This transcript is AI-generated and [lightly] edited by a human.

Karina Inkster:

You're listening to the No-Bullshit Vegan Podcast, episode 163. Registered dietitian and executive director of Vegan Outreach. Jack Norris joins me to discuss the nonprofit and a few nutrients to which vegans should pay special attention.

Karina Inkster:

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Introducing my guest today, Jack Norris. Jack is the executive director of Vegan Outreach, an animal protection nonprofit promoting vegan eating through their 10 Weeks to Vegan program in over 50 countries. Jack has been a registered dietitian since 2001. He holds a degree in nutrition and dietetics from Life University and performed his dietetic internship at Georgia State University, and maintains the website veganhealth.org. In 2005, Jack was elected to the Animal Rights Hall of Fame. He co-authored the book Vegan for Life with Ginny Messina, and the second edition was published in 2020. Jack was a Division 3, all-American pole vaulter in college, was on a national champion great grandmaster ultimate Frisbee team, and is now an avid pickleball player. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and by the way, he's been vegan since 1988 and his favorite meal is Cincinnati Chili. Here's our conversation. 

Hi Jack. Welcome to the show. Thanks for speaking with me today.

Jack Norris:

Hi Karina. Thank you for having me.

Karina Inkster:

Nice to meet you, and I'm looking forward to hearing about Vegan Outreach, but I feel like I have to ask right off the bat, you've been vegan since 1988. That is amazing. That's two years after I was born! That's freaking awesome. So tell me about this story. I mean, back then we didn't have social media. We didn't have most of the methods of getting information nowadays about how animals are treated and climate change, and we didn't have that in the 80s. So what's the story? How did you come to veganism?

Jack Norris:

As a kid, I always had companion animals. I always loved animals and had a lot of empathy and hated to see them suffer. And in 1986, at age 19, I went on a fishing trip and it was just taken for granted that that's what people do. I mean, I hadn't done much fishing during my life, but it was kind of a family thing that was happening. So I went and then this was the type of fishing trip where you hook a fish and then reel it in and then throw it in a dry cooler and listen to it flop around.

Karina Inkster:

Oh, yikes.

Jack Norris:

I remember I was very disturbed by the whole thing, and I thought if this was a human suffocating or even a dog or cat, we'd be trying to do all we could to help the individual. But since it was a fish and this was fishing, no big deal. I was quite disturbed by it. My family members did not quite understand what was going on with me. I decided not to take part in really in any more fish. So it gave me a lot to think about. I hadn't really thought much about the fact that I eat animals. I think maybe nowadays people actually think about it more because it's an issue, but at the time, there were very few vegetarians and hardly any vegans in the United States. Then in 1987, I was in a record store. If you can remember what records, there used to be stores that sold records.

Karina Inkster:

Yes, indeed.

Jack Norris:

I came across an album called Animal Liberation, which was a benefit album put together for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I thought it looked interesting, and because I'd always cared about animals, I thought I should check this out. So I bought the album in it. It had information about how animals are treated, and it had the statement that PETA was known for saying, I didn't realize it at the time because I'd never heard of PETA, but the animals are not ours to eat or experiment on, which was to me a shocking statement at the time. It wasn't like I was ingrained in that view, but I just never even heard of such a thing. I didn't even think much about any of these issues. It made a profound difference in it and how I thought about what we were doing to animals. I sent away from more information, got on PETA's list, started to learn more about how animals are treated on factory farms, and so I slowly became vegan over the course of maybe a year.

It took me to finally give up milk. As you hinted, there wasn't a lot of information. You couldn't easily go to the internet to see, well, what nutrition do I need to become vegan? I remembered that in high school I had a health teacher who, with a tear in his eye, told us that people had to drink milk for calcium. So I had taken that to heart and believed that to be true. And so I then found out from a chiropractor I was seeing as I was trying to completely go vegan, that leafy greens had calcium and that I could get it from leafy greens, and that was the first I had heard of that. And so I started, I don't know if I really started eating a whole lot of leafy greens, but in my mind it was enough to say, okay, well, I can go vegan because calcium is in plant foods.

