Vegan Cruises

Vegan has gone mainstream and nothing is more mainstream than cruises, which are apparently nothing more than 10,000 calories a day with ocean breezes.

Chari Suri wrote about vegan cruises on The Huffington Post.

The chefs on board were more aware of my dietary needs than I had given them credit for. Before long, I was feasting on Indian dishes, delicately-flavored al dente pasta and crisp, almost "farm to table" quality salads. Navigating the breakfast, lunch and dinner menu was a lot less pedestrian that I thought it would be. Noticing the absence of generous vegan options in the dessert department (how long can the "sorbet with fruits and berries" song possibly go on for?), I resorted to the biblical "ask and you shall receive" approach and requested the head waiter to give me some variations on what was becoming an increasingly boring theme. The very next day, I had a soy ice cream sundae with warm apple turnover. It really does pay to be a pest.

She goes on to talk about options available from several cruise companies.

The Healthy Voyager

Continuing the travel theme as we approach the big Fourth of July weekend - I'll be traveling so I don't know whether I'll be posting - check out The Healthy Voyager.

Welcome to The Healthy Voyager

Thank you for spending some time on The Healthy Voyager Site! Here you will find information, videos, podcasts, articles and more that will help you lead a happier, healthier and greener life!

The Healthy Voyager is a one-stop shop as there is something for everyone. From people who suffer from diseases that are curbed only by following special diets to those who want to put their finances on a diet, we’ve got something for you. Whether you’re traveling the globe or just wanting to make some healthy changes in your life at home, you will find a wealth of information from the Healthy Voyager herself as well as experts all health, wellness and eco fields.

Some of the things you will find on this site are;

•The Healthy Voyager Travel Show
•Healthy Voyager Radio
•Recipes
•Giveaways
•Product Reviews
•Fitness Tips
•Directory of Healthy Voyager Approved Products, Services, Hotels & Restaurants Worldwide
•Tips for Moms, Kids, Pets, Relationships
•Book Reviews
•Online Community
•The Healthy Voyager Store
•Healthy Voyager Wine Club
•Healthy Voyager Tours & Excursions
•And More

Coming soon, the Healthy Voyager will be launching:

•The Healthy Voyager’s Global Kitchen Show
•The Healthy Voyager Fitting in Fitness Show
•The Healthy Voyager’s Series of Ebooks & Print Books
•The Healthy Voyager IPhone Application
•The Healthy Voyager Grab-N-Go Line of Snacks
•And More!

Please be sure to join the online community, sign up for the newsletter and stay connected with us. We appreciate our readers and viewers and love to hear from you!

Happy Cow Compassionate Eating Guide

While searching on sites to help travelers, I came across Happy Cow Compassionate Eating Guide.

HappyCow's vegetarian restaurants guide is a global, searchable vegetarian dining guide and directory of natural health food stores, including nutrition & health tips, vegan recipes, raw foods, travel, veganism and other vegetarian issues.

The site also contains a Healthy Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes page.

Are you new to the vegetarian diet and would like to find some healthy recipes? Or maybe you are a veggie food lover who likes to dabble in the kitchen? Need a veggie recipe for holiday entertaining or a romantic dinner? HappyCow's Vegetarian Recipes features international vegetarian cuisine from healthy, low-fat recipes, including Vegan food dishes, Raw food recipes, Low calorie recipes, Low fat meal ideas,

Vegan desserts, and Macrobiotic cooking. Our collection of plant-based, pure vegetarian, vegan recipes will satisfy every palate. Feel free to experiment, add your comment & review for each recipe, and share your vegetarian cooking tips. Also email us your original veggie recipes for posting here!

iCanEat OnTheGo Gluten & Allergen Free™

I'm on the go myself, away from home and not able to post as often as I would like, so it highly appropriate that I write about iCanEat OnTheGo Gluten & Allergen Free™, an iPhone app from the people behind Let's Eat Out and the GlutenFree Passport site.

iCanEat OnTheGo Gluten & Allergen Free™ dynamically customizes menu items from 15 Fast Food and Quick Service Restaurant Chains in the US based on your allergens. Quickly & discreetly, you can:

Select and personalize any combination of 9 common food allergens:
Gluten • Wheat • Eggs • Fish • Milk • Peanuts • Shellfish • Soy • Tree Nuts

Explore 15 menus from top US Fast Food & Quick Service

View almost 1,600 menu items with color coded-columns to see which items contain your concerns

Hide menu items that contain your allergens to see what you CAN eat

The fast food chains involved are: Arby’s, Boston Market, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, Dairy Queen, Domino’s Pizza, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Qdoba, Sonic, Subway, Taco Bell and Wendy’s.

Gluten-Free Asian and European Travel Cards

Translation cards - cards with the words, phrases, and questions you need to know about food sensitivities in other languages - are a handy travel item. I've written about the SelectWisely firm before, in both Food Sensitivities Translation Cards and in Food and Travel Translation Cards.

They're back in the news with a new offering, as the title indicates, Gluten-Free Asian and European Travel Cards.



The inevitable press release tells us more.

The new gluten-free cards have been developed to help people with gluten intolerance improve communication when dining and purchasing meals. All of the cards feature English text describing what foods to avoid along with a picture of a stalk of wheat within the international prohibitory sign (red circle and slash). The European cards also have the English text translated into Spanish, French and Italian. The Asian cards have the English text translated into Chinese, Japanese and Thai. The card is laminated, simple to use and easy to carry, allowing travelers to keep them in their pocket or wallet to use when they are ordering meals at restaurants.
... All cards have English text, a picture and multiple language text allowing restaurant wait staff and kitchen staff who speak different languages to understand.

About the allergy and medical translation cards:
22 types of cards are currently available in the following categories:

Food Allergies
Gluten-free/Celiac Disease
Diabetes Emergency and Pharmacy
Asthma Emergency
Lactose Intolerance
Penicillin Allergy
Smoke-Free
Low-salt Diet
Vegetarian and Vegan
General Emergency
Special Orders

15 common languages are available (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc), plus an additional 40 languages through our Special Order program. The Special Order program provides translations for unique food allergies and medical conditions in less common languages (Catalan, Vietnamese, Khmer, Croatian, Czech, Laotian and more).

Over 130 common food allergens are available including nuts, peanuts, wheat, milk, shellfish, soy, sesame and others. Additional non-food allergens are available for translation including latex, sulfites, MSG, bee stings and penicillin.

No Intolerance While Traveling. Why?

Every once in a while I receive an email like this one from Adam:

I have many digestion problems in the UK. Have done for a while irrespective of what I eat or cut out. Just returned from Thailand where I had absolutely perfect digestion the whole time. I found I could eat anything I wanted the whole time. I went there for the 1st time last year+ found the same thing. After returning to UK, same digestive problems started again. Mystery to me+ my doctor. Just wondered if u have ever heard of anything like this. My life is miserable in the uk because of this. Hope u can offer an answer or some advice.

This is almost the ultimate fantasy for those of use with lactose intolerance and other digestive problems. A place in which we can eat anything we want and not suffer any consequences. Why does it have to be so far from home and so temporary an ideal?

I have no answer. I have no clue. I can't think of any reason why lactose intolerance should behave differently anywhere in the world.

I had only one possible grasp at a thought that I could share with Adam. We do know that the bacteria that live in our colons are responsible for many of the symptoms of lactose intolerance and many additional ills. And we know that bacteria are local. We'll meet strange bacteria whenever we travel. That's the problem behind traveler's diarrhea.

But what if it also worked the other way? What if the local bacteria that you encounter every day in your water and food are the ones making you ill? Wouldn't you then feel better when you got so far away that your exposure was to a whole new set that didn't cause the same problems?

I'm grasping at straws here, I know. But it's the only faint shred of an answer I have. If you readers have any similar tales or ideas that might solve this mystery, please share them.

Lactose-Free Airline Food

Not that long ago, anyone traveling with lactose intolerance had to trust to luck and a pocket full of lactase pills.

Today's travel is much easier, at least with regard to that small aspect. TravelBite.co.uk noted that:

Singapore Airlines comes top for the most diverse range of meals, boasting 14 different categories, including kosher, Muslim, Hindu, vegetarian, diabetic, fat-free, gluten-free, low sodium, low calorie, non-carbohydrate and lactose free.

Admittedly, short hub trips within the U.S. normally don't serve any meals at all these days. However, longer in-country trips and almost all overseas flights will include meals.

Make sure you contact the airline before your flight and inquire about food options. (Well before, not last minute.) If lactose-free or dairy-free is not a direct option, ask about kosher, Muslim, vegan, or gluten-free meals. One of the alternatives will probably work.

If not, trust to luck and a handful of lactase pills.

Food Allergy Wordlists

Over at News-Medical.net (what, all the MedicalNews domains were taken?) is an article featuring wordlists with 200 terms needed for international travelers.

Researchers and students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have translated the names of allergenic food ingredients into most European languages and a number of international languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic and Swahili. The list is available at www.food-info.net/allergy.htm.

The initiators of Food-info.net and EFFoST (European Federation of Food Science and Technology) provide these wordlists for people with an allergy or intolerance for certain foods. The list includes more than 200 ingredients such as lactose, hazelnuts, shellfish, soya and gluten, sorted into categories (dairy, nuts, spices, additives etc). The wordlists can be downloaded as PDF files and offers translations from almost any language into thirty other languages, so that nearly 700 language combinations are currently available. Travellers planning to pass through Denmark, Sweden and Finland, for example, can get translations from German into all three languages, as well as between the three languages (e.g. from Finnish to Danish) and from these languages into Dutch, English or any other language in the database.

The process at Food-info.net took me a minute to figure out.

If you want to translate another language into English, you click on the link for that language and it takes you down the page to a drop-down menu under the flag for that nation. (You can scroll down directly to the flag if you want.) You find the English listing in the menu and highlight it. You will automatically be taken to another screen with a two-page .pdf of the wordlist.

To translate from English, go to the first flag (which is Britain's) and bring up the language of choice. It will then take you to the new screen with the new wordlist.

Special Diet Meals Available from Disney

The biggest kid-magnet in the universe must be Disney. With 10 million or more kids going through the gates at each Disney resort each year, even a tiny percentage can add up quickly.

Bob Mervine of the Orlando Business Journal reports that Walt Disney World offers a special diets program that can accommodate 15 types of food allergies, kosher meals, and low-sodium meals. The program started in 1993 and now serves 7-8,000 meals a month. You merely request the special meals when making meal reservations.

[Joel Schaefer, manager of the special diets department] works with chefs at each of the hundreds of Disney food locations to provide alternative ingredients that can be used to create allergy-free meals, ranging from soy ice cream to a specially blended batter for the Mickey Mouse-shaped waffles that are a signature breakfast dish.

Disney adds no service fee, even working with families who want to enjoy a buffet by individually preparing the food items the guest selects.

"It's simply a guest service," says Ed Wronski, executive chef for product development in Disney's food and beverage department.

More information about the program is available from All Ears Net.

1. When making an Advance Reservation (1-407-WDW-DINE), alert the Cast Member to your special needs, and they will make a note on the file.

2. Special dietary needs can be accommodated if requested at least 72 hours in advance at 407-WDW-DINE (407-939-3463). [Note: some sites say 24 hours. This site says that the advance time increased in 2005.]

The number at Disneyland is 714-781-DINE (714-781-3463).

At Disneyland Paris call Guest services Tel No: +33- (0)1 60 30 40 50. A food allergies guide is available at:
http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/wdw/common/helpFAQ?id=HelpFAQDiningPage

Food Sensitivities Translation Cards

Traveling is always a problem for those with lactose intolerance or other food issues, and traveling in countries where you don't speak the language is even worse.

Here are two websites that provide cards pre-printed with translations of the questions you want to ask and the products you want to avoid.

• SelectWisely provides a number of different cards, including Lactose Intolerance, Food Allergy , Vegetarian, AND Gluten-Free.
  
  On the Lactose Intolerance card page, you can get a translation from any of more than a dozen languages to any two of those languages. The card translates two statements:

  I am allergic to milk and all milk products (milk, butter, cheese).
  
  Does this food contain milk or milk products (milk, butter, cheese)?

  
  
  The price is $8.95 for two identical laminated cards.
  
  
  
• A British web firm, Dietarycard.com , will create custom cards for people with lactose intolerance, milk allergies, celiac disease, or just about any combinations of foods you are sensitive to.
  
  The cards come standard with the following printed on them:
  

  I have an allergy/intolerance to:
  
  And all the derivatives.
  
  Eating foods, sauces, or garnishes containing these ingredients will make me ill.
  
  Can you assist me in making my choices from your menu?

  
  
  
  Anywhere from 1 to 8 risk foods can be included on the cards, available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  
  The Classic Coeliac cards contain slightly different information.
  
  Custom Cards cost £7 each or £25 including free delivery for their Europack presenting all five languages in a handy wallet.