketogenic diet. However, I was also coming to the point where I was ready to switch to a full vegan lifestyle.

Lose Weight Or Save Animals And The Planet

At the time I chose to go full keto/Atkins, however after only a week I began to feel not only disgusted physically, but also psychologically with the sheer emphasis on meat that I (mistakenly) believed I had to put onto eating animal products. So I abruptly quit and went straight to vegan and felt much happier in every way immediately. I also uppped my exercise regime, watched calories and lost loads of weight anyway as it happens.

However, in the meatime I’ve added back some of that weight and I’m feeling atracted to low carb diets again, so now I begin to wonder, well, can I do both?

Let’s Look At The Differences

Ketogenic Diet	Vegan Diet	Typical US Diet
The Ketogenic diet, unlike many other popular and fad diets, is a well studied therapeutic diet with a specific application to certain kinds of epilepsy. Depending on who you are it may benefit or disrupt your health.	There is no vegan diet as such. Veganism is a lifestyle decision to avoid the consumption and use of all animal or animal derived products. Becoming vegan may help or hinder your health, becoming a whole food vegan is likely to dramatically improve your health.	90% of people overconsume sodium, 70% overconsume sugar and saturated fat. Everything else, ncluding veggies, fruit, grains, protein foods, oils and even dairy is underconsumed. A recipe for disaster*
Recommended for certain kinds of epilepsy	Positive anecdotal evidence but nothing scientific to my knowledge	Unknown. But if keto is good, then ergo the typical diet is potentially an exacerbating factor in those predisposed to the condition
Helps you lose weight	May  help you lose weight if by vegan you mean ‘whole-food” vegan	OECD nations all tend towards increasing obesity, not just the USA
May help with alzheimers	May help with alzheimers	Some of the causes or exacerbating factors of the condition may be due to this
May help with diabetes	May help with diabetes	Probably causing a lot of diabetes
Tends to increase animal consumption although may actually decrease it for many in the OECD group of countries with high meat consumption	The best diet for animal rights	Catastrophic for animal rights
No direct relationship to environmental concerns, although less meat consumption is generally better	Often seen as synonymous with environmental concerns	Catastrophic for the environment
Low carb, medium protein, high fat	Macros of a vegan diet depend on the individual vegan and their goals. Many vegans tend to high carb diets	Random, but  usually way too heavy on refined carbs, sugar and processed  meat
Requires high levels of supplementation in some cases	Requires some supplementation	Supplementation is usually lacking although arguably required

An epilepsy treatment used for weight loss?

While the history of ketogenic diets relates to over a century of well established research into its use as a way to treat epilepsy, particularly in children, more recently it has been adopted as another fad diet to lose weight quickly, gorge on fat and meat and bore your friends with all the details of your latest eating habits. So little difference there to many other diets, including those of the newly converted vegetarian or vegan 🙂

From a serious medical treatment dating as far back as the 1920s it has been transformed into a kind of Atkins lite used primarily for weight loss. Although hotly disputed back in the 2000s at the height of the Atkins diet popularity, low carb diets have been shown time and again to be effective for weight loss. The terms ketosis and ketones came into popular usage back then so when I first heard of a ‘keto’ or ‘ketogenic’ diet I had already a good idea what it would involve and I was pretty much exactly right.

In essence low carb diets have been around since forever and you can bet that by 2020 or so there will be some new iteration and you will have to bite your tongue listening to your friends talk about the benefits of this incredible new diet where all you have to do is live on blood sausage and eggs for six weeks or whatever else it happens to be.

Keto Is A Diet. Vegan Is A Lifestyle.

The problem here is that there is no vegan diet. If you eat nothing but pineapples all day and wear only clothing and shoes made from hemp then you are a vegan, but you will probably only live six months or so before you drop dead in your hemp jumpsuit.

So to compare vegan to (popular) keto is to compare an ethical lifestyle choice to a weight loss fad diet. Now don’t get me wrong, keto is a serious and very well studied diet with a specific application to certain medical conditions, in that sense it is not a fad, only in its weight loss sense which will surely pass as they all do. Sooner or later most people get fed up eating nothing but fat and meat all the time because very few of us are built that way, no matter how attractive it might seem at first.

However, large-scale studies of low animal product and no animal product consumption groups and societies such as the Okinawan islanders and 7th Day Adventists show them to be overall healthier in terms of heart diesease, breast and prostate cancer, and overall life expectancy. Vegans also in general,  can expect to lose weight, lower blood sugar levels and improve kidney function, experience fewer of certain kinds of cancer, have a lower risk of heart diesease, experience less arthritic pain and also live longer. If you were to exclusively focus on health oriented vegans and take out the percentage that eat poorly then these indicators of good health would go up.