Then I started to learn a lot more about nutrition. Right after that, I started getting a lot of popular books on vegan eating that were around at the time. But then shortly after going vegan, I realized that simply removing my part from the killing of animals wasn't enough. It was a big relief to do that, but then it quickly faded into, oh, this is still happening and there's still so many animals suffering. So I co-founded an organization which became Vegan Outreach, and from 1995 to 97, I traveled the country handing out booklets about going vegan to college students, and I handed out tens of thousands. I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I went to, I think it was 240. It was 240 something colleges in I think 40, 44 states. That was the main thing I did for those two years.

And almost every day I met someone who said they had tried but didn't feel healthy. And this was contrary to my own experience. I personally felt quite healthy as a vegan and felt like I had had a few minor health benefits. I mean, I wasn't sick at the time or anything, so there wasn't really a lot to expect, but I felt just fine. And of course there were all the stories at the time about how going vegan would solve all the health problems of the world. And so I didn't know what to do with this information that I was hearing from people. I know that sometimes people were possibly using as an excuse to not be vegetarian or vegan because they didn't really want to be. But I met plenty of people that really wanted to be, and they just felt like they couldn't, the popular vegan literature didn't address any of these issues.

There wasn't any answers for this sort of thing. So I ended up going back to school to receive a formal education in nutrition, and I became a dietitian while I still today don't think there's a one size fits all answers for people who are finding it difficult. There are 10 nutrients that vegans should be aware of that I like to point out to people. That's usually what I talk about when I talk about nutrition. Then there's the Vegan Outreach side of things too that I'm happy to get into as well, but that's kind of my story.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing. We have a client who went vegan, I can't remember exactly what year, but it was in the seventies. It's been over 40 years. It's like 43 or 44 years or something. And it's a similar story where there wasn't a lot of information. There were a lot of myths, and I mean there still are. That's kind of why we have this podcast to bust some of that BS. So that's still there, but it's kind of the same situation where there wasn't a lot of support, and so the work that you're doing and Vegan Outreach as an organization was and is much needed. It's probably especially before the social media era, but now that I think about it, maybe it's needed even more now because now there's more pseudoscience and bullshit that needs to be busted. So it's still needed either way, but I'd love to hear about it. What's the organization as a whole? I do want to hear about the 10 Weeks to Vegan program specifically, but maybe you can kind of start broadly with your organization and its mission and then we can dial down into that specific program. 

Jack Norris:

The mission is for society to stop treating animals as commodities and to respect their individuality as conscious beings. So to do that, we feel like the biggest thing that needs to change is how farmers are treated because it's such a huge aspect of animal suffering, and so that's where our focus is, and we've always focused on trying to help people go vegan. So the main way we do that now, like I mentioned, the Leafleting College that I did for many years, and that was our main focus for at least, I think it was for the better part of 15 years. But then just as the pandemic was about to happen, we started to do more online outreach and we realized that we could reach a lot of people through our ads. We could get a lot of people to sign up for 10 Weeks to Vegan through ads on social media.

And so when the pandemic happened and we had to stop leafletting, and it wasn't just colleges, we would do a lot of outreach at festivals and Comic-Con and cat and dog shows, things like that where we thought people would be interested. That all ended, and so we had to really refocus our efforts. And the positive thing about it was once we developed a few 10 weeks to vegan series for a few countries starting in the United States and Canada, then we expanded to many more countries, and now we're in about 53 countries, I think we have 56 countries covered, but three of them have wars going on right now. So we don't actually promote the theories anymore in those countries. Hopefully, eventually we'll be able to do that again. So that's allowed us to do a lot more outreach around the world and in some of the countries, it's the main form of animal advocacy that's occurring because there are just so little of it, but it does make the nutrition even more important because in some places it's not easy to get things like say B12 supplements, the most basic thing that vegans need that is not easy in some countries to come by.

