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 - 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. 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.

Searching For Quality In Healthcare - Studying A Study And Beyond

Health information is everywhere these days!

Have a weird pain in your side? Google it. Want to know what to expect from a new medication? Google it. Curious as to the best treatment for whooping cough? Google it.

As we've made our way into the 21st century our definition of 'seeking advice from your doctor' has went from getting it while sitting in the exam room to obtaining it via the internet. People are searching for answers, and they're finding them too. But what's to believe and not to believe? How is one to find quality health information via the internet?

Whether you're a healthcare professional or a lay person, I hope to offer you some reliable, quality health resources I've found useful in my quest for trusted health information. My goal as a medical professional is, and always has been, to seek out the most effective, safest, and least costly approaches in treating the healthcare needs of others. With that being said, I have always been, and will always be, adamant about using evidence-based scientific and medical literature free of commercial bias, if at all humanly possible to achieve this.

Many of the resources below are focused primarily on conventional medicine. While I often advocate for the use of lifestyle medicine (diet and exercise) over conventional medicine—due to its superior efficacy and safety profile when treating most chronic diseases—I also believe it's important to highlight the benefits and/or risks of conventional treatments so both patients and providers can make informed decisions regarding their health and how to achieve their goals in regards to this. In addition, the resources below will offer medical professionals some very valuable tools to help them in their everyday clinical practices.