When we talk about plant foods......

[BasinHaircut]

Do you include grains such as rice, cous cous, quinoa etc?

Would you stretch it to pasta? Bread?

What about plant based sausages and burgers?

Where would you draw the line between minimally processed and processed?

My interpretation of 'plant based' is absolutely anything edible not derived from animals. But 'whole food plant based' is brown rice not white rice, olives not olive oil etc.

For those following that way of life some things that are considered processed, like bread, would be acceptable. I guess everyone finds their own line!

Try a google search under 'whole food plant based' or 'wfpb recipes'.

I eat plant based but generally exclude pasta/bread other than a couple slices of Ezekiel bread with soup a few times a week.

I'll eat brown rice, quinoa but not cous cous or farro as they're too wheaty and give me bloat.

I have a pretty wide range of recipes I choose to make on a weekly basis and I rarely eat processed vegan food just because my predominate goal is health.

I also don't like beans generally but will incorporate the few that I do like (edemame) on a regular basis.

I found that I tolerate starchy vegetables far more than grains so will have one day that's grain heavy, one that's starch heavy (rather than incorporating them every day), and the rest of the time I eat all vegetable meals either in the form of salad or a cooked dish like "meatloaf".

Thanks both. I’ve been doing veganuary and got really interested in the different interpretations of a ‘vegan’ or a ‘plant based’ or a ‘whole foods’ diet.

It’s fascinating because I would say that even though I eat some meat/fish/dairy/eggs normally, I would say that my diet is predominantly plant based and much more whole food than processed. Even more so than some vegans I know.

I think "vegan" puts the focus on what you don't eat, and what you eat can come from a plant or a factory plant as long as it doesn't contain animal products. Can be junk and a lot of commercial vegan food is purely junk, with vegan fakes winning the top spot, so vegan sausages, burgers, cheese, and so on, with so many chemicals it triggers an inflammation response to your body since it doesn't recognise this foreign bodies as food.

Whole food plant based, means what it says on the box, whole food. Not soy protein isolate, not corn starch, nothing extracted and so on.

The bread will depend, one that say wholemeal flour, water, yeast, salt, is whole, one that states wheat flour, bran flour is not because the bran is an extract.
Anything that is added to make a food taste better , look better, last longer , any cooking process you can repeat without a food engineering degree, and so on.

This year veganuary is heavily oriented on bad food, which will leave many with worse health markers than before they started.

This year veganuary is heavily oriented on bad food, which will leave many with worse health markers than before they started.

@Cormoran yes this struck me as well. Not what I was expecting TBH.

Plant based sounds like a marketeers dream tbh.

Oh I am sure the food industry has perfectly well understood the money that was to be made with a "vegan" label on a packet.

If you try to suggest taking the opportunity to try new veggies instead of eating ultra processed vegan food on the veganuary board, you are attacked and labelled diet police, so I am staying out, even if not a word is said about the need to supplement with b12 (and a lot more based on what they eat)

It already is a marketeers dream. Many folk will see a food item labeled "plant based" and assume its "healthy" much like we used to assume everything labeled "low fat" or "fat free" was healthy in the 80's and 90's.

Might be plant based but many items will still be highly processed.

That said, they have their place for someone wanting to move towards a meat/dairy free diet which can only be a good thing.

I myself used many of the plant burgers etc when I cut meat/dairy but actually don't eat them now (or very rarely when there are no other options).

But yes, plant based is the new "in" label slapped on food products.

And to answer your question @BasinHaircut yes quinoa is included in the whole food definition.
Bread is tricky. I make my own because in Australia, the majority of bread is heavily processed, even the bakeries are franchising and use pre-mixed flours with fortifiers or other additives, so I bake my own spelt bread.
A can of beans is whole, a can of baked beans is not, since they put sugar (or worse sweeteners)

I think I’ve read that ‘plant based’ originally referred to diet whereas ‘vegan’ was more of a lifestyle thing. So someone who is plant based will only eat vegan food but might use cosmetics that aren’t vegan and wear wool/silk/leather and a vegan wouldn’t. I’m guessing the former is more of a (supposed) health choice and the latter is more of a moral or environmental choice.

I might just have made that up though!

That's why it is not just "plant based" but plant based whole food .

A vegan when the term was coined was a stricter form of vegetarian. Now there isn't just one way of being vegan. There is a tendency to put labels on everything but the truth is there is fluidity.

And the vegan cosmetic is a con in many ways, because the "cruelty free" or not tested on animals has no geographic or time specificities , so you can sell a product " not tested on animals" because no testing is done in UK, but they could do them in France.

Quorn, the superstar of vegan food , was actually tested on animals for a decade.

Exactly right Cormorant. I'm not a vegan, but I do follow a whole food plant based lifestyle to the best of my abilities.

I follow for health reasons primarily, with welfare and environmental impacts secondary. Following a wfpb diet does not automatically equate to a vegan and vice versa.

Funnily enough it's easier for people to accept it if I tell them that I don't eat meat and dairy rather than declaring myself a "vegan" or eating a "wfpb diet" which can often sound pretentious!

You know the joke@Strokethefurrywall "How do you know someone is vegan? Because they tell you. "

In my case, it is to increase my lifespan. I have a genetic disease that comes with a 60% life chance of cancer (with shitty prognosis in case you do get it) and a 26 years reduction of life expectancy. So I am working on those numbers one morsel at the time. Reducing animal protein is a big part of that as is increasing the diversity, quantity and quality of vegetables. It is wasn't for my need to keep proteins very low, I think grass feed beef, or shell fish have a solid place in a whole food diet.

Ultra processed food are damaging to the immune system, so it is a no brainer.