So we've had to do a lot of work most recently trying to get vegans convenient ways that they'll actually follow in order to stay healthy. The second big program that recently started, we really got it going in the past year, and that's our vegan chef challenge, and that's where we choose a city that doesn't have a lot of vegan options, and we go to restaurants in the city and ask them to add a vegan entree for a month. Then we promote the whole challenge to the whole city for that month, get people to come to the restaurant, try the meals, and then we give awards for the best entrees and desserts and things like that. And it's usually very positive. It's anywhere from 10 to over 60 restaurants involved, and we tend to get a decent amount of news coverage and it's very positive news coverage, and it's very heartening to see news anchors talking about how much they like the vegan food. And so it's quite a change from the media coverage we would get, say in the nineties when it was all negative about animal rights, it seemed for the most part. Anyway, so that's something that we do. And there was 30 vegan chef challenges this year, so 30 challenges in 30 different cities, and then we're hoping next year to do a few more than that. Hopefully it'll just expand and we hope to do it in other countries eventually, but right now we're sticking to the United States.

Karina Inkster:

Wow, that's amazing. What a cool way to promote the positivity and variety of plant foods that are out there and how delicious it can be, and I think it's important to highlight animal abuse and the environmental impacts and all these more negative things as well. But I think this is a great way, especially in the media coverage, to get some positivity out there.

Jack Norris:

Sacramento was amazing. There was so much vegan food there. I never even got to sample a fraction of it because it was so much, and so it just seemed like that was a way to get a lot of people really excited about veganism. So now we're trying to do it in many more cities around the country.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing. Well, hopefully it comes to Canada. I would get involved.

Jack Norris:

We did get it to Anchorage, Alaska, and we did one last February, not necessarily the warmest month of the year.

Karina Inkster:

No kidding.

Jack Norris:

And we're also doing it this year. So yeah, hopefully we'll get to Canada soon.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing. So the 10 Weeks to Vegan program, is that entirely online and people join that and then they've got support for this period of time to make the transition to veganism? Is that kind of the idea?

Jack Norris:

That's right. It's currently a series of 10 emails, one email a week focusing on a particular animal product, how to replace it. We're going to probably change that model real soon, but for now, that's what it is. Then there's also a companion Facebook group so people can join the Facebook group and get all their questions answered that monitors all the nutrition questions throughout all the Facebook groups. We have one Facebook group for almost every country. There's a few that overlap. So we have translators and they translate everything into that language, and then they translate the questions back into English and we answer the questions. And we also have a vegan mentor program where people can get individualized. Usually it's one conversation or two. Sometimes people become friends. We try to match people up in their area, but it often we can't do that. But we do have, I think it's over a thousand mentors on the list that will help people, and we're in many countries, so we do that as well.

Karina Inkster:

That's amazing. Now, this is a nonprofit of course, so I assume that there's a lot of volunteer labor. What do you do for fundraising? I mean, is this all donor supported? 

Jack Norris:

Pretty much. So anyone that wants to help promote veganism, we definitely reach more people the more money we have, and as money comes and as it fluctuates, we have to cut back on our ads or spend more on our ads, and the ads reach people that sign up for 10 Weeks to Vegan, most of them are not vegan already. There's about 10% that are already vegan. At least when they join, they're at least flirting with it. So it's a good use of money because we are always getting people that are interested but not quite taking the steps or made the full commitment, and then we help them. Yes, please, if anyone's interested, you can definitely help us out.

Karina Inkster:

Absolutely. I would encourage that we'll have show notes with direct links to the website and the challenge and programs and such, but veganoutreach.org, is that right?

Jack Norris:

That's right. Thank you.

