Vegan Versus Plant-Based

 This one has been going around in my head for a while now, especially since I recently dived into information and advices from different nutritionists and dieticians. One nutritionist caught my attention since she put so much effort on emphasizing PLANT-BASED over VEGAN, complaining that many of her clients were former vegans with major nutritional deficits and/or intestinal problems due to not eating enough fresh produce and the right balance of nutrients needed. 

This made me think about two things: my own use of the word "vegan" and it's true meaning. I would like to start with the true meaning. 

It should be commonly known that "Veganism" not only refers to a diet - because, ultimately, veganism is a certain diet - but that it extends to a whole lifestyle. A person who is vegan is in the classical sense somebody who avoids all animal products. This does not only encompass food and drinks but also clothing, cleaning products, health and beauty products, any sort of tools, appliances, utensils, in short: everything. A person with a vegan lifestyle is in the majority of cases heavily motivated by animal welfare and does not want to harm or utilize animals in any way. Also, classical vegans are in my experience very aware and conscious about the need for wholesomely cooked food, utilizing fresh produce over convenient/processed foods or even anything canned.
And this was were I got irritated about above mentioned nutritionist until I understood that during the last ten, twenty years being "vegan" has become such a trend, that people might dive into it without knowing or giving themselves the time to learn exactly what to do and how to do it. 

"Plant-based" referes in general to people who prefere eating fresh produce, plants, non-animalistic foods over the normal carnivore diet. This includes everything from people eating fish, beef and poultry to a lesser extend but quite regularly to people who might only eat seafood OR beef OR poultry once in a while but clearly in lesser amounts and intervalls than in the "average western diet". It also means to avoid processed foods as much as possible, cooking from scratch with a wide variety of produce. 

Now, with all the hype around meat replacement products, many people obviously do believe that they can continue eating as they are used to and simply replace animal products with some soy- or other plant-based replacement. I am sorry to break it to you but that is not how it works (of course). Doing that will mean that you deplete yourself of necessary nutrients really fast because it is very likely that your diet will lack diversity. I am now 1,5 years into my vegan diet and I am still learning about new foods and how I can heighten the intake of useful nutrients by varying our diet as much as possible with different grains, plants, pulses, mushrooms, and so on. It is highly interesting to me and at the moment I am a bit obsessed with the usage of silken tofu that can not only mimic a good scrambled egg but also works wonderfully as a base for sauces or -  cake frostings! Or the different mushrooms that give certain meals the chewy kind of texture and the umami-taste that one normally strives after when longing for a nice piece of meat while I am also looking into foods for gut-health and balancing blood-sugar levels and so on and so on...  

Lastly that made me reflect on my own usage of the word "vegan". 

I normally say that I am vegan which is sloppy.
I am on a vegan diet and although  I do strive to terminate all animal products I do still own (and buy) leather goods, for example. Why? Well, frankly, I do not see the point in replacing leather goods with non-biodegradable, mineral oil-based plastics because that is what many "vegan leathers" are made of. There are more plant-based vegan leathers coming onto the market, like cactus- and corn-leather. But one has to be carful that they are in the end also bio-degradable otherwise I am just continuing the vicious cycle (well, actually it is not a cycle, more a one-way street) of raw-material extraction and waste.
So, in correct terms I would need to say that I am on a plant-based diet instead, albeit one that excludes all animal products. Exceptions are made for my family: my husband sometimes craves the odd bite of seafood when eating out (like once every three months, if at all), my oldest daughter and two oldest sons will choose dishes with meat when at the restaurant, one of the sons has a metabolism in overdrive and is a picky-eater so if I only can make him eat a certain dish with adding some pieces of meat to it to make it more appealing, I will. My youngest though eats no animal-products at all (not only at home, so to speak) and thriving. This approach works for us.
Most importantly, I try to skip as much convenient, processed food as possible and the longer I am following this path, the easier it gets. It is a constant process of learning, understanding and then implementing. And it is extending to other things, having me brought to wanting to reduce drastically our use of plastic, chemicals and so on. The last think I kicked out of our household? Liquid hand-soaps. But that is another story.