Plant-based nutrition is consuming a diet of whole plant foods including whole grain products, legumes, vegetables and fruits that provide all the nutrients that the human body requires: carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and sufficient calories. A plant-based diet is a lifestyle choice that can be for health issues, cultural, religious or ethical reasons. Or you may eat a plant-based diet to stay healthy and prevent health problems, such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes. Whatever your reasons for choosing a plant-based diet or lifestyle, this site will help you make smart choices to ensure that you meet your daily nutritional needs.
There is decades of scientific research shows that most chronic health issues are a direct result of diet and other lifestyle choices. The science supports that by adopting a plant-based diet many of these chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease can be prevented and even reversed. People who eat the most animal-based foods get the most chronic disease. People who eat the most plant-based foods are the healthiest and tend to avoid chronic disease. One study in particular, supports this claim, it is called “The China Study” by Dr. T. Colin Campbell, and it is most comprehensive long-term study on nutrition ever conducted on the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease which challenges much of the standard American dietary beliefs.
Populations that consume high carbohydrates like the Okinawans are trimmer, healthier and vibrant people, their diet consists mostly of rice, vegetables, some fish and no dairy products. The Okinawans have more people over 100 years old per 100,000 population than anywhere else in the world, the lowest death rates from cancer, heart disease and stroke (the top three killers in the US), the highest life expectancy for both males and females over 65, and females in Okinawa have the highest life expectancy in all age groups. This is just one example of a healthy lifestyle can avoid many chronic diseases such as we have in the U.S. caused by the western diet.
This is the way thin healthy people around the world live; another example, the healthy people of Asia thrive on a high-carbohydrate, rice-based diets. The Japanese (who eat the traditional diet) eat a diet abundant in rice and vegetables with only small amounts of animal protein and have a very low incidence of heart disease, breast, colon and prostate cancer and have one of world’s greatest longevity. Many Seventh-Day Adventists are strict vegetarians, who consume mainly grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables, and as a result have a lower incidence of heart disease and colon cancer compared to the general population.