Karina Inkster:

Of course. Now you're a registered dietitian, and I do want to touch on some of that nutrition info if you're up for it. Maybe just kind of an overview. We've done a couple similar conversations with other dietitians, but is this what you do? Do you see clients? Are you more in an educational role? What does it look like for you at this point?

Jack Norris:

Yeah, more educational. What I mainly do is I monitor the research that comes out and then I maintain a website called veganhealth.org. We have recommendations for vegans. It's now in our article called Nutrition Tips for Vegans, where we lay out all the nutrients that vegans should be aware of. It's not a terribly long article. We try to make it as user-friendly as possible, but if people want more information like, well, why are you saying that vegan should have this much protein? Or why are you saying we should eat this much vitamin B12? We have all the research laid out in other articles that go into great depth, and that's my nutrition work, and I do have Ginny Messina and Reed Mangels. They help me with the site to a large extent, but I'm the one that does most of the research and writes most of the articles. I throw ideas off of them and make sure that I'm staying in my lane.

Karina Inkster:

I remember Reed actually was on the podcast way in its early days. It might've been like episode seven or something, and now we're in the hundred and sixties. So I remember a good conversation about nutrition for vegan children specifically. So if folks want to go back to that, that was a really good convo that I just was reminded of way back in the day, probably around five years ago. Excellent. Okay, so what are the 10 nutrients then that vegans need to think about or need to pay more attention to?

Jack Norris:

Protein is the first one. Of course, it always comes up. It's easy to get to a variety of plant foods. Most vegans are going to randomly get enough protein no matter basically almost anything they eat. But some vegans do feel better when they eat higher protein diets, and this is anecdotal, there's no research on this, but it's anecdotal enough that I want to mention it because sometimes people feel like they feel fatigued and tired and then they increase their protein and they feel a lot better. So I always like to mention it. It's something for most vegans to be concerned about, but if you're not feeling like yourself, try eating more protein and it might help a lot. And then iron is similar to protein in that iron is in a lot of plant foods, you can just randomly get enough iron to meet most needs.

However, there are people that are prone to iron deficiency, whether they're meat eaters or vegan, iron from plant foods – absorption is reduced. But the good thing is that vitamin C increases absorption from plant foods by a large amount, a high percentage. So if you add vitamin C to your meals, you can increase the absorption of iron. So I like to point that out because I'd say about 10 years ago, there was a number of food bloggers who were long distance runners and they came down with classic signs of iron deficiency. Though they never really addressed the fact that it was iron deficiency, they just went back to eating meat and then they'd have this big to-do about the fact that they were no longer vegan and now they feel better. I'd like to point out that distance runners are going to, especially menstruating distance runners, are going to be losing blood through menstruation and through foot strike against the ground over and over.

So that can be a challenge for such people. For most vegans, especially if you feel fine, there's nothing really to worry about with iron. Another thing is to avoid coffee and tea at meals. If you are prone to iron deficiency, because that inhibits absorption of iron and it's not the caffeine, it's the polyphenols, so it's any kind of tea and just avoiding it within an hour of a meal. 

Then there's three nutrients that are most easily obtained through foods that you have to pay attention. It's not just a random thing, and that's calcium. And of course, leafy greens that are low in oxalates. So some leafy greens are high in oxalates like spinach, and you're not going to absorb much calcium from them. But there are quite a few leafy greens that are low in oxalates such as kale, broccoli, collard greens, bok choy, mustard greens and turnip greens and Brussels sprouts that you can get that have high absorbable calcium.

So eating a few servings of those a day will help. There's also dried figs and then there's calcium fortified soy milk and orange juice, especially in the United States, there's a lot of calcium fortified orange juice. I'm not sure about every country. I know in some countries there's probably not. And then calcium set tofu is a big one for me. I do eat a lot of tofu and most of it's calcium set. You just look on the label to see if it has calcium listed in ingredients like calcium sulfate is typically the calcium salts used, and you can get a lot of calcium that way. So I recommend doing those things. So if you're not doing any of those things, your diet is probably too low in calcium if you're a vegan.

