The Surprising Link Between Your Health and the Fate of the Planet

What is a plant-based diet?

A plant-based diet?is based on foods derived from plants, including vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and fruits, with few or no animal products. Plant-based diets rich in beans, nuts, seeds, fruit and vegetables, whole grains such as oats, rice, and cereal-based foods such as bread, and pasta can provide all the nutrients needed for good health. This includes essential fats, protein, vitamins, minerals, and plenty of fiber too.

But only a healthy plant-based diet can improve your health. For optimum results, avoid sugar and fat, cut deep-fried and highly processed food, use healthy cooking methods, and make the most of your vegetables to get all the benefits of a plant-based diet.

Supporting the immune system and reducing inflammation

Cutting back on meat and dairy and switching to a plant-based diet is one of the best ways to boost the immune system. Plant foods reduce inflammation. They are rich in phytochemicals and antioxidants that boost your immune system and also go around your body neutralizing toxins from pollution, processed food, bacteria, and viruses. Plants successfully remove free radicals and lead your body to balance. Prolonged inflammation can damage your body’s cells and tissue and has been linked to cancer and other inflammatory diseases.

Eating a plant-based diet improves the health of your gut so you are better able to absorb the nutrients from the food that support your immune system and reduce inflammation.?Research?shows that a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole wheat helps reduce inflammation by strengthening the immune system.

Maintaining a healthy weight

Maintaining a healthy weight to reduce inflammation and the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes is very important. This is because excess weight causes inflammation and hormonal imbalance. If you eat mostly plants, you remove many of the foods that lead to weight gain. In combination with exercise, a plant-based diet improves your overall health.

In a series of?studies?out of the U.K., researchers tracked weight gain in meat-eating, fish-eating, vegetarian, and vegan men and women over five years. They found that those who ate less meat were less likely to gain large amounts of weight. In addition, people who gained the least weight were those who changed their diets to a category with less meat, such as switching from meat-eating to fish-eating, or fish-eating to vegetarian.

Reducing cancer risk

Plants are high in fiber.?Fiber?is present in all unprocessed plant foods. It is what makes up the structure of the plant, and if you eat more of it, you access many benefits. Fiber is very important for reducing your cancer risk. This is especially true for your risk for the third most common cancer:?colorectal cancer.

A 2012 meta-analysis in the?Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism?found that vegetarians have an 18 percent lower risk of cancer compared to non-vegetarians. Researchers credit the diet’s immune-boosting properties.

A?review?published in 2011 in?Cancer Management and Research?notes the protective benefits are there, though they’re moderate (lowering the risk for certain cancers by about 10 percent) and are likely because of the nutrients present in plant foods and because eating this way promotes a healthy weight.

Reducing heart diseases risk

According to a 2018?review?published in the journal?Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, following a vegan diet can help reverse coronary heart disease. The review also found a 40% lower risk of CHD and a 34% reduced risk of hypertension, which is a risk factor for heart disease.

Having high cholesterol increases your risk for heart attack and stroke, but a plant-based diet is associated with lower levels of total cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol, according to a study in the journal?Nutrition Reviews. The study found that a plant-based diet also decreased HDL (good) cholesterol, but in a much smaller proportion to LDL (3.4 compared to 12.2 mg/dl), lowering the ratio of LDL to HDL. A high ratio is a predictor of heart disease.

Preventing type 2 diabetes

Fiber can lower cholesterol and stabilize blood sugar, and it’s great for good bowel management. A plant-based diet is also very useful in managing existing diabetes because it’s very high in fiber and plant compounds with antioxidant activity, which can help regulate blood sugar. In a?study?of 8,401 adults, vegetarians were 74 percent less likely to develop diabetes over the course of 17 years when compared to those who ate meat at least once per week.

It’s well known that there’s a link between diet and type 2 diabetes. Weight is a major risk factor since more?fatty tissue?makes the cells more?resistant to insulin, according to the?Mayo Clinic. A?study?published in June 2016 in?PLoS Medicine?found that eating a plant-based diet filled with high-quality plant foods reduced the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 34 percent. It’s likely because plants are lower in saturated fats than animal foods, which raises?cholesterol levels?and your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Protecting your brain

A meta-analysis in the journal?Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience?found that increased consumption of fruits and vegetables is associated with a 20 percent reduction in the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. Researchers say this is likely because of the antioxidants in plants that clean up cellular waste (free radicals) and protect cells from damage.

Your risk for stroke increases if you have high blood pressure, are overweight, have diabetes or heart disease, have high cholesterol, or smoke, drink or use drugs.?As noted above, most of those risk factors can be wiped out by following a plant-based diet and making healthy lifestyle choices. After all, half of?the strokes?are preventable.?

One simple way to reduce your risk is by increasing your intake of fruits and vegetables. The highest consumers of fruits and veggies had a 21 percent lower risk of stroke than those who consumed the least, according to a?study?published in June 2014 in?Stroke.

Conclusion

A plant-based diet may protect you because it removes some triggers for these diseases.?Using?healthy cooking methods and knowing how to make the most of your vegetables?can help you get all the benefits a plant-based diet offers. You should limit sugar and fat, and make sure you are picking whole grains. Choose 100% whole wheat pasta and bread, and eat brown rice. Choosing plants will help all your body’s systems work the best they can.

Bonus Benefit! Protects the Environment?

Finally, eat off the land and the planet will thank you. According to?research?published in?The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it takes 11 times more fossil energy and 100 times more water to produce animal protein than it does plant protein.

While the difference in greenhouse gas emissions for animal-based versus plant-based foods is well known, emissions per gram of protein for beef and lamb are about 250 times those of legumes; pork, chicken, dairy, and fish have much lower emissions. Twenty servings of vegetables have fewer greenhouse gas emissions than one serving of beef.

There’s no debating animal agriculture’s devastating contribution to global warming. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that livestock production handles?14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while other organizations like the?Worldwatch Institute?have estimated it could be as much as 51%.

According to the?Water Footprint Network, it takes 1,000 gallons of water to produce just ONE gallon of milk. That staggering statistic alone should be enough to steer any earth-conscious individual away from animal products.?When you take into consideration that it requires about 100 times more water to produce a pound of animal protein than a pound of grain protein, you can see how?reducing the animal products you eat?will reduce the enormous amount of valuable water we waste.

Animal agriculture is the?leading cause of water pollution?and ocean dead zones.?Waste from factory farms?is stored in giant lagoons and applied, untreated, to crops as fertilizer. The soil can’t absorb the hundreds of toxins in such large quantities of manure, and instead, find their way into groundwater and then into rivers and oceans, where they destroy marine ecosystems.?

By choosing to eat more plant-based foods, you can drastically cut your carbon footprint, save precious water supplies, and help ensure that vital crop resources are fed to people, rather than livestock. With the wealth of plant-based options available, it has never been easier to eat with the planet in mind.

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