By Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina

Book Publishing Company, 2000
Paperback, 281 pages, $25.95 Cdn.
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Syd Baumel

If you're thinking of becoming a vegan – or are, but want to make sure you're doing it right – you couldn't ask for two better-qualified experts to guide you.

Authors Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina are registered dietitians who have played prominent roles in the American Dietetic Association's committees and publications on vegetarianism. Melina has been a vegan for eight years and Davis was still "becoming vegan" herself when this book was published last year.

Becoming Vegan lives up to its credentials. It manages to be chockfull of expert, well-referenced information on nutrition, in general, and a healthy vegan diet in particular, while being friendly and accessible. Davis and Melina take a strong "evidence based" approach to the do’s and don'ts of vegan eating, informatively describing relevant studies throughout. This is no starry-eyed polemic. When studies repeatedly suggest that eating plenty of nuts will cut your risk for coronary heart disease by 40 to 60 percent, they happily report it. But when research shows that some vegans risk slow nerve and brain rot (and other ills) from marginal vitamin B12 deficiency and that most alleged vegan B12 sources (such as algae, spirulina, seaweeds, and fermented soy products) are simply unreliable, Davis and Melina emphasize that too. (The solution: just eat B12-fortified vegan foods or take a supplement. B12 itself is vegan; it comes from bacteria.)

Becoming Vegan has a significant edge over books of its kind written ten or even five years ago. It devotes a full chapter to the burgeoning field of phytonutrients (there are thousands of these natural medicines in vegetables and other plant foods, but none in animal foods). And much of a long, cutting edge chapter on "Big Fat Lies" deals with a new cause for concern that few vegans are likely to be concerned about (I wasn’t): deficiency of long chain omega-3 fatty acids. On that score, Davis and Melina note that while a vegan diet can be very well-endowed with the plant-based, short chain omega-3 fatty acid, linolenic acid, studies have found that vegans' blood levels of long chain omega-3s tend to be much lower than even the very low levels of the average omnivore. The problem is that the human body converts the short chains to long chains very inefficiently. And that's a scary thing, because the brain – including the brain of a baby a vegan woman might be carrying or nursing – demands long chain omega-3s. Nutritionists hope, but aren't absolutely sure, that ramping up intake of linolenic acid-rich foods like flax, hemp, walnuts, and dark leafy greens will meet vegans' long chain omega-3 needs. But people vary in their ability to convert short to long; and it may prove, Davis and Melina suggest, that some need to take long chain omega-3s directly. While omnivores can just eat fatty fish, vegans would have to eat large quantities of seaweed or (more conveniently) take supplements of microalgae, which is where fish get their long chain omega 3s. I’m oversimplifying here. But Davis and Melina don’t: they walk you through all the pertinent facts and considerations. This is popular health writing at its best.

originally published in The Aquarian, Summer 2001