Plant-based
Plant-based food could mean many things. There are countless dietary choices that could be healthy, unhealthy, cheap, expensive, low-calorie, high-calorie, low-protein, high-protein, etc.
This page is about ways to eat well with at least 95% of protein/calories coming from plants.
Balanced diets
Despite a lot of misinformation out there,
It is possible to meet 100% of your nutritional needs with just plants
To eat more healthy and more cheaply than most people do,
Use these principles as a guide:
If this doesn't seem balanced on first glance, see some of the examples below - it is.
- Note: These examples may not be perfect, but they are far more balanced than a typical diet in most countries.
- Note: You can also play around with the nutrition calculator to analyze your own options.
Nutrition examples
cheap home cooking
A balanced diet with beans, root vegetables, and other ordinary foods.
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Notes:
- This analysis shows the raw ingredients. Cooking instructions / recipes will be added to this wiki soon. In general, when you boil any food, do not drain the water; keep it for the soup. You don't want to lose some of the minerals (nutrients)
(...)( relevant info: Heat doesn't destroy minerals (...)( scientific reason: the minerals are elements (on the periodic table); the vitamins are molecules that can break down at high temperatures ) , but it does destroy some vitamins. The multivitamin fully compensates for this: Most multivitamin tablets have 100% the recommended daily intake of all B vitamins and vitamin C, which are the ones that can be lost in cooking. ) . - Calcium is supplemented (typically costs about 10 cents per day), because the cheap foods aren't naturally high in calcium.
- Yes it's all vegan!
junk food method
Yes, it is possible to construct healthy diets with junkfood, in some cases.
TODO: add screenshot of nutrition calculator here
Notes:
- Even if the cookies have small amounts of dairy etc., the vast majority of calories & protein are still coming from plants.
- Calcium is supplemented (typically costs about 10 cents per day), because the cheap foods aren't naturally high in calcium.
low carb
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expensive cliché vegan diet
Not an example of the principles above. This tab is included for comparison.
This vegan diet is still nutritionally balanced but far more expensive.
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global food supply
This tab is for research purposes.
Suppose the world went vegan but all the same food crops are grown
This tab shows how a balanced diet would work. A multivitamin is once again essential.
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Notes:
- Farmers could grow other crops instead.
- See the next tab for an extreme example.
- This analysis shows just the raw ingredients. Recipes can be added to this wiki.
- Recipe ideas:
- Corn muffins: using corn flour, wheat flour, sugars, soy, etc.
- Soy milk: The soybeans are cooked, pureed and filtered. The solid parts (filtered out) are used in the muffins.
- Recipe ideas:
extreme amounts of vegetables
This tab is for research purposes.
This theoretical diet comes from research on crop choices. If farmers around the world grew only the highest-yielding crops of their local regions, the global food supply would look like this! Calories & protein come from the sheer volume of vegetables grown, mostly. For people to be able to eat that many vegetables, most of it would have to be powderized and used as flour. There would still be some fresh produce, of course.
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Notes:
- This diet appears to work without a multivitamin. But since most of the vegetables would be powderized, then some nutrients would be lost. A multivitamin would still be needed to make up for this.
typical western diet
Not an example of the principles above. This tab is included for comparison.
This section has not been filled in yet.
Rationale
Plant-based diets are beneficial for a few reasons:
In summary
If people ate fewer animal products
- Deforestation could finally be stopped, and
- Massive amounts of farm land could be rewilded, and
- Even with less crop production, there'd be more than enough surplus food to end global hunger, and
- Factory farms could be abolished.
With all of this, it also helps to reduce food waste (the gap between production and consumption)
FAQ
Veganism is a heated topic. This section can hopefully clear up some misconceptions on both sides of the debate. If you want to add more Q&A to this section, please join the discussion.
Q: What to do with all the animals if everyone goes vegan?
A:
- Option 1: Keep them until they die of old age.
- Option 2: Keep slaughtering them at the same rate they currently are.
- In either case, the farmers stop breeding more animals
(...)( except to maintain the species by keeping around ~0.1% of their population (...)( maybe that's more in the realm of scientists, conservationists, zookeepers etc. - but no matter who does it, it's viable ) ) . - In either case, people would still eat meat for another year or so, after pledging to go vegan.
- Maybe the "pledge" part is weird and hypothetical, but so is the idea of everyone going vegan tomorrow.
- If everyone gradually
(...)( as in, people slowly phase out meat in their diets - or people go "cold turkey" vegan but each starting from a different day - or anything in between: there wouldn't need to be a whole lot of coordination between people necessarily; just a general trend of being more plant-based ) went vegan, there'd be no "shock in demand" (...)( as economists would say ) , and thus no "what do we do with the animals". Farmers already control how many animals are bred. They would just breed fewer of them.