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= Plant-based diet = A plant-based diet is a diet based on foods derived from plants, including vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes and fruits, but with few or no animal products. The use of the phrase has changed over time, and examples can be found of the phrase "plant-based diet" being used to refer to vegan diets, which contain no food from animal sources, to vegetarian diets which include eggs and dairy but no meat, and to diets with varying amounts of animal-based foods, such as semi-vegetarian diets which contain small amounts of meat.

As of 1999, it was estimated that "4 billion people live primarily on a plant-based diet", and that "shortage of cropland, freshwater, and energy resources requires that most of the 4 billion people live primarily on a plant-based diet".

The key to understanding food is understanding how it is nutritious to the body because they are the sum of their nutrient parts.The whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health (Pollack).

Terminology
Historically, examples can be found of the phrase "plant-based diet" being used to refer to diets with varying amounts of animal-based foods, from none at all (vegan) to small amounts of any kind of meat, so long as the primary focus is on plant-based foods (semi-vegetarian). The 2005 book, The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, and his son Thomas M. Campbell II, a physician, tended to equate a plant-based diet with veganism, although at points the book describes people having a "mostly" plant-based diet. Vegan wellness writer Ellen Jaffe Jones stated in a 2011 interview:

More recently a number of authoritative resources have used the phrase "plant-based diet" to refer to diets including varying degrees of animal products, defining "plant-based diets" as, for example "diets that include generous amounts of plant foods and limited amounts of animal foods", and as diets "rich in a variety of vegetables and fruits, legumes, and minimally processed starchy staple foods and limiting red meat consumption, if red meat is eaten at all". Others draw a distinction between "plant-based" and "plant-only".

In various sources, "plant-based diet" has been used to refer to:


 * Veganism: diet of vegetables, legumes, fruit, grains, nuts, and seeds, but no food from animal sources.
 * Fruitarianism: vegan diet consisting primarily of fruit.
 * Raw veganism: vegan diet in which food is uncooked and sometimes dehydrated.
 * Vegetarianism: diet of vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts, etc., that may include eggs and dairy, but no meat.
 * Ovo-lacto vegetarianism: includes dairy and eggs
 * Ovo vegetarianism: includes eggs but no dairy
 * Lacto vegetarianism: includes dairy but no eggs
 * Semi-vegetarianism: mostly vegetarian diet with occasional inclusion of meat and/or poultry.
 * Macrobiotic diet: semi-vegetarian diet that highlights whole grains, vegetables, beans, miso soup, sea vegetables, and traditionally or naturally processed foods, with or without seafood and other animal products.
 * Pescatarian: semi-vegetarian diet with eggs, dairy and seafood.

Plant-based diets vary, some of these diets not only eliminate animal meat but, also eliminate the intake of highly refined plant foods such as white flours, sugars, and oils. While others recognize plant-based diets by actual content. Some studies have defined plant-based diets as being either vegetarian or simply not. Other studies have recognized all plant foods equally. This then raises the question as to whether all plant-based diets are equally beneficial for one’s health? Not all plant-based foods are equally healthy. An optimal plant-based diet includes whole grains as the main form of carbohydrate, unsaturated fats as the predominant form of dietary fat, an abundance of fruit and vegetables. Also adequate n-3 fatty acids can play an important role in preventing CardioVD. Such diets, which have many other health benefits including the prevention of several chronic diseases, deserve more emphasis in dietary recommendations.

Health Benefits
From 2017 reviews, a plant-based diet reduced total and LDL cholesterol, with further evidence that shifting plant protein consumption to more than 50% of total protein intake may lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases, although further clinical research was recommended. A diet high in fruits and vegetables may decrease the risk of high blood pressure, stroke, and colorectal cancer. A vegetarian diet may also help with weight loss.

The leading causes of death in America have been in part due to the mass consumption of meat in the American diet. Number one on that list is heart disease also known as Atherosclerosis. This disease is the buildup of fatty deposits or plaque build on arteries which cause stroke and in some cases death. The fats that tend to cause this build up are saturated fat which comes from animals; the fats that are in beef, dairy and eggs are all saturated fats.