So, here’s the deal, popular keto is more focused on weight loss, vegan is more general, including lifestyle, ethics and the envirnoment. If you just want to lose weight then I don’t recommend looking to just quit eating meat, dairy and eggs without thoroughly planning what you are goiing to replace htem with.

Keto is terrific option to lose weight, but if you can turn your keto diet into a vegan-keto or your vegan diet into a keto-vegan, then not only will you be almost guaranteed the weight-loss, but you also can live ethically and protect the planet as well.

Low Carb AND Vegan?

Dr. Atkins clearly stated in his bestselling book the Atkins Revolution that you could not be a vegetarian and do his diet. I was disappointed at the time and so when I heard about keto I presumed ti would be the same. But we have come a long way since then.

So lets look at what you can and can’t eat on a keto diet and then look at just how easy it is to make the modifications necessary to stay or to become vegan – although I wound’t recommend becomign vegan with a keto version, take it slow and easy on yourself at first, because although I tend to jump into things feet first, it can be a big, big change for some and can take some plannign and time..

So lets break this down into a handy table format:

KETO DON’TS	KETO DOS	VEGAN SUBSTITUTES
GRAINS	MEAT	TOFU, SEITAN, TEMPEH, TVP, VEGAN PROTEIN SHAKES, etc
SUGAR	LEAFY GREENS	LEAFY GREENS
FRUIT	ABOVE GROUND VEGGIES	ABOVE GROUND VEGGIES
TUBERS (potatoes, yams etc)	HIGH FAT DAIRY	COCONUT YOGHURT, VEGAN CHEESE, COCONUT CREAM, VEGAN CREAM (unsweetened), COCONUT MILK, COCONUT OIL, VEGAN BUTTER
	NUTS AND SEEDS	NUTS AND SEEDS
	AVOCADO	AVOCADO
	BERRIES	BERRIES
	SWEETENERS	SWEETENERS
	SATURATED FATS (coconut oil etc)	SATURATED FATS (coconut oil etc)

 

Vegan-Keto The Easy Way

Now do you see how simple that is? I mean, could it be easier? The diet is nearly identical except that you switch out your chicken, beef, pork and fish for tofu, tempeh, protein shakes and seitan. If you are vegan already then you absolutely know how to do this and it will be a cinch. Will the effect be as good as meat based keto? Possibly not if you are looking to prevent epileptic seizures. If this is the case then you need to be following only what your medical team is tellling you, but chances are you are just looking to be healtheir and lose weight. So if you cut out all the pasta, beans, potatoes, lentils and so on and eat organic non-GMO tofu, tempeh, good quality vegan shakes, then yes you will begin to lose weight. If you are a ‘desert and sugar’ vegan then again, YES, my god of course you will lose weight.

The macros in the average keto diet are 70% fat, 25% protein and 5% net carbs (total carb weight less the weight of any fiber contained in the food source). This is so easy and arguably healthier on a vegan diet than any other. Coconut oil and butter, olive oil, nut spreads all have very high and usually healthy fat contents. Most vegan cheese and cream substitites are made with coconut oil so these things are really easy to substitute. 25% protein, again so easy to replace with soy based mince, tofu and the others mentioned above, together with the occasional high quality vegan protein shake and you will easily hit your protein targets. That just leaves your 5% carbs which will be all plant based any way.

Vegan-keto Cookbooks? Do They Exist?

So all you need now is the cookbook right?

Well, using the table above you don’t have to get a vegan keto cookbook. All you would need is any popular keto book and sustitute the meat and dairy ingredients as required. You might need to read the back of a few packages to get the numbers right but believe me you will need to do that on a meat or dairy based version of the diet as well.

It turns out however, that there are a ton of vegan-keto cookbooks out there already.

Check out these guys (disclosure: all affiliate links here – buy through me to help this site grow), if you need inspiration, either as a vegan going keto or as a keto enthusiast going vegan.

Some of these cost as little as .99cents via Kindle download so you can’t really go wrong. Just click on the images to download samples or to buy them on Amazon.

Here’s a great book if you are not quite ready to go full vegan yet.

And here’s great book if you have already taken that step:

And here is a great general purpose book that you could use to learn about the diet and then just substitute ingredients as you go when you feel you can.

What Do You Think?

What are your thoughts on the ketogenic diet, going vegan and potentially combinding the two?

Let me know in the comments if this blog post has been helpful, helpless or hopeless. All constructive feedback is totally welcome!

Liam at ZenYogaHealth

*Massive disclaimer. This entire blog is entirely my opinion only. I am not medically trained and hold no qualifications in nutrition. If you need dietary advice go to a nutritionist or see your doctor.

**Article orginally published on https://zenyogahealth.com/blogs/zenyogablog/keto-vs-vegan-can-you-do-both