I try to eat around a minimum 20 different vegetables every week, changing them in base of season.

Of course when you see what happens in slaughterhouses, or dairy farms, industrial cattle farms, it is absolutely disgusting.

Taste and smell will change too when adopting a whole food diet. It has even become a joke in the house that I should go hunting for truffles.

I would say that the term 'vegan' isn't fluid - it has quite a clear definition, as per the Vegan Society: "Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose"

As a philosophy it has animal rights at its core, rather than healthy eating.

In contrast, I would say people who say they follow a "plant based" diet usually do so for reasons of health, and tend to be more flexible in their approach. I agree with PPs that lots of mass-produced, low nutrition products call themselves 'plant-based' these days, and whilst the name implies healthiness, that is often far from the case!

Incidentally I wouldn't say 'Quorn' has ever been the superstar of the vegan movement. Most of its products weren't vegan until comparatively recently, as they contain egg (and egg from intensively reared chickens, at that)

Ohh I’m glad this discussion has picked up!

Interesting points about bread re whole grain as proposed to using separate components and I take your point about plain beans or baked beans although on the scale a ton of baked beans would rate better than a slice of vegan bacon presumably?

And yes that makes sense that vegan = lifestyle and plant based/pbwf = diet.

Sorry to hear about your health issues @Cormoran, hopefully your diet changes are working out for you.

I have become slightly obsessed about the health benefits of a plant based diet. I am a food scientist by background (previous life though so I am a bit out of date) and I enjoy wading through both the evidence based and also more biased information. DH has been bored to tears by me these past few weeks

By fluid, I mean there are many ways to be vegan, as there are many ways to be an omnivore.

Many forget the VEG part of VEGan and opt for a 50-shades-of-beige-diet, other will have a very healthy seeds, unrefined grains and a great variety of veggies and so many will be somewhere in between.

I believe that vegan, as being a strict vegetarian without eggs and milk, is the diet and veganism the philosophy .

But let's leave the rhetoric and semantics out.

The bread is a good example. Wholemeal flour will not make your blood sugar spike, however, legislation allows for a bread to be labelled wholemeal even when it is made of white (listed as wheat) flour, and with added bran. The white flour will make your blood sugar spike and the isolated bran will boost Bacteroidetes in the gut which isn't ideal . Wholemeal flour on the other hand will increase the Bifidobacterium colonies.
You can't break a food apart and then re-glue it and think it will be the same.
Even the bakeries use flour mixes with any of the hundreds of additives which will accelerate workability of dough or reduce raising times, gluten activator and so much more.
Everyone blames the gluten, but very few know how heavily and chemically processed bread is today.

Baked beans are minimally processed, where as vegan bacon belong to the Frankenfood (from Frankenstein)

The majority of nutritional research is biased, the majority of the diet voices are equally biased, especially if they earn $$ from their opinion by whichever mean (selling program, subscription, YouTube videos that include ads, social media, influencers, ....) .
Peter Attia had an interview with John Ioannidis recently and it makes a good listening while cleaning, chopping and prepping the veg.
peterattiamd.com/johnioannidis/

Agree to an extent about the research, but true scientific studies can be unbiased, but they can’t be controlled. Therefore they must never be examined in the same way as (for example) medical research and strong and definitive conclusions can never be reached.

It’s amazing how much information you can find out there that comes from biased or just simply unqualified places. But sifting through it is still interesting and can be informative in its own way. For example that game changers documentary references studies that it just misinterprets, but if you watch it and go looking for the counter arguments or discussion pieces about it you can drill down.

I am very interested in diet and science and base what I eat mostly on what is recommended to BRCA1 women since my gene mutation is very similar. I hit pubmed on a daily basis. However I know that you can find an association with cancer risk or the opposite, benefit for most food ingredients.

Take this study
Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review
Ingredients were randomly selected from a cookbook, they were veal, salt, pepper spice, flour, egg, bread, pork, butter, tomato, lemon, duck, onion, celery, carrot, parsley, mace, sherry, olive, mushroom, tripe, milk, cheese, coffee, bacon, sugar, lobster, potato, beef, lamb, mustard, nuts, wine, peas, corn, cinnamon, cayenne, orange, tea, rum, and raisin. , so a mix of animal, plant, spice

For each the authors could find studies that show an increased risk and its opposite.

academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/97/1/127/4576988

or the big war between types of diet, the low carb agains the low fat. Every study compares a crappy diet against a healthy low something. But when they compared a healthy low carb vs a healthy low fat, no difference whatsoever

Bottomline, you can manipulate pubmed to your flavour.

Which makes my every day complicated, especially when my oncologist doesn't believe at all in diet preventing cancer, and her words " eat what you want, it doesn't make any difference" .

And people don't like to change their beliefs and opinion, be it on diet, vaccine, Trump, ....

I agree in that there is a counter argument for every "way of eating" out there, although PubMed is the best source of practical, sound research out there.

I'm personally satisfied by the amount of hard evidence in support of a whole food plant based diet for health certainly when you review it against other diets that limit certain macronutrients. That's not to say that certain restrictive diets don't assist with certain ailments (high fat keto diet for epilepsy for example), but on a broader basis, the way of eating that positively protects from the most serious of lifestyle disease is a plant based one.

Ultimately it comes back to the reasoning that if it arrives surrounded by plastic with words I don't recognize, my body doesn't recognize it either. If it's grown in the ground or falls off a tree, I'm going to eat it. The few exceptions to this are tofu and Ezekiel bread which I eat in relatively small amounts.

I totally agree @Strokethefurrywall high volume and high diversity of plants offers the best health chances and highly processed the most damaging.