Welcome back! Today, I am very excited to share an interview with registered dietician, Vesanto Melina. If you've been vegan for a while, you've probably read some of her work. She is the co-author of internationally acclaimed books on plant-based nutrition, including Becoming Vegan, which is used as a textbook around the world, The Kick Diabetes Cookbook, and Plant-Powered Protein. Her work, co-authored with Brenda Davis, has been translated into 10 languages and is recognized by the American Library Association as “the go-to books” on the subject. She has taught at the University of British Columbia and Bastyr University, received prestigious awards for her contributions to dietetics, and is the lead author of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ latest Position Paper on Vegetarian Diets.
As an internationally renowned speaker, Vesanto has shared her expertise in 14 countries, and today, she’s bringing that knowledge to you. In this episode, we dive into key questions for menopausal women on a vegan journey, such as her thoughts on whether vegans are really getting enough protein, some easy and delicious ways to get more protein into your diet, the biggest challenges with menopause and weight loss, what she does to thrive in her senior years, and how you can too. So get ready for this interview with Vesanto Melina!
AP: Hi, Vesanto. Welcome to the podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you on.
VM: Hi, Anna. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
AP: Would you mind sharing for the audience your story of veganism and how you wrote your books, and how you transitioned from vegetarianism to veganism?
VM: Okay. Well, I actually started teaching nutrition at UBC a long time ago, 1965. Probably some people weren't even born that are listening to that, or even their mothers weren't born.
So I've had a very long experience in this quite lively field of nutrition since a long time ago. And when I was in my 30s and 40s, I actually spent four years in India. And that was really interesting because that's a very plant-based culture.
And they're lacto-vegetarian. They use a lot of dairy. They thought cows were sacred and tended to treat them well, although that doesn't always happen at the end.
And they also have a concept that we get more lives, and we could even have lives as animals. So they have just ingrained in their culture that plant-based works. And so they know how to do it. They know how to make it taste good.
So anyway, when I was in India, which some of us were doing in the 70s and 80s, I became vegetarian. And then when I came back, I started doing workshops for dietitians and for the public through the university, just to show people how to do that.
And dietitians hadn't really been learning about plant-based. It was kind of thought of as a hippie thing to do, you know, that you didn't shave your legs and you wore sandals and you ate vegetarian food. And so anyway, I did that for a while, and it was actually really popular.
It was on the national news, and it was just the right thing at the right time. And then in 1993, Brenda Davis and I wrote a book called Becoming Vegetarian. And we had a chapter called Without Dairy in that book.
And I wrote that chapter. We take turns, sort of our first author for certain chapters. We kind of divide it up.
And so when I wrote that Without Dairy chapter, I thought, oh, I could do this. It's not so hard. And so I just did it.
Of course, the hard thing for a lot of people is leaving out the cheese. And we didn't have good vegan cheeses at that point, but I just thought I could do that. So I wrote this chapter.
It wasn't saying dairy was bad. It just said, if you don't want to do that, here's how to manage and get the nutrients, the calcium, the protein, the riboflavin, the different things that are in dairy. And so that was even though it was called Becoming Vegetarian, it was actually a vegan book.
And I had also been learning then about how animals are treated. I remember visiting a woman who was concerned about the plight of farm animals and how like little dairy calves are, if they say they're being transported to the slaughterhouse, if they fall in the truck and break their leg or something, they just put a chain around their leg and haul them off and they clunk onto the ground. So anyway, I just found the things that happened quite horrifying.
So that was fine with me to avoid doing that, you know, just participating in that whole realm. And so anyway, we did our first book in 1993, and the Dairy Farmers of Canada actually wrote a 45-page booklet against our book because of this chapter that said Without Dairy. And that was quite devastating.
They gave that their booklet out across Canada, but it wasn't that well done. And something happened. It made our book a bestseller.
It was one of the contributing factors. So it turned out not to be so terrible after all, but at first it seemed pretty terrible. So anyway, and so we had our plant-based workshops where actually Without Dairy and Without Eggs right from the beginning, you know, we learned these kind of tragic things that happened.
The boy, little chicks that are male and they can't be egg producers get kind of ground up and fed back to their mother, the mother, you know, chickens. And it's just kind of a whole tragic situation for animals.
AP: So much cruelty in animal agriculture.
VM: That's right. So it also became evident to me that our food guide was kind of racist because 70% of the world's population has some degree of lactase insufficiency. They don't have the enzyme after weaning age, like after the age of about four, they don't have the enzymes that will break down lactose.
You know, it's just a normal thing. When you grow up, you don't do that anymore because you're not breastfeeding anymore. But it changes.
So indigenous folks, many people from Asia, like the Chinese people, they never had dairy as part of their normal food supply. Indigenous didn't. Well, it turned out 70% of the world's population had some degree of lactose intolerance or lactase insufficiency, lactase as the enzyme.
And so I realized that our food guide, which at that point required dairy products, you were supposed to drink four cups of milk a day, that it was unsuitable to be advocating that for a population across Canada that is so mixed in origin and including the people that were here in the first place, the indigenous folks. So anyway, it was just a gradual evolution. And our book became really popular right away.
And also we were interested in having an American publisher then. We had first a Canadian one and an American one. And then our book became popular in other languages, French, Portuguese.
Now our books, I guess we have 14 books and they're in 10 languages. So in many, many different places. And now we just had a landmark this month, having sold a million books in English.
So I've just seen this, what was kind of a fringe topic decades ago, over three decades ago, now is really appealing to a lot of people. And now we've got the environmental interest. So our last book, Plant-Powered Protein, actually reached number one on Amazon in the sustainability category.
AP: Congratulations!
VM: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was really interesting.
And I've been writing with my co-author, Brenda Davis, who was in, we were both in the Fraser Valley at that point. And she's kind of considered in many, many parts of the world a vegan rock star. And she's a really fun, lively speaker.
She'll get standing ovations at huge medical conferences. And I think she's spoken in 28 countries and over 40 states. And I've spoken in a lot of countries, maybe half as many as her.
But anyway, we just had a really wonderful experience doing this and meet people from all over the world. So in the last year, I guess, I've spoken a year and a half, maybe spoken in Philadelphia, Manhattan, New Jersey, California, Costa Rica, Vancouver, Victoria. And I just had to turn down an invitation to Hawaii because it wouldn't fit in my schedule.
But it must have been hard to turn that down. You know, that was hard to do. Anyway, people are just interested all over the place.
And you get the feeling of what a good world it is. You know, we're visiting these people that are really trying to make a difference. And now, of course, the interest has shifted a lot from the health reasons for going plant-based are very important for the different associations, you know, whether it's heart, diabetes, cancer, and the animal issues are becoming more and more widely known.
There's Animal Justice, a really, really good group. And then the environmental impacts are starting to be appealing to young people who want to be a world left and, you know, to diminish the impact of these forest fires and so on. And also for seniors who want to be able to leave a decent world to their children, their grandchildren, and avoid these tragedies.
AP: Yeah, so many reasons to go vegan.
VM: That's right. And so what my mission has been, I haven't been, you know, saying you have to do this kind of thing.
I've just been saying, when you choose to do this, or if you do, here's how to do it in really good health. And here's how to make it taste good. So those are our little projects, you know, in the world of what we're doing.
Do Vegans Get Enough Protein?
AP: Do you find that people on a plant-based diet are generally getting enough protein?
VM: We've had certainly interesting issues with this. I do consulting for people. My website is nutrispeak.com, and there's a consulting area there. And I find that mostly people who come to me as clients are quite surprised. Hey, I'm getting enough protein easily. Like we do an overall assessment.
It's in much more detail and covers more nutrients than the free nutritional analysis does. So most of them are doing okay. And I also find some that are not because they're limiting calories.
They're limiting the kind of foods they eat. So I'll get just a few because of their food choices or difficulties like getting to the store or knowing how to make beans taste good or having food sensitivities. They don't get enough.
Or one, I know that some people have kind of rigid ideas about what to eat and when to eat and limit things. And so I've had a few people that were short of protein. So it's not really typical.
Now, the other issue here is, and I mentioned that nutrition is a very lively field. It's evolving. So the first vitamin was actually discovered.
Vitamin, guess what, letter A was discovered in 1914, just like 110 years ago. And this science has been evolving. We're still kind of arguing or discussing the scientists.
How much protein exactly do we need when we're older? How much vitamin D do we need? We don't have big enough studies on some of these points that we can give a really solid, solid answer.
Increased Requirements for Protein in Menopause and Senior Years
So the protein one, for example, has been quite lively and we see different opinions, different takes on it. And one of the things that I've found, and I should say I'm 82. And so I've been interested, what's it like as you get older?
