What You Should Know About Plant-Based Diets

Further, it causes up to 96 percent less water pollution and emits up to 94 percent less greenhouse gas emissions. By transitioning to plant-based meat and other alternative proteins, we can use far fewer natural resources and enable entire ecosystems — /trustpilot/ and the biodiversity those systems support — to recover, function, and thrive. Polyphenols occur in many plant foods, and research suggests they are good for our health. At ZOE, we know that understanding how your body responds to food is important for your health. By analyzing your gut microbiome, we can provide you with personally tailored nutrition advice. According to Prof. Tim Spector, one of the world’s leading gut microbiome researchers and ZOE’s scientific co-founder, one key to a healthy gut microbiome is eating 30 different plants each week.

What Is a Vegan Diet?

“Our brains are trained to think about meat as the main course and veggies as the side,” says Snyder. “Plant-based eating becomes much easier if you shift to thinking about plant-based options as the backbone of your meal.” Together, these resolutions require WHO to support all countries in ensuring that everyone, everywhere, can access healthy, safe and affordable diets throughout life. While many of the world’s biggest companies are selling plant-based meat, some special interests want to stifle better, more efficient meat production and consumption. GFI works to ensure that plant-based meat and other alternative proteins can compete fairly in the market and that governments invest in public research for these groundbreaking fields.

Types of vegetarian diets

The same is true for a meal like buttered pasta or cheese pizza. Sure, these are plant-based options, but both are also fairly processed and lack the nutrition a well-balanced meal brings. Snyder adds that, on occasion, you can also consider plant-based meat products, like Beyond Beef and Impossible Burger. While there’s no hard and fast rule as to how much of your diet should be comprised of plant-based foods, Snyder says at least 50% is a good starting point — though she adds that, ideally, the majority of your foods come from a plant-based option.

Fill at least Three-Quarters of Your Plate with Plants

Lynn brings her expertise in nutrition, exercise, and behavior change to her work in helping people reach their individual health and fitness goals. In addition to writing for Everyday Health, she has also written for websites and publications like Food and Health Communications, Today’s Dietitian, iVillage.com, and Rodale Press. She has a passion for healthy, nutrient-dense, great-tasting food and for being outdoors as much as possible — she can often be found running or hiking, and has completed a marathon in every state. You may need to be intentional when it comes to avoiding deficiencies, especially if you’re forgoing all animal products.

• Explore our white paper for an overview of the nutritional profile of plant-based meat as a category, including areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, relative to conventional meat products.
• The second arm included subjects with a preference for plant foods who (habitually) ate more chicken and fish than red meat.
• With regard to dietary sugars, those consuming PB diets had a similar or higher intake (22–27 %E) of total sugar compared to omnivorous diets (20–23 %E)(Reference Allès, Baudry and Mejean44,Reference Sobiecki, Appleby and Bradbury45,Reference Clarys, Deliens and Huybrechts47) .
• But it’s crucial for these diets to be well planned and balanced.
• Table 1 provides an overview of the study characteristics (in a reversed chronological order) and shows how the term “plant-based diet” was used in the respective studies.
• Another found that men who follow a vegan diet had a 35% lower risk of prostate cancer than those who ate a diet that included animal foods.

Plant-Based Meal Plan vs. Vegan Meal Plan

It’s safe for most people, as long as it has enough variety to ensure you get all the nutrients you need. Whole foods are more filling than many processed options, and you can make a wide variety of dishes with your favorites, allowing you to eat whole, nutritious meals that keep you full for longer. Reproducibility of research, however, is a fundamental tenet of good science and requires meticulous and complete reporting of interventions parameters [36]. This is particularly true for nutrition interventions, that vary from study to study in many methodological details [37]. To facilitate comparison (and reproducibility) of studies, we call for a standardized plant-based intervention reporting checklist. A template including nine items that primarily focuses on the description of the dietary intervention itself is provided below (Fig. 4).

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This was highlighted unimeal-review trustpilot by one study, which reported that a group of postmenopausal women who followed a semi-vegetarian diet for 20 years had significantly lower body weight, BMI and body fat than their non-vegetarian equivalents. This meal plan, based on recommendations from Wagner and Zerner, shows what a week of eating mostly plants might look like. Swap in fish for tofu if you prefer a Mediterranean approach, or swap out dairy-based yogurt for a nondairy option if you’re avoiding all animal products.

Boost Fiber Intake

And as you fill in your diet with non-plant options, you can still help limit saturated fat by opting for lean meats over red meat and choosing fat-free options of milk and yogurt. “Beans and lentils are some of the best plant-based proteins,” says Snyder. “They not only have a good amount of protein but are also high in other beneficial nutrients, like fiber, B vitamins and minerals.”

What to Eat on a Plant-Based Diet

“By prioritizing plants, we cut way down on our saturated fat intake.” This also differs from the trendy diets we often think of when making healthy changes to what we eat, like Whole30, keto and paleo — which can help a person lose weight through the sheer amount of food restriction required. They also don’t provide much benefit beyond short-term weight loss. Some even make it harder to consume important nutrients, or, worse still, cut them out completely. Studies show that prioritizing plant-based foods comes with several health benefits.

Plant-Based Diet: Pros and Cons, Cost, Foods, and More

A healthy dietary pattern limits foods and beverages that are higher in sodium, added sugars, and saturated fats. The latest edition of the Dietary Guidelines includes a Healthy Vegetarian Dietary Pattern variation, which provides recommendations to meet vegetarians’ nutritional needs within the different food groups. “Vegetarian diet” is a general term for several types of plant-based diets that may include dairy, eggs, seafood, or even meat and poultry (U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2020).

What is Plant-Based Eating?

This maximizes nutrient intake and virtually eliminates foods that can lead to poor health outcomes. Compared to most other diets, a plant-based diet is fairly easy to maintain. It offers a lot of flexibility because there aren’t any hard and fast rules either—you can reduce your meat intake, eliminate animal products altogether, or find a happy balance in between. Perhaps you’ve heard about the health benefits or are concerned about the environment. For years now, plant-based products have been flooding (and flying off of) supermarket shelves, according to the Good Food Institute.