Karina Inkster:

And that's also something that we can't test in our blood. So if we go and we get our blood work done, looking at our B12 and our vitamin D and all these things, it won't tell you where you're at intake wise with your calcium. You could do a bone scan, I guess, and see where your bone density is, but still that's not telling you how much you're taking in. So yeah, I agree that it is something we need to pay attention to. And maybe tracking your food for a little bit just to kind of see, even if you're just writing it down, it doesn't have to be in an app. Just highlighting the items that are high in calcium and making sure you've got enough I think would probably be a good call.

Jack Norris:

Yeah, definitely a good idea. And vitamin A is one that it's easy to get to plant foods, but you do have to eat those foods. And a fruit like cantaloupe, carrots, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, spinach is actually high in vitamin A, and so make sure that you're eating those on a daily basis. That vitamin A is also probably important for bone health, and I think there's evidence that a lot of vegans have vitamin A levels that are too low, and so I think this is a concern. It's also important for vision, especially night vision. So if you're vegan and you notice that your night vision is going down, which actually happened to me, eating vitamin A could reverse that issue. Omega-3 is another one that's a really controversial subject with a huge amount of research, and I go into great depth on veganhealth.org for people who want it. But my current view based on the research is that vegans really only need the short-chain omega fatty acid found in plants called alphas and oleic acid or ALA for short, and you can get it through flaxseed, hemp seed, chia seeds, walnuts. One of my favorite ways, chia seed pudding, very easy to make and it's delicious.

Karina Inkster:

What about supplements? I mean, you could do an algae-based supplement, right?

Jack Norris:

Yeah. And if you are concerned and you want to supplement an algae-based, usually an EPA or DHA supplement, usually it's DHA, which is fine. You don't really need the EPA so much, but you should be eating those foods anyway. ALA is an essential fatty acid on its own, and so it's important to get enough ALA, your body can convert ALA into EPA and DHA. Now that's where the controversy comes in. How much does the body do that? I think it does it adequately enough. Other people disagree, but that's based on blood levels of EPA and DHA, which doesn't reflect tissue levels. So I think that vegans are probably fine with their tissue levels of EPA and DHA. Okay. So then the next one, those are the three that you just have to pay attention to what food you're eating.

In the case of Omega-3, some of it is foods you wouldn't typically eat as a standard American diet on the standard diet, and so you have to kind of go out and skip them. Then nutrients that I think are just more easily gotten through supplements, and a multivitamin usually covers all of these is vitamin B12, iodine, selenium in the United States and Canada. Vegans don't need to worry about selenium because there's plenty of selenium in our soil, and so plant foods will naturally have selenium, but just about every other country, selenium is an issue. So I recommend vegans get it. Vitamin D, no one naturally meets the RDA for vitamin D in the United States because if RDA is 600 international units, which is quite high and you just can't get that through foods, vegans aren't that unusual by needing vitamin D in a supplement and a mini multivitamins have enough.

So you don't necessarily even have to take a vitamin D supplement, but you need a multivitamin that contains it. And then zinc, most vegans probably don't need zinc, but some vegans do seem to need zinc. And once again, I think I'm one of them. And what happens is that you either can get colds more frequently, get colds that last longer or get cracks in the corners of your mouth. That's a sign of zinc deficiency. And when I'm taking zinc on a daily basis, none of that happens to me. I rarely get a cold, and if I do, it's usually quite short-lived. When I'm not taking zinc, I have more of a problem. So for anyone where that might be an issue, I recommend it a bit more zinc. Zinc is in a lot of plant foods, but it's not as absorbable as from animal foods.