And I started writing my books when I was 50. So I've been in this realm of, although I help people at all the different ages, you know, in pregnancy and all the way through. But I've also been very interested in what's it like for women?
What's it like as we pass menopause? But we find that in the Canadian and American recommendations, we don't suggest any difference in protein when you get older, not in the official recommendations. We haven't really updated them, in my view.
In the European recommendations, they suggest that you need about 20% more, or in the Scandinavian, even about 40% more protein as you get older. And this is because you don't absorb as well. You may have lost some muscle mass.
And it seems that as we get older, we probably should be upping our protein intake. But at the same time, we have to decrease our caloric intake because we're not needing as many calories. A lot of people aren't getting quite as much exercise as when they were doing a lot of fitness things.
I mean, it's good that we do keep doing those, but most people diminish that realm. And so anyway, we're finding that you should really focus on protein when you get older and maybe cut back on some certain things that just provide calories.
Ways to Get More Protein as a Vegan
AP: What are some ideas for getting enough protein?
VM: Well, there's one in our Plant-Powered Protein book. That was the most recent one that you just got to number one on Amazon. My absolute favorite recipe is marinated tofu.
And I have an air fryer, which everybody doesn't have, but I found it really, really good as a senior having an air fryer because one of the things is it'll kind of do its thing. And when it gets finished the time that you set it for, it stops. And that is so good if you go off and do something else, you know, work at your computer or go out and do gardening or forget about it.
You don't want to, "oops", you know, it stops. And I really value that aspect of preparing food that it'll not just burn at the bottom kind of thing or, you know, have the oven on too long, that kind of issue. So anyway, these little cubes of firm tofu get marinated.
It could be for an hour. It could be overnight. It could be three days.
I've usually got these in my fridge marinating. And what they're marinating is low-sodium tamari, which is like a soy sauce, or you could use regular soy sauce or tamari. And some, a little bit of toasted sesame oil, a little bit of rice vinegar, some grated ginger and grated or minced garlic.
They have it at the stores now, little jars of minced garlic, so you don't even have to chop it up if you use that quite a bit. So anyway, you've got your little tofu sitting in the marinade. And you just use a slotted spoon and put it in the air fryer.
And in about 11, 12 minutes, it's ready. You get these delicious little cubes. And I find for a protein source, it's one that really, really works well for me.
You can have it as a snack like potato chips, except that it's a really healthy, you know, protein delivery system. So it works very well. That's one favorite way.
AP: Sounds delicious.
VM: Yeah, it is really, really good. And the other thing to notice is that people could expand their use of legumes. And legumes are things that grow, they have roots that take up nitrogen well because of just how the soil and the microorganisms that are down there.
So legumes, they're things that grow in pods, and they include about 20 kinds of beans, beans, lentils, tofu, soy foods, yeah. So if people can expand their range of what ones they like, and some people think, oh, my mother made beans and they were horrible, you know, when I was a kid, I never liked them. But it's good to start thinking about options, okay.
What are some ways that, you know, and if you can have a group of friends that you're sharing meals with or look online, you know, what on earth do I do with aduki beans or what do I do with white beans, black beans, red beans, kidney beans, and a sassy beans, they're just all these different kinds, edamame. And you can find just delicious ways to start using them. So they're very valuable, whereas meat is a protein source, but usually beyond the protein in it, the rest is entirely fat.
Or even with cheese, 75% of the calories can be fat, and you do get protein from them, you know, from the different animal products. It can go, a few of them are low fat, but even the legumes are lower fat still, and they provide carbohydrate legumes too, which carbohydrate kind of got a bad name because so much of the carbohydrates people are eating are starches, refined starches, and sugar, like the very refined things. But the carbohydrates in whole plant foods are very valuable and they have a gradual delivery and that's what keeps our brain going.
So legumes are just a wonderful balance of lots of protein, very little fat, most of them have about 3% calories from fat instead of 50 or 75% in a lot of the animal products. And so they have the carbohydrates to run your brain, which is the main fuel for the brain. So anyway, it's just good to start thinking, hmm, how could I get some more beans, peas, lentils?
And then peanuts are also in the legume group. So all these are things that grow in pods, legumes. And you could have just whole grain toast and peanut butter.
