What if you were a vegan for one day?

Do you follow a plant-based, whole foods diet? Would you consider yourself a vegan? Do you eat more plant-based meals during the week than any other type?

How would you describe your regular eating habits?

What you eat is one of the most important ways that you can influence your health. Your health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is a significant indicator of an individual’s happiness and life satisfaction. This measure consistently finds that Western diets are detrimental when it comes to chronic mental and physical health illnesses. Consistently whole foods, plant-based diets rate the highest when it comes to preventing and treating mental and physical illness.

Why don’t doctors recommend a plant-based diet?

One reason that doctors say that they don’t recommend whole foods, plant-based diet to their patients to reverse and treat chronic conditions is that they believe it would be “too hard” for their patients to follow.

But the research doesn’t support this idea

You could reverse debilitating conditions without surgery or medications, without complications or side effects. Plant-based diets are proven to be the most effective way to lose weight and maintain weight loss. So health professionals are not recommending them because they perceive them to be difficult, not because of the benefits. But I am willing to bet you are already eating plant-based meals.

Isn’t this a decision you should be making?

I think that you should know the facts and make choices based on what you think is possible. I believe that most people eat plant-based foods now…ever had a salad? An apple? Do you ever eat oatmeal for breakfast? Or have a berry smoothie, hummus, rice and beans? So many meals already are plant-based. It is not that difficult to switch a few meals to plant-based ones.

Maybe you don’t worry about heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes or your weight. Changing your diet may not seem worth it to you. However, a whole food, plant-based diet may not increase your life span but can improve your health span. Spending more of your years healthy and active and less time, dependent, sick or suffering. 

Or you could eat more whole food, plant-based foods for the planet. 

• If everyone ate a vegan diet for one day we would save 400 billion gallons of water, the equivalent of water used by the state of New England in 4 months.
• If everyone ate a vegan diet for one day we would save 70 million gallons of gas, enough for all the cars in Canada and Mexico.
• In one day  we would save 33 tons of antibiotics
• 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide
• 3 million tons of soil erosion
• 1.5 billion tons of crops are fed to animals, enough to feed 2 million people for one year.

You can find out how much of an impact you have made at the Vegan Calculator.

Change your mind, change your health,

Shayla