someone emailed me today looking for vegan cookbook recommendations. fun!

here is what i wrote back:

this is probably the best book out there in terms of explaining nutritional basics (very cutting edge stuff actually) and has a lot of interesting recipes:

Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life

it's a lot to get your head around. start slow. what i did was start by getting rid of starches and substituting fruit and greens. if you go totally cold turkey all at once you will be hurting!

this woman, dreena burton, is obviously into the same information stream as brazier:

Vive le Vegan!: Simple, Delectable Recipes for the Everyday Vegan Family

...because the recipes look a lot like "Thrive" recipes, but are more focused on stuff that tastes good. she obviously knows what she is doing.

if you get these two books you will be leaping ahead of the curve. a lot of vegans start out trying to emulate their old diets, buying soy this and soy that to sub for butter and cream cheese and so on. this kind of eating is referred to by many now as the "junk food vegan" diet, where you have gone from processed foods to more processed foods. the mantra in The China Study is "plant based whole foods". that is what you are after. Thrive will give you the information you need to meet your protein requirements and sooo much more. it's also about stress management. you'll see. so fascinating...

dreena burton's book will give you recipes that taste good. brazier gives you good recipes too, but you can kinda tell he is after the nutrition more than he is the taste. but brazier gives you the theory, and that is vital to understanding how to do it right. and i make his recipes all the time, moreso that burton's actually. he is easy to understand and the material is fascinating. i still go back and read his book, again and again, trying to get all the principles down solid.