Simple, you know, and not put margarine on, just put peanut butter and you'll get a good protein source in that. And then, of course, there's really good. I like curry in a hurry.
I use a curry paste called Patak's. It's a British company and they have it at major supermarkets. It's all over the place.
Anyway, you just cook, say, some red lentils and onion and water and then add some Patak's curry paste after. And you could add in some vegetables, like you've got some cauliflower leftovers or some tomato or something like that. You can add that too, either after it's cooked or during the cooking.
What about Mock Meats?
So there's some pretty simple ways to do this. And, of course, there are a lot of veggie meats now. Now, we're in our books and in our thinking, are going a lot more towards whole foods plant-based, not so much the process.
The processors are still healthier than the animal products, but we're finding that the whole foods approach, where you've actually got like lentils and onions and maybe some vegetables, that's more valuable in terms of health than when it's really processed and they've got a lot of additives and different processing methods that diminish the nutritional value a little bit. So the whole foods are even better.
AP: Yeah, I agree. I tend not to eat the mock meats very often, but maybe once in a while at a restaurant or something, just if it's a treat, but not as a regular.
VM: That's right. And they can be valuable like when your son-in-law comes over or your grandson that wouldn't be caught dead eating, you know, a lentil. You can use some of these alternative things and then go, huh, that was pretty good or won't even recognize that the veggie meat was a plant-based product.
AP: That happened to my husband once actually. He went through a drive-through and ordered a Beyond Burger and he didn't realize that it was vegan. And I told him after, how did you like the vegan burger? "Oh, that was vegan? That's so good."
VM: That's right. Yeah. So I find that these veggie meats really have a place and I wouldn't downplay them, just not to focus that as your main protein source, but they are valuable.
And they also have less of an environmental impact. So that's one of the things that we're finding is that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, land use, land acidification of the land, like near the big pork slaughterhouses and the facilities where they're growing animals, they of course produce a lot of manure, a lot of waste, and that seeps into the land and causes problems, causes air pollution like near the big pig farms, and then also water pollution and water use. So all of these things, like for greenhouse gas emissions, beef produces 31 times more greenhouse gas emissions than tofu, 31 times as much. So people are starting to realize that and they'll back off.
And chicken isn't quite as bad as just about like three or four times as much as tofu. But the people who really are going, hey, I'm worried about these wildfires. I want to help the environment.
They'll back right off to the tofu and the pulses, the beans, lentils, the legumes, and all of these environmental factors. There's five categories of environmental impact and they're all way better when you go to the plant protein foods.
Is Soy Good for You?
AP: Soy tends to have a bad name.
VM: I know. Yeah, and I got it mainly because of two guys. It's hilarious.
So these two guys, one of them ate 12 servings of soy a day, if you can imagine, the other one ate 20. And they didn't know each other. They just had this lifestyle where they did that.
I don't know if one of them lived next to a factory and got it for free or free soy milk. I don't know what happened. Anyway, at the end of a year, they had developed sort of breasts.
And so they went to doctors, wondered what the heck they were doing wrong, and the doctors had quit that very unbalanced diet. Luckily, they had smart enough doctors. Doctors don't really learn that much nutrition, but these guys figured that out.
And they got back to normal. One of them was young, like around 20, and one was around 60, these two men. So anyway, I think the meat industry and Weston Price, the different sort of anti-vegetarian groups, really made a big thing about this and put it out all over the world that soy wasn't good for guys.
Well, eating 12 or 20 servings of carrots or Brussels sprouts or anything is not wise. He could have focused that much, that most of your calories are coming from one food source. That is not a smart move.
And so anyway, we've realized over time that the actual opposite is true, that men reduce their risk of prostate cancer if they include some soy foods. So it's the exact opposite of what was in these rumors, which are unfounded. So the one point is, don't eat just such an unbalanced diet and people don't anywhere in the world, just focus on one food and that's it.
And also, soy is not damaging. It's actually beneficial. It definitely reduces our risk of breast cancer when you feed your little girl soy and probably reduces the risk of prostate cancer.
And we're finding too, if men get prostate cancer later and then they go into remission, the soy helps that going into remission. So as you see, we're just evolving our sense of our nutrition, our sense of what's good and what's bad and how things work. And so we definitely recommend.
There's really easy ways to get the protein and it's not very hard, but you do have to make kind of a shift. There's not a lot of room in your diet for soda pop and sugary things and very low protein foods like donuts. There just isn't.
