A healthy vegan breakfast in the morning really sets you up for a good morning. I think all of your meals are equally important, but a healthy breakfast is perhaps the most important meal of the day. It does not have to be the same old orange juice, breakfast cereal, and burnt toast - there are plenty of healthy vegan recipes for breakfast.

Important: If you tend to skip breakfast in favor of a coffee, having a healthy vegan breakfast instead could be the most important thing you do!

Here are 3 healthy foods that make up the majority of my vegan breakfasts...

Today is a big day - Phil and I are getting married!

Aside from simply hearing about what's going on in our lives, it relates to vegan cooking in that we wanted to be sure to have a feast that our non-vegan families would be wowed by. There was a lot of brainstorming and planning involved, and our menu wound up looking pretty fine. I'll have to check back in with you on how the families enjoyed it, but I'm sure they're going to love it.

Those who aren't vegan are often intimidated by the thought of vegan food, but there's so much to choose from. Cooking vegan gets me thinking more creatively about the plant foods I'm using.

Choosing Oils

The best source of dietary fat is whole foods. Oil is not a whole food, but when you use oils in healthy vegan recipes, you can use oils that are as close to whole as possible. The first thing to consider is the processing.

Fats can cause a lot of damage to your body when they are processed and become rancid. So you always need to look for unrefined. This is incredibly important. Sometimes the producer will have some nice marketing language on the side of the bottle telling you how minimally they process the oil – don't be fooled!

Types of Fats

There is a lot of publicity right now about the differences between the types of fats – saturated, unsaturated, even polyunsaturated.

Trans-fats have become the current villain, and Omega-3's the hero. Your brain may shut down whenever you start reading about these things (mine used to), but I'm going to do my best to make it simple. Understanding this stuff is the key to understanding the benefits and hazards of the specific oils used in healthy vegan recipes.

There are cultures around the world, such as the Inuit in Northern Canada or the Greeks and other Mediterraneans, that have traditionally eaten a high proportion of fat and yet have relatively low rates of heart disease. The reason this works, despite the protests of modern scientific nutrition, is that they are getting these fats from a variety of whole and healthy foods, and eating them in a balanced way.

In contrast, modern North American culture attempts to follow a technically perfect diet, but somehow winds up with a huge amount of heart disease, obesity and other major health problems. One of the main reasons for this apparent disconnect is that mass food production and processing has taken away the balance, variety and wholeness of healthy foods, especially when it comes to fats.