Eat less meat but.......

Eglantine - it may be that you're introducing fairly large portions of beaans/humous etc that your body hasn't had chance to adjust to.
I'm not a food expert at all but I expect your body will adjust, just go a bit more slowly and I'm sure all will be well. I was away for three weeks this summer, didn't eat any meat at all, ate lots of spicy, veg/pulse based dishes. No digestive probs at all until I came home to a more usual western diet.

You could try these.

Beano tablets

I agree wth IAM64, introduce pulses and other plant based food substitutes slowly.

There are many alternatives, delicious too, to beans.

Try the range of lentil - lentil sooup has to be the quickest ever soup to make. A handful of split, red letils, a little bit of spice and a couple of cups of stock.
Ready in less than 5 mins.

If you are determined to eat the beans, try adding winter savoury (herb) to the dish, it certainly helps with windy tummies.

And if you are over 50, then you should ideally be taking acidophilus bifidus capsules regularly to help your whole digestive tract to stay healthy.

Our guts slow down as we get older and don't work as well, need the good bacteria to be renewed. It will also help you digest those beans better.

You can have a food intolerance to absolutely anything. I have many of them due to a multitude of health and pancreas problems!

But for some people as they get older they need digestive enzymes at the best of times, and definitely for a drastic change of diet like yours. Beano would be good, and also introducing beans and pulses (or any change of diet) slowly, as mentioned above, would be good.

Can I suggest that you revert to your original diet then gradually bit by bit introduce more vegetables. Very slowly. Also your gut bacteria need to upgrade themselves to deal with these changes too.

Try a probiotic like Bio-Kult available from Boots and other good chemists and cheap. Start off with the maximum daily. dose.

I understand it is quite hard to eat a balanced vegan diet so you do need to do quite a lot of research before going totally vegan.

But, BradfordLass, lentils are worse than horrible!!

I went to a vegetarian restaurant with my DD last week and there was nothing on the menu I could eat - I have a garlic intolerance. They made me a special wrap with veggie cheese, lettuce and tomato. Garlic seems to be an essential part of a vegetarian diet. That’s my excuse for staying omnivore! (Although I don’t eat much meat and am very particular where it comes from)

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Just go easy on the amounts as you get older. In fact as you age your body tells you your limits, though saying that I can still eat the same amount of mushy peas with a good lamb dinner as I did years ago without any unwelcome " effects ". Peas of the soaked variety and not the frozen soaked ones.

I'm limited to the amount of green leaf veg anyway because of taking warfarin. I love cabbage too and enjoy a meal of crisp bacon pieces mashed potato and savoy cabbage with the bacon fat poured over the potatoes. Delicious.
I have to have such meals 2 days on the run because of the amount, but the 2nd day it's a fry-up.

I've reduced my meat intake in favour of more fish. I don't do much frying either so I'm not much of a drain on the environment-------I don't think.

I'm on a blood thinner but don't eat any differently than I ever did. The consultant said if I've always eaten turmeric, lots of greens, spinach and a bit of cranberry - keep it up, so I do.

Jillybird
I developed an intolerance to broccoli (which I love, incidentally). Who'd have thought such a nutritious food could make me so ill. It was like I had swallowed knives and forks! Agony. (Apparently there's an enzyme in it to which I'm reacting).

When I was being seen by the Senior Allergy Consultant in the hospital, I told him about my reactions to broccoli and cauliflower (both in the Mustard Food Family) and he said it's an allergy/intolerance that is surprisingly common. I can't tolerate any veg in that food family, which unfortunately covers a lot of the green veg we eat in the UK.

Oh EV ^ a meal of crisp bacon pieces mashed potato and savoy cabbage with the bacon fat poured over the potatoes^ a woman after my heart! I’m definitely coming to live next door to you (in The hope you invite me in to share).

well after 30 years as a vegan/veggie I was persuaded to put meat back in my diet.
A couple of years later I stopped my usual bean and veg soups and casseroles and I stopped having so many tummy pains and gas
Seems beans are hard to digest.
Seaweed cooked with the beans can help but my stomach was so relieved when I stopped beans I will never go back though I will eat lentils and chickpeas.

The planet is also in danger from deforestation to clear land to grow crops to make veggie/vegan foods.......it is not a simple issue of stop eating meat.

Hmm not sure about that pinkquartz. The animals eat mainly plants if they're allowed to.

The old irritating question asked of veggies springs to mind: "What would you eat if you were stranded on an island with just animals?" The answer being: "I would eat what the animals eat"

I certainly agree that a surfeit of beans/legumes is indigestible.

I can only eat lentils occasionally and not in the same meal as beans, chickpeas or green beans. or I fart a lot
I can't believe there are as many intolerances as people make out though. It's not a problem in countries short of food.

It took me about 3 months to get used to a vegan diet. You don’t need huge amounts of beans on the plate. If making a butternut squash casserole add a few chickpeas and bulk up with carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, eat with rice or baked potatoes. Try crispy fried tofu or a nut based dish instead of the beans. Most deforestation is to grow soya to feed pigs in China, not for humans to eat.

Yes, a gradual change would be sensible. The bacteria in your intestines vary depending on your diet so give them a chance to adapt. I make my own kefir daily (a two minute procedure) and have never felt healthier!

Thanks everyone. The giving your gut bacteria time to adjust makes sense and perhaps a supplement to help it on its way, though generally I don’t agree with supplements. I tend to think if you need a supplement there’s actually something lacking in your diet! But it might need a kick start.

I’m not intending to become vegan, just to alter the balance of what I eat. Definitely couldn’t give up on ?.

I’ll persevere? (and stock up on toilet paper?)

Cutting down how much meat you eat doesn't mean cutting it out. I still use all my usual casserole and stew recipes but I add lots of chopped vegetables to them so that a 1lb of meat with the vegetables will feed 8. This cuts the average meat portion from 4oz to 2 oz. I sometimes add beans and I add lentils to mince.

We do also eat a lot of non-meat meals - but we always have.

MOnica, your diet sounds excellent. It's similar to the one I grew up with. We had the classic small amount of roast meat with lots of veg for Sunday lunch (and a delicious pudding, apple/rhubarb/blackberry crumble) then Monday small amounts of the roast in a large stew full of whatever veg was in season, by Tuesday the meat was being transformed into a potato onion and meat pie plus cabbage or whatever came in from the garden if we had a veg garden or the market if we didn't
In the 1970's when my first child was born and money was very tight, I followed a similar line. Because we were young hippies, we supplemented this with brown rice and tomato sauces of various kinds, with beans/pulses added for protein.

I'm still a fan of what a friend whose father was a chef referred to as 'peasant food'. I have a veggie chilli cooking at the moment, we'll have some brown rice and brown bread for those who are greedy (whoops, mean hungry) or who don't like rice.
Like MOnica, we've always eaten 4 or so non meat meals a week. It was a huge relief when the children left home, to know they could make something tasty out of left overs/or fridge bottoms teas.

I have an Ottolenghi cookbook with lots of delicious recipes but everything in it is such hard work. You need a million ingredients, a day to chop everything and then have enough to keep two of you you going for a week even when you make half quantities. And you end up having to throw most of the spices away after you fail to use them by the sell by date.

Do you mean 'use by' date, tidyskatemum?

I have to confess I don't even look at the dates on jars of spices. I probably have some that are years old.

tidyskatemum - you don't need all the ingredients for Ottolenghi recipes and as merlot says, spices last for ages. Use them in your more 'ordinary ' cooking - a bit of chilli/garlic/herb/s and spices add a lot to most food.

When I get a new recipe, the first thing I do is run my eye down the ingredients and remove or replace any exotic ingredient that I do not want to buy for one recipe only or cannot buy in Waitrose.

Last weekend I had a recipe for Chinese style duck which included maltose paste(?) and something similar. I had heard of neither. I decided that the purpose of the two igredients was to make a sweet paste to rub into the ducks skin and I just replaced them both with Hoisin Sauce, which is a sweet Chinese relish, a jar of which was in my kitchen cupboard. The duck tasted delicious.

I used to think this kind of substitution was a guilty secret I should never admit to then about 10 days ago I read a column in a newspaper by a columnist who did exactly the same thing and started the article 'When I get a recipe with exotic ingredients, I do what everybody else does, I ignore half and replace the rest with ingredients already in my kitchen cupboard' or words to that effect.

Recipes are merely serving suggestions. Do with them what you will. Certainly substitute any rare or expensive ingredient for something more common and cheaper.