Plant Diet Education for Latter-day Saints
Unfamiliarity with plant diets can make it hard to visualize what a healthy and balanced one looks like. As each plant food contains a limited list of nutrients, it is necessary to eat a variety of plants in order to receive all our needed nutrients — but variety makes eating more enjoyable anyway. Nutritionfacts.org has a short video outlining the main plant food types recommended to be included in one's diet on a daily basis.
What does a 'well-balanced' plant diet actually look like?
Although each and every human needs the same nutrients for survival, we do vary from infancy to adulthood in what proportional amount of each is needed. This checklist contains only about 1500-1800 calories, and so anyone needing more calories each day would need to add additional servings of one or more of the listed categories. While additional customization for yourself may be needed, this template is a very good baseline to start with.
​Nutritionfacts.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of public nutritional health and education, and has hundreds of other brief, easily-digestible videos on over two thousand health and nutrition topics. Their videos compile the latest information from the best and most recent nutritional studies, explaining all key findings in layman terms to better educate others on personal nutritional health. Their extensive coverage of the source of various diseases, chronic illnesses, developmental milestones, and other special conditions make their content an invaluable resource to understanding one's own health and finding the way for yourself to live the longest, healthiest, and most able-bodied life that can be achieved.
The Phytonutrient Index
The phytonutrient index is a measurement used to calculate the healthfulness of a diet based on what percentage of the diet's calories is derived from whole plant foods. By definition, phytonutrients are only found in plants, and so a diet composed solely of whole plant foods receives the highest indexed score of healthfulness. A diet composed entirely of whole plant foods is shown to be the diet to most effectively prevent the most common diseases and other adverse medical conditions.
Don't other diets also have research showing them to be beneficial to human health?
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The most common model of dietary intervention study used is to compare an experimental group with a control group - the experimental group follows whatever dietary regimen is to be studied, and the control group continues with no intervention. Most diets that are studied produce results indicating them to be superior to control groups, even when the nutritional theories of these experimental diets are in conflict with eachother. This may appear confusing at first, but is easily understood once we take a look at what the average American — and therefore what the average control group in U.S. dietary studies — is eating:
From these figures, the average American has a phytonutrient score of only 12%. This means any diet that advocates a higher percentage of whole plants than 12% (whether Atkins, paleo, keto, or any other) will produce more favorable results than the standard American diet — but a dietary intervention that is studied next to the standard American diet is comparing itself to a very low bar, and does not in any way indicate it to be the best diet for optimal human health.
How would I transition my diet to a higher phytonutrient index score? Do I become a vegetarian first?
Those who cut meat out of their diet to transition to vegetarianism often replace many of the calories they had been receiving from meat with dairy products. This causes issues for many people, as dairy products are often more difficult for individuals to digest than meat. Switching calories from meat to dairy also does not increase your phytonutrient intake or improve your index score. It is recommended in transition to instead replace animal proteins like meat with plant proteins like beans and lentils.
Tracking your own intake of foods can tell you what your own phytonutrient index score is currently, and show you what changes can be made to best improve your score going forward.
Where Do You Get Your Protein Iron?
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The nutrient most often first thought of as under threat when adopting veganism is protein, but it should probably be iron instead. Protein is as plentiful in beans and lentils as it is in meat, but those eating a plant diet need a higher intake of iron than those eating animal products, as plant iron is less readily absorbed than animal-based iron.
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I followed a plant diet and it worked for a while, but then I started feeling sluggish, with brain fog, muscle fatigue, and irritability. As soon as I ate some fish and red meat I felt all of my energy come back and I was myself again.
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This story has been told by many people. It may sound like an embellishment to suggest that meat could somehow near-instantaneously resolve strong symptoms of unwellness — after all, certain nutritional deficiencies can take months to restore — but iron actually explains this phenomenon well. As iron is essential for the proper oxygenation of blood, we feel tired, slow, and without energy when we don't have enough of it, in every part of the body that our blood flows to, and within hours of receiving more iron, our bloodstreams are properly oxygenated and our bodies feel back to normal. This can also explain why women are more likely to fail on a vegan diet than men are, as women need a higher level of dietary iron than men.
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Why would women need more iron than men?
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This is because of menstrual cycles. Iron is not only needed for the proper oxygenation of blood, but also for the production of blood. Women between the ages of 15-50 lose a regular amount of blood each month, to the point of needing over twice as much dietary iron each day than a full-grown man. Without knowing this, women can end up feeling chronically unwell on a plant diet — but it is easily correctible with added iron intake.
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How would a woman even manage to eat more than twice as much plant iron than a full-grown man?
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Adding mineral iron to one's cooking through the use of either iron ingots (like this one) or cast iron pots is an easy and effective way to increase iron intake to needed levels, and is also several times cheaper than purchasing either animal products or iron supplements:
One use of an ingot provides the same iron as...
44 grams of liver
8 ounces of steak
7 chicken or turkey breasts
600 grams of ham
100 grams of fish
1/2 cup of tofu
3 1/2 cups of pumpkin seeds
10 cups of raw broccoli
8 cups of spinach
3 cups of boiled green peas
Coffee and tea also play a role in decreased iron absorption and lower iron stores --
Both coffee and tea have been shown to significantly decrease the bodies' absorption of iron — coffee by 40% and certain types of tea by as much as 90%. This means that Latter-day Saints who already do not consume either coffee or tea will likely have a greater advantage in successfully thriving on a plant diet than those who consume those drinks regularly.
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If those on a 100% plant diet need to take a vitamin B12 supplement, then doesn't that make it an unnatural diet?
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Vitamin B12 is not made by plants (or technically by animals) but by microorganisms. Same as ourselves, apes like gorillas also need trace amounts of vitamin B12. They are able to get this through the intake of dirt, contaminated water, and eating bugs off of eachother. Early humans would have been able to get similar trace amounts of B12 without meat by eating unwashed vegetables, drinking untreated water, and having insects get into their food stores.
Being that we only need trace amounts of vitamin B12, one pea-sized supplement taken once a week is all that is needed. — But if you really want to be more natural, you can always feel free to eat dirt and dead bugs instead.
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What if I still feel hesitant about making the switch to plant nutrients?
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The Word of Wisdom states, "And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments... shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures;" As you seek to apply the principles of the Word of Wisdom in your life to the best of your knowledge, you are promised that you will find answers to your questions of health, even those that have been previously hidden to you — answers impactful enough that they will be "treasures" to you. You can go to the following Latter-day Saint Testimonies page to read what treasures of health knowledge have been found by those who have already made the transition themselves.
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Go to Latter-day Saint Testimonies