Plant-rich: the Win-Win Diet
Originally published in the Sudbury Star on Feb. 5, 2022
When it comes to their eating habits, you’d never know my two kids were raised in the same home. Kid #1 is a committed vegan and amateur chef, who loves her beans and lentils. Kid #2 (to his pediatrician-mom’s dismay) subsists on red meat, eats no vegetables except raw carrots, and can barely rehydrate noodles.
Over the last few decades, we’ve been fed so much contradictory advice about food, we hardly know what to eat any more. Even the meaning of the word “diet” itself has been transmogrified: the purpose of a diet isn’t to nourish our bodies. It’s all about shrinking them.
There are so many “diets” out there, we can’t even keep them straight. Paleo. Keto. Low-carb. Low-fat. Atkins (which is low everything), The Zone. Gluten-free. Vegetarian. Flexitarian. Vegan. We’re so busy cutting out this and supplementing that, we’ve lost track of what food is. And thanks to the food industry, it’s questionable whether much of what’s to be found in our supermarkets and fast food outlets even qualifies for consideration. (My own personal view: if it isn’t capable of rotting quickly, it probably isn’t food.)
Despite our mixed-up relationship with nourishment and our preoccupation with losing weight, obesity and its complications have become a global pandemic.[1] Around the world, some 1.9 billion adults are overweight or obese. The rates are particularly high in countries like Canada and the USA. Our messed-up eating habits and inactive lifestyles result in a high risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and many forms of cancer. In 2021, about 15,000 Canadians tragically died of COVID-19, but almost 80,000 died from heart disease, stroke, or complications of diabetes.[2]
When I was born in 1959, the world’s population was about 3 billion. We’re now approaching 8 billion, and although birthrates are falling, we will likely hit 10 billion in the 2050s. Producing enough food for everyone is one of humanity’s greatest challenges and achievements. Through the development of higher-yield crops, the use of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers, and the industrialization of agriculture, we’ve managed to increase global food production dramatically. Around the world, a great many people have access to far more food than is good for them; famine and malnutrition have become less common. That said, hundreds of millions of our fellow humans still go to bed hungry.
While our capacity to expand food production might seem like a triumph of human ingenuity, it has come at an enormous environmental cost. Here are just a few examples: Globally, about 25 percent of greenhouse gases originate from agriculture. Heavy use of chemical fertilizers has dramatically altered the planet’s nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, with serious consequences like massive aquatic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. The use of pesticides is killing off wildlife, and contributing to biodiversity loss. Large swaths of critically important ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest have been been cleared to make way for agriculture. All these costs have been inflated by our modern love affair with animal-derived foods, and especially beef.
The good news is this: there’s a way of eating that’s good for both people and planet. A win-win diet. A diet characterized not by restrictions, but by abundance. It’s called the Plant-Rich diet. It’s not really a “diet”; it’s a way of life. There’s nothing you can’t eat on the plant-rich diet. But when you intentionally fill up your dinner plate and your stomach with plant-sourced foods like vegetables and fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds, there will simply be less room for meat, cheese, eggs, and chicken. You will be eating a diet that’s higher in fibre, and lower in sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats.
And finally, here’s the biggest surprise: the plant-rich diet bears a remarkable resemblance to the latest version of Canada’s Food Guide![3]
Sources:
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-rates-by-country
[2] https://www.statista.com/topics/8039/death-in-canada/#dossierKeyfigures