Order now: The Plant-Powered Plan to Beat Diabetes

Plant-Based Diets of All Kinds Offer Benefits

Sharon Palmer

If you’ve been hanging around my blog long enough, you know that I am a fan of plant-based diets. More and more research links plant-based diets—eating patterns that focus primarily on plants—with health benefits. Plant-based diets include a spectrum of eating that range from vegan and vegetarian to pescatarian and flexitarian. Even a Mediterranean diet, linked with numerous benefits, is a plant-based diet, because it focuses on grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, with seafood as the primary animal protein. But how do various plant-based diets compare when analyzed side by side?

Very few randomized dietary intervention studies have investigated the effects of vegetarian diets in omnivorous subjects. However, researchers did just that when they randomly assigned 118 overweight omnivores with a low-to-moderate cardiovascular risk profile a low-calorie lacto-ovo vegetarian diet compared with a low-calorie Mediterranean diet. The subjects followed each diet pattern for three months in a crossover design. Both diets were effective in reducing body weight, body mass index, and fat mass with no significant differences between them. Both diets helped subjects achieve targets for reducing cardiovascular disease risk. However, the vegetarian diet was more effective in reducing “bad” LDL cholesterol, while the Mediterranean diet was more effective at reducing triglyceride levels. The moral of the story? Shift your eating patterns towards the plant-based diet that works best for you.

Read the full study here.

For other studies on plant-based eating and health, check out the following:

Plant-Based Diets of All Kinds Offer Benefits
Plant-Based Diet Quality Matters
Fight Hypertension with Plant-Based Lifestyle

Main image: Spicy Sorghum Avocado Salad, Sharon Palmer, MSFS, RDN

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *