Vegan but you don't like vegetables? Lentils, fruit and one orange vegetable

We suggest leaning on lentils and fruit and keeping one orange vegetable. On NIH’s potassium list, dried apricots and lentils outrank every vegetable, and one orange gives 78% of the Daily Value for vitamin C. Of the three nutrients we checked, vitamin A is the gap. A mango gives 12% of the Daily Value, a baked sweet potato 156%.

Those potassium figures are the ones I’d show anyone who thinks a vegan who skips the salad is running on empty. The NIH table of potassium in selected foods opens with half a cup of dried apricots at 755 mg and a cup of cooked lentils at 731 mg, 16% of the Daily Value each. Only acorn squash, at 644 mg a mashed cup, and a baked potato, at 610 mg, come close among the vegetables, and a cup of canned kidney beans sits further down at 607 mg. Two cups of raw spinach, the food that looks most like virtue on a plate, comes in at 334 mg, and half a cup of cooked broccoli at 229 mg. The servings differ, so this compares portions, not weights. By those numbers, a cup of lentils does more for your potassium than two cups of the greens you were going to push around anyway.

You’re also in a crowd. By CDC’s estimate, only 10.0% of US adults met the then-current federal vegetable recommendation in 2019, estimated from a phone survey of how often people said they ate vegetables, run through a statistical model. That survey wasn’t about vegans. For vegans, the 2025 to 2030 Dietary Guidelines add a warning of their own. They say vegan diets show shortfalls in a long list of nutrients, vitamin A and potassium among them, and tell vegetarians and vegans to monitor their nutrient status periodically, especially iron, vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium and iodine. B12 isn’t a vegetable question, and it’s the one our piece on veganism without supplements comes back to. Of the rest, vitamin A and potassium are the two I’d plan for first if vegetables are off the plate, because so many of NIH’s top sources for both are vegetables. This article doesn’t cover the others on the list.

Why broccoli tastes worse to you than to the person next to you

If it’s the bitter ones you can’t stand, that may be in your genes, and only for some vegetables. In a 2006 study by researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, 35 healthy adults were genotyped for a bitter taste receptor gene, TAS2R38, and rated the bitterness of vegetables. People with two copies of the sensitive form rated vegetables containing glucosinolates as 60% more bitter than people with two copies of the insensitive form. The difference reached statistical significance for six of them: watercress, mustard greens, turnip, broccoli, rutabaga and horseradish. Radicchio, endive, eggplant and spinach, which have no glucosinolates, were rated equally bitter by both groups.

That’s a narrower result than “some people hate vegetables”, and a more useful one. If broccoli and turnip taste harsh to you, eggplant and spinach weren’t the vegetables that divided the study’s tasters (both groups rated them equally bitter, not necessarily mild). I’d try those before deciding you hate the whole aisle.

The old version of this page put it down to supertasters having more taste buds. A 2014 study run in a museum’s community genetics lab found that sensitivity to PROP, the bitter test chemical behind the supertaster label, was not in any way predicted by the density of papillae, the bumps that house taste buds, and its authors cautioned against loose use of the word supertaster. By that study’s results, counting the bumps on your tongue won’t tell you which kind of taster you are.

Salt, and a few more tries

The 2025 to 2030 Dietary Guidelines, in their section on vegetables and fruit, say to flavor them with salt, spices and herbs if you prefer. There’s a lab result behind the salt part, though not one about vegetables. In a 1997 study published in Nature, a sodium salt suppressed the bitterness of urea much more than it suppressed the sweetness of sugar, and in some mixtures of the two the sweetness came through stronger once the salt was added. The authors suggest this may be part of why people salt often-bitter vegetables, but they didn’t test vegetables. Whether it works on your Brussels sprouts is a cheap experiment to run.

The other lever is time. A 2018 review that pooled 43 articles and 117 comparisons, mostly in infants and young children, found that repeated exposure to a vegetable increased liking and intake of that vegetable compared with no exposure, and that tasting a variety of vegetables increased liking for a new one. The same review says the effect sizes are small and the evidence for long-term benefit is limited. For an adult, the honest reading is that a few more tries may make a vegetable you mildly dislike a little more likeable. Nobody can promise love.

Where vegetable nutrients come from when vegetables don’t

Potassium is the easy one, as above. Lentils and dried fruit carry it, and so does a banana at 422 mg.

Vitamin C is easier still. NIH lists one medium orange at 70 mg, 78% of the Daily Value, a kiwifruit at 64 mg and half a cup of sliced strawberries at 49 mg. An orange and a kiwifruit come to 134 mg, more than the Daily Value of 90 mg (our arithmetic), without a single vegetable.

Vitamin A is where fruit runs out of road. In NIH’s table, half a cup of cantaloupe gives 135 mcg RAE, 15% of the Daily Value, a whole mango 112 mcg and five dried apricots 63 mcg. The plant foods at the top of the same table are vegetables. One baked sweet potato in its skin gives 1,403 mcg, 156% of the Daily Value, half a cup of raw carrots 459 mcg and half a cup of boiled frozen spinach 573 mcg. It would take more than 12 mangoes to match one sweet potato (our arithmetic).

So here is the line I’d draw, and it’s the site’s call, not a nutrition prescription. Build the week on lentils and fruit, and make peace with exactly one orange vegetable. Sweet potato is the obvious candidate, because to me it tastes more like dessert than like the vegetables people complain about, and carrots are the backup. Keep giving the bitter brassicas the occasional salted second chance if you like, and don’t feel obliged. If you’re unsure whether your own diet covers what the Dietary Guidelines list, that’s a question for a registered dietitian or your doctor, who can check your nutrient status.

What I’m least sure about is whether “don’t like vegetables” is usually about vegetables at all. A lot of it might be about bland cooking, and that’s the more fixable problem. If that sounds like your kitchen, start with our pantry sauces that make vegan food taste better.