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.

Beans, Beans, The Musical Fruit

Beans, beans, the musical fruit

The more you eat, the more you toot

The more you toot, the better you feel

So let's eat beans with every meal!

I'm sure that short, little tune takes you back to your playground days like it does me.  I remember growing up and having a few laughs over one of nature's most smelly culprits.  As goofy and childlike as the song may be it has a lot of truth beneath the verses within it.

Beans are part of the legume family which also include lentils, peas, soy, and peanuts.  While beans may be the butt of many flatulent jokes they have some incredible health benefits and should be included in one's diet if you're looking to lose weight and feel great.