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What’s the Best Way to Eat a Plant-Based Diet?

A diet that’s personally sustainable, makes you feel great and satisfied, and helps you achieve your long-term personal goals, is the best diet to maintain.

What this “best diet” looks like for you, depends on various factors.

Are you sedentary or physically active? A high-endurance athlete or bodybuilder? Pregnant or nursing? Teenager or senior? Do you have specific health issues influencing what you can eat?

So, while we can give you general guidelines, it’s worth going the extra mile to make personal adjustments, and we can help steer you in the right direction.

Eat Mostly Fresh, Whole Foods

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If you want maximum health benefits, the refined sugars and flours, hydrogenated oil products, and overly processed food products all have to go.

That shouldn’t be too much of an issue as plenty of delicious meals and snacks can be prepared from fresh ingredients.

Choose Your Staple Foods Mindfully

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Instead of whole grains, we suggest eating non-wheat gluten-free ancient grains and pseudocereals.

The following are examples of staple foods we encourage:

  • Amaranth
  • Buckwheat
  • Cauliflower
  • Celeriac
  • Jicama
  • Lentils
  • Millet
  • Squashes
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Wild rice

Use the above items to make up the bulk of your meals along with your choice of fats and/or seaweed.

Include Quality Sources of Fats

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“Fats are bad for you!” Or variations of that, is what you’ll hear consistently, especially in low-fat diet circles.

Because of this, you may feel encouraged to restrict or steer clear of foods and edible products with a high fat content, including nuts, seeds, certain oils, and avocados.

Luckily, most of us know about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fats so we have thankfully moved on from ‘all fats are bad’. Having said that, it’s still used in marketing and many people fall for such blanket perceptions because of this.

Whole food sources of fats:

  • Avocado
  • Coconut
  • Nuts
  • Olives
  • Seeds

Some nuts and seeds can be soaked and even sprouted to improve their digestibility so you can extract more nutrients.

Oils you can consider using:

  • Avocado oil
  • Coconut oil
  • Hemp seed oil
  • Macadamia nut oil
  • Olive oil
  • Pumpkin seed oil
  • Walnut oil

Apart from coconut oil, the oils you buy should be contained in dark glass bottles, shielded from light. Be sure to buy the best quality oils you can.

For olive oil (and this can apply to other oils too) try to avoid blends of olive oil from different sources. Extra Virgin olive oil is considered better than regular and for the very best, look for ‘first’ and ‘cold’ pressed and, of course, organic.

It is standard practice with olive oil to press the olives multiple times, each yielding a lower quality oil.

Include Sources of Minerals

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You’ve likely heard many times how important minerals are for your well-being.

But the challenge we all face with today’s modern food production is the lack of minerals and general nutritional value in much of the fresh produce we buy due to:

  • topsoil that’s never allowed to replenish
  • overuse of fertilizers and toxic chemicals
  • harvesting fruit when unripe

For this reason, it’s up to each of us to do what we can to compensate, whether through food or supplements.

We can recommend you do one or more of the following:

  • Incorporate edible seaweeds (e.g. arame, dulse, nori, wakame) into your diet
  • Sprinkle unrefined salt on your food
  • Take a multi-mineral supplement

You can buy seaweed in whole form, granulated, as flakes, or powdered. The flakes, granules and powders are easy to add in salads, soups, and smoothies.

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