Let's set the scene: You have been invited to a big holiday dinner with friends or family... the only problem? Your host and the other guests don't follow the same diet as you do. You might be a vegan, vegetarian, raw/living food dieter, or a very health conscious ominvore and most if not all of the dishes at the event are sure to be diet busters. What do you do?

We surveyed our newsletter subscribers to find out, and the results might surprise you.


First we asked our subscribers to put themselves in the category that best describes them:

We asked the Living & Raw Food Vegans how they handle the holiday dinner quandary?

And the Vegans?

How did the vegetarians respond?

And finally the health conscious omnivores?

Is it surprising to you that vegans (both living/raw and regular) don't cheat, even on holidays? Not a single vegan respondent admitted to cheating and you know what? If the vegans working at Living Whole Foods are any indication, they aren't fibbing. :)

Only about 1 in 10 vegetarians cheats a little at holiday dinners and the generally health conscious? Mostly they fold like a cheap suit... but hey, it is the holidays, so no judgement here ;)

We hope you found the results as interesting as we did.

Healthy Holiday Dish Ideas

We asked our respondents to recommend some ideas for dishes to maintain their diets during the holidays, and we got lots of great recommendations. Tofurky was far and away the most recommended. Here are some other selected recommendations:

• Living & Raw Food Holiday Dishes
  • Ambrosia fruit salad with pomegranate, sliced oranges, grapes, apples & coconut.
  • Raw cranberries in fruit salad

• Vegan & Vegetarian Holiday Dish Ideas
  • Vegan wild rice with mushrooms
  • Winter squash casserole with cashews, ginger & lemon
  • Vegan shepherd's pie
  • Mashed butternut squash
  • Whole grain pasta with vegetables & vegan sauce
  • Sweet potato with oatmeal crumble topping
  • Stuffing made with vegetable stock
  • Vegetarian lasagna
  • Tofu pumpkin pie
  • Rice casserole with tofurky
  • Roasted green bean & tofu casserole
  • Quorn meat substitute
  • Mashed cauliflower
  • Grilled asparagus with garlic and sliced almonds
  • Roasted carrots & okra with grapeseed oil
  • Chickpea loaf
  • Marinated portabella and oyster mushrooms in balsamic vinegar and olive oil

Holiday Stories

And lastly a couple our readers submitted humorous holiday dinner stories we identify with:

• "I don't often serve "fake" meat, but I did serve a tofurky one year and many of the meat eaters loved it so much, there wasn't anything left for the vegans and vegetarians."
• "One year we went to my brother's house for Thanksgiving dinner (they call it dinner but it is lunch) It was so awful for a vegetarian I think everything had some sort of meat in it or laden down with sugar or butter. We, my husband, two kids, & myself we so hungry at the end we drove the hours drive home and decided to go out to eat. But what do you eat when everything's closed? Our favourite Japanese restaurant was open, so for Thanksgiving we ate Japanese."