They could be a very, very rarely once in a while, but I think we're finding that the more you just focus on the whole plant foods. And it's interesting, like you start going, I know my coauthor Brenda Davis, who's this vegan rock star, just wants to inspire people to just have an apple or have some fruit, have celery and hummus for snacks, that kind of thing.
Menopause and Weight Gain
AP: What are your thoughts on postmenopausal weight gain?
VM: Oh, yeah. When I went through that, I had a really, really good doctor who was telling me that women always gain 10 pounds around menopause. I mean, of course not everyone does, but that's a very typical pattern.
Our sort of hormonal balance shifts, a few things shift and people often gain 10 pounds that they hadn't intended to and their patterns haven't changed all that much, but they do gain that. So that's one of the tricky things that happen. And then after menopause, we find that people's absorption of nutrients like protein can diminish and yet your caloric requirements are less.
So it's a tricky situation. Here you've got maybe a few extra pounds gained. You aren't needing as many calories and you do need probably more protein.
So it's really an important time to start shifting your diet just with the hormonal changes that happen and it's also important to shift lifestyle so that you do get some exercise. It's not just gardening and running after the grandkids, but you might want to do some fitness classes. I know the ones I'm doing right now and I'm 82 are doing about three aerobics type classes and these are for seniors.
You're not competing in marathons. Although I have done triathlons.
I've done those until fairly recently, but they have, like, mini triathlons where you only have to go, you know, less distances, cycle 20 kilometers and swim, you know, some certain lengths of the swimming pool and that kind of thing. But it's really good to start doing that kind of thing. And my husband and I walk around the lake every morning and I can do a two-minute plank now because we're doing those a lot in our fitness classes.
And I do a yoga class every week and one on balance because I had a hip replacement and that's really helpful just to get that strength. And then one that I just started last week was women's self-defence. Oh, cool.
And everybody in the class is young except me. And so the teacher's having to adjust what she teaches us, you know, a little bit because my needs are different. But she's happily doing it.
It's a 12-week course. And so I'm kind of excited because she teaches us that things like how you stand. She works with the City Hall and also with a big shopping mall, a huge one.
She says just how you stand, how you walk has an effect on whether people will attack you or not. Like, if you've got a kind of up-there chest, a little bit out stance, proud, you know, that kind of thing, they won't look at you for the one that they're going to try and rob. They'll pick the one that's kind of slouched over, timid looking.
Anyway, it was interesting. I hadn't thought about that before, but there are these important things to look at or when we travel. I know people that have been, you know, robbed in Europe, in Paris or Italy, you know, and you just want to make it clear that you're not going to be, you know, just taking that lightly.
I think we also have to, in one of the later classes, learn how to shout better. And so I want, you know, as we get older, and my goal is to be quite old, like maybe a hundred to eighteen in fairly reasonable health. You know, we have to keep working at maintaining our strength, our power, our posture, our vocal strength, you know, just these different areas.
And it can be quite fun, and you can get out there with a group. Many communities have, you know, regular meetings and fitness groups that gather, and so it can be quite an important activity.
What to Focus on to Thrive Post-Menopause
AP: What would you recommend women to focus on after menopause? And if they want to live to be 118, what would be your recommendations?
VM: Oh, yeah, yeah. That's what, you know, we'd like that. Well, one of the things is to definitely eat more plant-based.
You don't have to go 100% vegan. I want to for environmental and animal reasons, but for the health reasons, including some fish in the research also turns out to be a reasonable choice, although a lot of the fish are in waters that are getting very polluted. So some of the research is kind of older when it wasn't so polluted.
But anyway, to eat much, much, much plant-based, like at least 80% up to 100% somewhere in there, and preferably go more towards the whole foods plant-based. So not the ultra-processed stuff, you know, as much as you can, whole foods.
And get some exercise, whether it is saying to your buddy, oh, let's instead of just going to the coffee shop and sitting there, let's walk around the park when we do it.
Or, you know, in our little community, I live in something called co-housing, we got a treadmill, or one of those elliptical machines that was for sale had quite a good price. So people use that even when it's icy and snowy, and you can't get outside that much. Or, you know, go to the local pool, go swimming.
Some people like classes, some people don't want to be told what to do, they just want to do something. And during COVID, we did it three times a week online classes. And so there's so many different ways, but it's good to find something that suits your personality and your lifestyle.