Karina Inkster:

Right. Well, let's talk about this kind of on a general level for a sec. I think a lot of folks who are, I dunno what you want to call it, non-vegan or vegan skeptical in that camp, they use this concept of, “oh, look at all these nutrients you need to be extra careful of” as an excuse that veganism isn't quote natural or healthy or whatever you want to call it. But you've just alluded to this. You mentioned for one of those items that it's actually not just vegans, and I think isn't it kind of the same for all of these nutrients? I mean, iron deficiency is pretty damn common across the population regardless of vegan status. So are these just things that we as humans need to be considering? I mean, certain ones like B12 vegans have to be more cognizant of, but what about these folks who are using this concept against veganism? 

Jack Norris:

To me, if someone wants to say, I don't think a vegan diet is natural, that's just flat out my view. I think it's something that I hope we're evolving towards. But in the early 1900s and before that, there were a lot of nutrient deficiencies around the world. I mean, people suffered from nutritional deficiencies all the time, and so what happened was the government, as they discovered what was causing it, it wasn't that easy at first even discovered what was causing these things. They started fortifying the food supply with various nutrients such as iodine. They started putting in salt. So now you buy iodine salt. That's from government regulations because people to prevent people from getting goiter.

Karina Inkster:

Tell me about your book. Is this kind of what you go into there? Actually I don't know a ton about this book. I think the second edition just came out a couple years ago in 2020. Is it a nutrition book? Is it a cookbook? It's called Vegan for Life, so I'm interested to hear more.

Jack Norris:

Yeah, it's just about vegan nutrition. It's not a cookbook. We have meal plans in it, but we don't have recipes. It's basically like the veganhealth.org website, but as a book form and written for a lay audience, it's written in Ginny’s voice, thankfully. So people can power it more easily than if I was writing it in more technical language. And it just has everything. It tries to address all the questions. People have a variety of questions. It talks about all the different stages of the lifecycle infants through old age and tries to address any issues there. And we focus a bit on some of the controversial subjects like low-carb diets, things like that.

Karina Inkster:

Is the new addition, taking into account more of those things because they’re more popular now, like keto and low carb and all of these things, they seem to have just exploded in popularity.

Jack Norris:

Yeah, it did address some of the more recent issues, and to be honest, it's hard for me to remember. It was a few years ago that we wrote it, and I haven't revisited it since then. So I know we made a number of significant changes, and Ginny did most of those. I know we added a lot of the issues that were hot at the time into the book, but I'd have to pull out the contents to actually look at it right now to tell you. So I'm not a great marketer for the book apparently. Sorry about that. I just didn't think about that.

Karina Inkster:

Oh, that makes sense. Well, Vegan Outreach, I mean, that seems to be kind of the big project and a lot of energy and time and fundraising and education and writing that and your other website, veganhealth.org. I mean, that's what I assume would be a full-time job already there with those projects. 

Jack Norris:

Yeah, it’s all full-time. I mean, I do it all every day. I spend time on all the different aspects, and it is definitely a full-time job. Yeah, and I do get paid by Vegan Outreach. I'm the executive director. That's how I earn a living.

Karina Inkster:

Of course.

Jack Norris:

I don't do counseling for individuals. I try to answer questions, but I just don't have time to sit down with people and do a diet history and medical history and things like that. If someone's really struggling, then I will occasionally spend more time with them, but that's very unusual.

Karina Inkster:

That makes sense. Awesome. Well, it was great speaking with you, Jack. Is there anything that we've missed or anything you want to leave our listeners with?

Jack Norris:

Nope. Thank you so much for having me. I've been enjoying your podcast, so I'm going to keep listening.

Karina Inkster:

Oh, well, thanks for tuning in. It's great to have you on the show. It was awesome to speak with you. Thanks so much.

Jack Norris:

You too. Okay, bye.

Karina Inkster:

Jack, thanks again for joining me. Much appreciated. Check out our show notes at nobullshitvegan.com/163. And don't forget you can learn about and sign up for my no-BS 2024 accountability service at karinainkster.com/accountability. Thanks for tuning in.