What's The Best Plant-Based Diet?

Your health depends heavily on your lifestyle and, more importantly, the foods you choose to include in your lifestyle. Over the past few years there has been a popular and growing movement to transition towards a plant-based diet in order to achieve better health and trimmer waistlines. The science and evidence is certainly there to support this move towards a plant-centered diet, not only in terms of health, but also in terms of benefiting the environment and the welfare of all living beings on the planet.

Along with these many benefits comes many choices. There’s at least a dozen or more different plant-based diets to follow so which one is the best? Which provides the greatest benefit to you?

We’ll get to these questions soon, but first let’s take a look at just a few of the popular plant-based diets out there to give you a sense of what’s available.

Popular Plant-Based Diets

1) The Fab Five - Pursue A Healthy You (The Plant-Based Pharmacist)

I’ve laid out some simple guidelines to adopting a whole foods, plant-based diet and which foods to incorporate as part of this eating style at my website Pursue A Healthy You. This includes five basic food groups I like to call my Fab Five:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Legumes
• Whole Grains
• Nuts/Seeds

I focus on keeping things simple and including all of your calories from these five food groups. The amounts of each food group and tips on how to adopt this health-promoting diet can all be found here.

2) The Power Plate - Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine (PCRM)

PCRM has outlined their path to a healthy diet using a straightfoward method using a dinner plate divided into four main food groups. These include:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Legumes
• Whole Grains

This approach is very simple to follow and resembles the USDA’s MyPlate program, albeit a much healthier version. PCRM focuses on incorporating only whole, plant-based foods while eliminating all animal-based foods in their plan.

3) The McDougall Diet - Dr. John McDougall, MD

Dr. McDougall has outlined his road to optimal health using a starch-based diet. His approach uses unrefined starches as the base to one’s meal plans accompanied by an array of whole, plant-based foods. The McDougall Diet at a glance:

• Unrefined Starches (Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Brown Rice, Whole Grain Pasta, etc.) – Base of the Diet
• Green and Yellow Vegetables
• Fruits
• Legumes
• Whole Grains
• Nuts/Seeds (Optional, Limited Amounts)

Dr. McDougall’s starch-based diet acts to satisfy your hunger needs while sticking to starchy vegetables and whole grains which have served as “staple foods in the diets of all successful, trim, and healthy populations throughout history” as he often cites.

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