Plant-based vs. Vegan

A made-up debate

Before I left Twitter, I saw a tweet by someone with “vegan” as a part of their handle, that said, and I quote, “If you’re vegan for any other reason than the animals, you’re not a true vegan.”

It was a trend. There were lots of posts like it.

And this, my friends, is why I don’t generally identify as vegan, even though I am one. Angry social-media vegans are giving the rest of us plant-eaters a bad rep.

Some of them approach converting meat-eaters the same way the early Christians approached converting the pagans during the Inquisition. Not a good look, nor an effective method.

In truth, most vegans are kind, compassionate, loving, friendly people.

A rose by any other name…

The word “vegan” has been so sullied because of this behavior, that when governments and Big Food finally saw the writing on the wall (they have) and realized that the Standard American Diet is unsustainable (it is) and that they must get people to stop eating so much meat & dairy (they must) they turned to marketing wizards — those geniuses who’ve convinced us to buy bottled water even if we have perfectly good water flowing freely from our taps.

Those brilliant mind-benders could sell a bridge to a desert dweller. But they couldn’t sell products labeled “vegan” to the American public. You might say the word “vegan” left a bad taste in consumers’ mouths.

“Plant-based” sells better

The term “plant-based” came into use in product marketing because testing showed that if you put plant-based on one box and vegan on another, even if everything else on the packaging was identical, the plant-based one would sell and the vegan one would sit there until its expiration date.

In a head-to-head comparison, 73% of consumers said “100% plant-based” tasted better than “vegan,” and 68% said it was healthier than “vegan.”
– Marketing and Promoting Plant-based Proteins, by the Good Food Institute

So now, all the fake food in the freezer section is labeled plant-based. The angry always-looking-for-a-fight social media vegans are screaming that “plant-based and vegan aren’t the same!” and “If you’re plant-based you’re an animal hating waste of oxygen.” You know, that kind of thing.

“Plant-based” in medical circles

The term “whole foods plant-based” was already in use before the food companies got hold of the “plant-based” part of it, among another group of geniuses; doctors and nutritionists like Caldwell Esselstyn, T. Colin Campbell, and Dean Ornish, who all use “whole-foods plant-based” to describe the diet on which patients in their groundbreaking studies were able to reverse coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Ornish is currently involved in a new study on the effects of a whole foods plant-based diet on Alzheimer’s after initial findings showed promise.

And when they use it, they mean it the way I describe it below. And I’ll give the exception that’s confusing people below that.

Dr. Michael Gregor says the words vegan and vegetarian only tell him what you don’t eat. “Whole foods plant-based” tells him everything that you DO eat. In How Not to Die, he says, “You can be vegan and live on French fries and beer.”

Definitions

Plant-Based Diet
Excludes: All animal products (meat, fish, poultry, dairy, honey, insect-derived ingredients)
Includes: Any food made from plants or parts of plants, including highly processed foods and oils. No restrictions on salt, sugar, oil, chemicals, preservatives, etc.

*You can live on French fries and beer on this diet.

Whole-foods plant-based diet
Excludes: All animal products (meat, fish, poultry, dairy, honey, insect-derived ingredients)
Also Excludes: Highly processed foods and oil. Artificial sweeteners. Chemical additives.
Moderates: Minimally processed foods (tofu, oat or nut milks,) refined cane sugar, white flour.
Includes: Whole fruits and vegetables (so instead of olive oil, the whole olive, instead of apple juice, eat the apple, for example,) beans and legumes, whole grains, and natural sugars (raw sugar, maple syrup, agave nectar.)

*You cannot live on French fries and beer on this diet.

Vegan Lifestyle
”Vegan” does not refer to diet alone, but includes every aspect of the person’s life.
Excludes: All animal products (meat, fish, poultry, dairy, honey, insect derived ingredients)
Also Excludes: Use of animal products outside the diet, (leather, silk, wool, fur, bone, ivory, lecithin-a blood product, horse-derived estrogen, hoof-derived gelatin, etc.)
Includes: Any food made from plants or parts of plants, including highly processed foods and oils. No restrictions on salt, sugar, oil, chemicals, preservatives, etc.

*The main difference between the definitions of “plant-based” and “vegan” is that “plant-based” is a diet—it’s what you eat. “Vegan” is a lifestyle. It includes what you eat and items you use in other parts of your life.

You can still live on French fries and beer in this lifestyle.

Two other dietary terms, just so you know what they are if you see them mentioned…

Vegetarian Diet
Excludes: Meat (beef, fish, poultry, any animal flesh)
Includes: Everything else, dairy, honey, highly processed foods, oil — everything.

You can live on cheesy fries and beer on this diet.

Pescatarian Diet
Excludes: Meat derived from mammals or birds (beef, lamb, poultry)
Includes: Fish & shellfish, dairy, honey, highly processed foods, oils — everything.

You can live on beer and fish sticks on this diet.

My lifestyle and diet

I eat a whole foods, plant-based diet.
For this I have many reasons and the top one is my health.

Animal proteins in the diet have been proven in medical studies to “wake up” the mutated genes that cause breast and pancreatic cancer. If 20% or more of your total weekly calories are from meat or dairy, your mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are probably awake and working. (Most Americans are getting about 67% of their calories from animal proteins, which is why we have the health epidemics we have.)

I am also a vegan.
(One of the nice ones.)
(Mostly.)
For this I also have many reasons, and the top one is the environment.

Eating meat and dairy adds more climate-warming greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all forms of transportation combined, uses 30% of the world’s fresh water and 70% of its arable land (land that can be plowed to grow crops.) No child would be starving if we were all eating a plant-based diet.

As a vegan, I don’t eat or buy any animal products including wool, silk, or leather. For this I have two huge reasons.

I love animals, and I love Mother Earth. In order to fulfill the insatiable demand for meat in the US, animals are raised in abhorrent conditions, force-fed to grow them as big as possible, as fast as possible. They are raised in crowded, cramped conditions, breathing the ammonia from their own urine and feces in which they must stand. It burns their eyes and their lungs. No animal-lover should be willing to support this horrible, cruel, absolutely morally bankrupt industry.

Yes, small family farms with pastoral scenes still exist. They dot the landscape where I live. But 90% of the meat in our grocery stores is raised on factory farms.

Unlike some vegans, I do not eat fake meats

Fake burgers, sausage, meatballs, fishlike filets and chickenlike nuggets are mainly made of oil. It’s usually the second ingredient listed after wheat gluten or soy protein. Then they add seasonings and that’s your meal.

Oil will kill you almost as efficiently as meat will. Watch the following 4 minute video to understand this better.

What we can learn from the fake foods littering the freezer section of the grocery store, and how wonderful they taste, is that when we eat meat, we aren’t always tasting the meat at all, but the seasonings. In the case of hot dogs and sausages, wings and ham, the taste you think of as coming from those meats, actually comes from the seasonings and brine used to make them taste that way.

The made-up debate

I see lots of vegans trumpeting online about a completely fictional requirement to choose between vegan and plant-based. I could care less which you choose. You can die of a heart attack either way, because those two groups have the same diet. Anything I want besides animal products.

But both terms refer to what you EXCLUDE and neither refer to what you INCLUDE in your diet.

The truth

There is no question that the healthiest diet for the earth, for our bodies, and for the animals we love, is a whole foods, plant-based eating plan where we live on vegetables, fruits, legumes, beans, and whole grains, plus a little tofu, a little oat milk, a little raw sugar or maple syrup.

Combined with a lifestyle that embraces veganism by shunning the use of animal products in non-edible items such as medicines, supplements, cosmetics, clothing, furniture, car interiors, etc.—makes it even better for the environment and all those who live within it.

The exception that confuses people

Dr. Michael Gregor keeps says that a whole foods plant based diet “modifies or eliminates animal proteins.” The word “modifies” is what has a lot of us up in arms because that’s not vegan and it’s not whole foods plant-based by today’s standards, either.

It was, however the approach of Dr. Nathan Pritkin, who pioneered his version of a whole foods plant-based dietary treatment for heart disease as early as the 1960s. In his plan, limited amounts of fish and lean meats were allowed, but the diet was otherwise whole foods plant-based.

But Ornish, Esselstyn, and Campbell have since proven beyond doubt that eliminating animal proteins works far better than limiting them, and Dr. Gregor knows this very well and I’m sure he says so. He mentions eating meat nowhere in the video version of How Not to Die on Amazon Prime other than early, when he drops “eliminate or modify animal proteins” when what he really means is “eliminate animal proteins.”

I can’t tell you why he uses “modify” anywhere on his site, in his video, or in his book, but he does. My best guess would be that by throwing in that one word, he might reach omnivores who wouldn’t otherwise even look, and who would then read the small print and maybe get the message.

And the message is this: Animal proteins are BAD, mkay?

Animal proteins cause breast cancer, heart disease, colorectal cancer, auto-immune disorders, and type 2 diabetes. They line your arteries with plaque while simultaneously stimulating your blood vessels to contract about 22% right after you ingest them. They fill your body with inflammatory components. They make you fat. They raise your blood pressure. They elevate your cholesterol. They shorten the telomeres at the ends of your cells which is a suspected mechanism of aging. They cause digestive issues. They’re just awful in every way.

If you want to achieve peak health at any age, lose weight, save the planet, grow younger every day in every way other than the calendar, get off most of your prescriptions with medical supervision, reverse most of your ailments, and feel like a million bucks, just do this one thing:

Eat a whole foods plant-based diet.
Mkay?

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