And it's also good to have community. And so one of the ways that I found was working well for some people is to live in co-housing. And there's a website called co-housing.ca, which show the different areas. And there's co-housing.org in the US. So people have their own place completely, you know, with kitchen, bathrooms, and so on. We have a three bedroom with two and a half, two bedroom, two bathrooms.
Anyway, you've got other people in this community. And we've got a big common house, I think it's 40,000 square feet or 4,000. I can't remember.
Anyway, it's got a big dining room, we can have 50 people having a meal together. It's got a meeting room, a business center, a children's playroom, like for when grandchildren or children come over.
It's got underground parking. So it's got a number of shared facilities. And it does bring people together.
And it also brings people who want to be in community together. So that co-housing, it's just one word, it doesn't have a dash or anything, is quite an interesting, it's a Danish concept that came in in the 70s. Because people always used to live in villages, you know, they'd have, like the indigenous community had a longhouse and they'd have town squares in different European areas, you know, they, everybody would live in these villages and there'd be one person that's good at this and one that's good at that.
So I find now that, you know, somebody will say, I've got, I need to get to the airport Thursday morning, could anybody take me? And you might pay them or do a trade or something like that. Parents will say, my child gets home from school at three o'clock and I can't get home till four, could anybody help out for that hour?
And so there's a lot of this helping each other. And interestingly, we have meals now, three times a week. A meal typically costs $5.
And we've got teams of three that cook and three that clean up. And you probably do this once a month, but then you can eat three meals a week if you want. And I'm finding, interestingly, that we started off with some meat, chicken, fish meals and some more plant-based vegetarian or vegan meals.
But it's really moved a lot towards plant-based with time. We figured out really good things. People learned how to cook, prepare things that were really good.
And so even with some of the meals that maybe have chicken, they'll offer a tofu alternative pretty well always. And then a lot of the meals in general. And I had an interesting evolution with that because, of course, I wanted to tell them how horrible meat was and all that stuff, but that doesn't actually work.
You just lose all your friends if you try that one or half your friends anyway. So I found that over time, just helping people get good tasting stuff. I had one woman that told me not to tell her anything about plant-based.
And she'd had a stroke and had weight issues and so on. But over time, she could develop reasons where she wanted to go more plant-based and ended up giving me one of my best recipes. You see these things happen, but you realize how it's like for any of us, we want to evolve at our own speed and feeling like we're the ones running the boat or whatever and not do it according to what somebody else's opinion is, how fast you should move and evolve.
So that's been really interesting. So the things I've mentioned so far are the diet, the exercise, living in community, and then there's things like the stress reduction. And I think you do some meditation, that kind of thing.
AP: Yeah, plays a huge role in all the menopause symptoms.
VM: Yeah, what do you find with that? How does it work?
AP: Oh, stress can really exacerbate the symptoms of menopause. And I find that meditation helps with a lot of things like anxiety and insomnia, brain fog. It can also really help with the feelings of grief or anger that some women may have around menopause.
And even just being able to take a few minutes to yourself during the day just to relax and breathe can have a big impact on your well-being.
VM: Wow. Yeah. So what kinds of meditation do you do?
There's so many different varieties, aren't there, that people can approach it from an active role, a sitting-by-yourself role, having sounds? What are you exploring?
AP: I teach two forms of meditation. One is instinctive meditation, which was developed by the author of The Radiance Sutras, which is a really beautiful book. And the other form of meditation is yoga nidra, which is the yoga of deep sleep.
And both of these forms involve a lot of awareness, without judgment, of what's going on in your body, sort of the sensations in your body. And neither one of them involves sitting in any uncomfortable positions like lotus pose. You can just be however you feel comfortable.
Yoga nidra, you're usually lying on your back, but you don't have to be. And I find both of these forms of meditation really enjoyable and beneficial.
VM: Yeah, that's wonderful. We go to a class sort of at the end of each week that is the most peaceful yoga class. And you've got to get it a bit early to get your spot.
Some people are loving it, and all it is is just relaxing and being peaceful. I do some physical stretches and so on, but it's wonderful how good that is. And it's good to have the sense of the East and the West, because I was trained, of course, in Western science, but had some chance to explore the East as well, and find that they contribute so much from the different cultures in terms of, you know, medical and healing and understanding of relaxation and how the mind can help with things.
