Vegan Junk Food Is Still Junk Food

Vegetarian versus Mediterranean

The Mediterranean diet is mostly, but not 100 percent, plant-based—so much so that in its scoring system, vegetarians are three times and vegans more than 30 times as likely to rank at the very top. The traditional Mediterranean diet can be classified as “almost vegetarian.” What did a direct comparison of the two dietary patterns show?

People with overweight were randomized into groups and were to eat either a low-calorie Mediterranean diet or a low-calorie vegetarian diet. With the same forced calorie restriction, the groups lost the same amount of weight, but the vegetarian group had the added benefit that their LDL cholesterol dropped significantly. And what about without specific restrictions on calorie intake and portion size? Another study approached it that way, and its obese participants in the Mediterranean group didn’t lose any weight at all in four months, whereas those in the plant group without added fats lost 13 pounds.

Vegan Junk Food Is Still Junk Food

Does plant-based mean the same as vegan? No. Even though plant-based eating is often confused with vegan or vegetarian eating, it can affect health very differently. If you eat vegan, you eat nothing that comes from animals; as a vegetarian, you don’t eat meat, but you don’t abstain from dairy products and eggs. In both cases, religious or ideological motives can underlie the avoidance of animal products, but neither necessarily has health as the focus. A plant-based diet, by contrast, is described as minimizing consumption of meat, milk, eggs, and industrial junk and eating more whole plant foods such as vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes (beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils), mushrooms, nuts and seeds, herbs, and spices—in other words, basically real food that grows from the ground.

Nowadays, what people mainly eat is industrial junk, junk food. Companies deliberately develop products that people will eat as much of as possible, so that they can take in as much money as possible, and the industry is only too happy to produce every conceivable kind of vegan trash we’re willing to buy. In fact, a comparative study of different dietary patterns found that most industrial junk like ramen noodles, potato chips, and cookies is eaten by vegetarians and vegans. Oreo cookies are vegan, and then there are vegan Doritos, Pop-Tarts, and Krispy Kreme pastries. Vegan doesn’t have to mean healthy.

From a health standpoint, that may help explain why vegans in the United States generally do better than vegans in the United Kingdom. Americans choose a plant-based diet primarily for health reasons, which is why they tend to eat more plants (as shown by their higher intake of fiber and vitamin C, which are found in concentrated form only in whole plant foods). On the other side of the Atlantic, by contrast, ethical concerns are the primary motivation for deciding to live vegan, which is why British vegans are more likely to simply buy vegan cake instead of regular cake. A similar pattern can be seen with processed grains and sweets; vegetarians in the US eat less of those than those in Great Britain.

To distinguish between healthy and unhealthy vegan eating, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, emeritus professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University, introduced the term whole food, plant-based diet—that is, a “whole-food, plant-based diet.” A look at India, for example, shows that people there are eating fewer and fewer whole plant foods, and this results in a growing risk of obesity and noncommunicable chronic diseases. Instead of brown rice, people are more likely to choose more highly processed white rice, as well as refined carbohydrates, packaged snacks, and fast food instead of traditional Indian staple foods such as vegetables, lentils, fruit, nuts, whole grains, and seeds. That explains why even in a country with many vegetarians, the disease rate is rising.

Professor Campbell’s son and daughter-in-law, also physicians, conducted a trial with vegetarians and vegans who were to eat a whole-food, plant-based diet for eight weeks. On average, they lost five kilos and reduced their LDL cholesterol by 16 points. In other words, even vegans benefit from eating more plants.

Balance

When the medical literature discusses an “anti-aging diet,” it’s not just about eating more whole plants and less meat, but also less junk. Here are a few examples: “a dietary plan that provides plenty of fruit and vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, while at the same time reducing animal products and the saturated fat that comes along with them, salt, sweets, and refined carbohydrates,” or “Such a way of eating contains whole-grain cereal, legumes, fruit and vegetables, only small amounts of saturated fats and trans fatty acids,” and “anti-aging diet” means “strongly limiting meat, salt, added sugar, and processed foods, and instead increasingly choosing foods rich in secondary plant compounds.”

If you focus merely on eating fewer animal products, it can happen that you consume more industrial junk like Coca-Cola and soggy white bread. It has to be repeated over and over again: You must not assume that you’re automatically eating a healthy diet just because you avoid animal products. Based on the fact that not all plant foods are created equal, “healthy” plant-based food indices were developed in which, as in the “pro-vegetarian” system, you get points for healthy plant foods and minus points for animal foods and industrial junk.

Using these sophisticated evaluation systems led us to the result: If you assign points for all plant foods (junk food or not) and subtract points for animal foods (meat, dairy products, or eggs), you get scores that represent a significantly lower risk of early death. However, you’re not doing your body any favors if you simply replace animal products with industrial junk. A diet of plant-based junk has a neutral effect on mortality or even increases it. Over time, as more than 75 000 health professionals determined over more than ten years using the Harvard cohort studies, those had a lower risk of death who ate very few animal products while also consuming more plant foods—especially healthy ones. Those, by contrast, who likewise ate few animal products but at the same time stuffed themselves with a lot of junk like carbonated beverages and sweets increased their overall risk of death.

The results of these studies suggest that we must not throw all foods of plant origin onto the same pile. Red beans are something different than jelly beans. In the studies, however, the animal products were treated as equivalent, which is why scientists also tried to develop a quality index for animal products. They assigned processed meat, red meat, and eggs to the category “unhealthy animal products,” while fish, seafood, dairy products, and poultry were classified as “healthy animal products.” They found: The higher the quality of the plant foods, the lower the overall risk of death, but for the quality of animal foods, no independent association was found—meaning they apparently are all about equally bad for mortality from cancer and heart disease as well as all-cause mortality.

The Simplest Diet Quality Index

Overall, the dividing line between healthy and unhealthy is less plant foods versus animal foods than whole plant foods versus everything else. You can see that in a diet quality index that, on a scale from 0 to 100, indicates the percentage of calories from nutrient-rich, unprocessed plants. So if half of the calories you eat come from unprocessed plants, that yields a value of 50. A very strict whole-food, plant-based diet—that is, a vegan diet without ground grains, potatoes, alcohol, added sugar, and oil—would get a perfect 100. Unfortunately, most Americans barely get above 10.