You need to do both, but you can't outrun your fork

That's only a downside for the coworkers

Yeah but I did it for ethical reasons and ended up gaining weight very quickly lol

It was a major motivation for me at the time, but mostly in the sense of forcing me to radically change my diet

Protein: legumes (beans, lentils, peanuts, chickpeas, tofu and other solid soy products)

Calcium: enriched plant milks (convenient) or cruciferous leaves and flowers (healthy) such as collards, kale, or broccoli. Tofu is a good source too. Avoid excessive intakes of salt.

Iron: eat vitamin-C rich food with your meals, such as bell peppers, lemon/lime juice on your food, or drink orange juice.

B-12: you must supplement, either with gummies, enriched plant milk or processed vegan products (vegan sausages, vegan "turkey" slices, etc.)

A vitamin: carrots, cruciferous leaves and flowers (see calcium), squash, cantaloup. Eat with fatty food for better absorption. Eg. Minestrone soup (kale and olive oil)

Omega-3 : tofu is a good source. Flaxseed oil has enough in a teaspoon – it works well on salads. Some nuts are a good source too.

Please visit https://veganhealth.org/ for more information. This site is authored by a registered dietetician.

https://nutritionfacts.org/ is great too.

If you plan to reduce your meat intake, you don't have to consider anything, really.

If you plan to eat fully vegan, you should look up B12 supplements and make sure to get some proteins (beans, lentils, tofu etc). The whole nutrition thing is not as big a problem as you think it is, though. If you're unsure, maybe get a blood test done after a few months.

Vitamin B12 is the main one that's hard to get. It's not really natural to any foods apart from animal products.

Iodine is also a tough one. Though you're probably deficient in this anyway depending on how much sea food and dairy milk you eat. Technically iodine isn't natural to milk, but we feed iodine supplements to dairy cattle.

You can get enough of both of these by drinking enough fortified plant milks, but it's like half a litre a day and idk I find that's just a lot.

I'm personally just lazy and take supplements, the Vegan Society here in the UK do ones that are affordable and have everything you need in them. If you live far enough north or south you should be taking vitamin D supplements anyway, at least during the winter.

You can pretty much survive on black beans and onions.

Iirc, beans have everything you need except for vitamin c, but I could be wrong about that.

You’re unlikely to be lacking most nutrients in a first world country, even eating tons of junk food.

That’s not me saying it’s okay to live on junk food, that’s me saying essential nutrients aren’t going to be your problem.

Edit:

I looked it up. You’ll be missing some components of a complete protein, so eat some grains too.

There are no nutrients that are exclusively available via meat/dairy. The only thing you might miss out on is B12, but that's usually supplemented in a lot of the vegan substitutes/junk food alternatives already. Anything else you'll get pretty easily by simply eating your regular veggies, beans, legumes etc.

If you truly care about nutrients, then get your blood tested and have them check what you are actually lacking, and then adjust or supplement your diet accordingly. Chances are that you are already low on something even when eating animal products.

Iirc just rice and beans cover all essential amino acids so nothing to worry about. Obviously, in the real world scenario the diet will be more varied than that with veggies and grains and stuff so the vitamins/fatty acids will be covered as well. If you want to get real numbers there are apps for this, for example Cronometer - pretty cool. So overall I’d say don’t worry about it, just eat enough and different foods, supplement with B12 and check the bloodwork yearly.

Its not that hard. Gorillas are vegan, they do fine. So are my goats.

i quit meat a bunch of years ago, I try to eat a varied diet, and try to mix greens and grains. I get a check up about once a year and all my blood work comes back fine.

why block vegans?