AP: Yeah, wonderful tools to have in your pocket.
VM: That's right.
So those are the main things that'll get you through, I think, to an old age, a healthful old age. And what we want is not that people just get to whatever 100, 118, 90, whatever. But that there are decades before that are not just bed pans and tubes, doctor visits and that kind of thing, but that you're able to garden, to be out in the sun, do a bit of travel if you want, or just get some exercise and have fun with family and friends and grandkids and so on.
You know, we want the good, good decades up until that time.
AP: Absolutely.
VM: Yeah.
AP: Is there anything else that you want women to know?
Women and Leadership
VM: Well, I think women, I'm glad, however much women are coming into leadership. Of course, that's been a change in my lifetime, that women, I remember when my mom had me, she wasn't allowed to be a teacher. Because she had married.
She had to quit. She could be a preschool teacher, but she couldn't be a school teacher anymore. You know, I just when I see our concepts of, you know, how women have changed and evolved.
My daughter was just telling me that she had noticed how, like in my era, we were kind of wanting to go out there and be wild and, you know, break loose from our mothers for rigid patterns or more contained, refined, restrained. And they were like latchkey kids, a lot of them. And the different stages, the different generations and decades have different things that women are learning and evolving.
So, but it does seem when I look at the women in leadership roles that they can sure contribute a lot when they get to be leaders. So I hope that'll keep happening more and more in political positions and health positions. Yeah.
Vegan Resources
AP: Vesanto, you also have some resources to share with the audience. Can you talk a bit about those?
VM: Yeah, we've got several websites. So my main one is Nutrispeak.com. And that one includes how to do consultations that people want to and I do them online.
And with people all over the place, many different areas. And also plant-poweredprotein.com is about our latest protein book.
So that one and all of these have podcasts and interviews. I guess we do probably an interview every week or two and podcasts and often do speaking in different areas. And then there's the kickdiabetescookbook.com.
And that one, that is for people who have prediabetes or diabetes, but it's also of interest to people that want to keep their weight, either back off, you know, lose a bit of weight, or have prediabetes or actually have diabetes. It's also suitable for heart disease, but it has recipes with no added sugar, no added oil, and they taste good. Yeah.
And that book is actually used now by the New York hospitals. So we found that a lot of our books are very popular in, you know, many, many parts of the world. So there was the plantpoweredprotein.com.
And then the other website I want to mention is becomingvegan.ca.
And that is interesting because it's more for health professionals and our Becoming Vegan Comprehensive Edition is used as a textbook in the US, Canada and Taiwan, and very popular in Chinese and Taiwan. And it has a lot about becoming vegan, including points about menopause and different, you know, what it's like for seniors, different stages of the life cycle. And it's all referenced.
So it's very sound scientifically, all our books are. And they're written with my co-author Brenda Davis, who's wonderful. Yeah.
AP: The vegan rockstar.
VM: Yeah, the vegan rockstar. She is. She's just so, she could do very, very good shoulder stance and head stance at the age of 65.
So I can't do that.
AP: Well, I think you're a vegan rockstar too!
VM: Thank you. Well, that's what I really appreciate, you know, people being able to still do stuff and have fun at it when we now at this stage of life can be a lot better.
I feel like I'm a lot smarter and nicer and more together than when I was young. And I want to keep it that way.
AP: So many positive changes as we go through menopause and as we get older that people don't always think about, but there's definitely.
VM: There are. I find after I was 60, I had to start taking care with some things, or I could slide downhill a bit. You know, I had to make sure I wasn't so focused on the exercise or, and my diet has been more plant based and more whole foodsy.
And then, and I find that the people that aren't doing that are sometimes in pain and, you know, things are getting worse. Their diabetes is looking like a pretty dismal outcome. You know, people are developing cancer and that's related to animal products like bacon and ham and, and all those foods are convincing carcinogens.
Convincing according to the World Health Organization. So it's, it's just good when we, we really look after ourselves and, and after the transition, it doesn't become harder. So it's just good to take care of these things.
So thanks for what you're doing, focusing on this wonderful age group of the women. Yeah.
AP: Yeah, it's my pleasure and my passion to help women through this stage of life.
VM: Yeah, it's great.
AP: And thanks for all you do as well and thanks for being here and sharing your knowledge and wisdom. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
VM: Thank you.
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