Cancer is  the second leading cause of death in the U.S, and has been shown to be related to the foods we that we eat. This correlation has been investigated using epidemiological studies; studies that are done all over the world. They have proven there is infact a direct relationship between cancers and the consumption of dietary fat. Cancers of the colon, the prostate, and the breast are influenced by the amount of fat that we eat. Studies have also shown that obesity and the amount of abdominal fat or fat in our blood can actually lead to cancers of pancreatic, esophagus,colon, rectum, breast thyroid, gallbladder, kidney and endometrium. How does animal protein cause all of these issues ? In digestion bile is necessary for the absorption of fat. Bile is a carcinogen, so the more fats you eat the more bile is produced. In a large cohort study, higher intake of animal protein (including processed red meat, unprocessed red meat, dairy, poultry, and eggs) was positively associated with mortality, whereas the inverse was true for high intake of plant protein. In another recent meta-analysis, Kwok et al. found similar results with vegetarians experiencing a 29% lower risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality relative to non vegetarians. These findings suggest the importance of protein source and support recommendations to increase plant protein intake, which in turn calls for education of physicians, patients, and the public about the largely unrecognized protein content of plants.

In this study it was shown that nutritional intake of vegans compared to an omnivorous diet correlates with previous studies. The restricted diet had  lower cholesterol, total and saturated fat and higher poly-unsaturated fat, lowest protein and highest dietary fiber intake in contrast to the omnivorous diet. Carbohydrate and sugar intakes were higher in vegan diets but more likely due to high fruit consumption. Vegan diets typically do not include less healthy sources of sugar such as, candy, chocolate, cake and cookies because they often contain often animal products. Sodium intake in vegans is less than half of the omnivorous intake. Diets that allowed dairy consumption had the highest calcium while the results of the vegans showed half of that value. In the Western diet dairy is a major source of calcium, studies point that this restriction can lead to increased fracture risk in vegan diets compared to omnivorous, pesco-vegetarians and vegetarians. Interestingly, vegans in the United Kingdom were studied and did not show the estimated increased fracture risk. Vegans had higher intake values of iron because they consumed better sources such as vegetables and legumes. Using the MDS resulted in another ranking: vegans received the highest total score followed by the pesco-vegetarians, the semi-vegetarians, the vegetarians and the omnivores.

Paleontonoly[edit]
Although herbivory (reliance on diet entirely of plants) was long thought to be a Mesozoic phenomenon, evidence of it is found as soon as the fossils which could show it. Within less than 20 million years after the first land plants evolved, plants were being consumed by arthropods. Herbivory among four-limbed terrestrial vertebrates, the tetrapods developed in the Late Carboniferous (307 - 299 million years ago). Early tetrapods were large amphibious piscivores. While amphibians continued to feed on fish and insects, some reptiles began exploring two new food types: the tetrapods (carnivory) and plants (herbivory).

Carnivory was a natural transition from insectivory for medium and large tetrapods, requiring minimal adaptation. In contrast, a complex set of adaptations was necessary for feeding on highly fibrous plant materials.

Modern herbivores and mild omnivory[edit]
Quite often, mainly herbivorous creatures will eat small quantities of animal-based food when it becomes available. Although this is trivial most of the time, omnivorous or herbivorous birds, such as sparrows, often will feed their chicks insects while food is most needed for growth.

On close inspection it appears that nectar-feeding birds such as sunbirds rely on the ants and other insects that they find in flowers, not for a richer supply of protein, but for essential nutrients such as Vitamin B12 that are absent from nectar. Similarly, monkeys of many species eat maggoty fruit, sometimes in clear preference to sound fruit. When to refer to such animals as omnivorous or otherwise, is a question of context and emphasis, rather than of definition.

Humans[edit]
Humans are omnivorous, capable of consuming diverse plant and animal foods. Fossil evidence from wear patterns on teeth indicates the possibility that early hominids like robust australopithecines and Homo habilis were opportunistic omnivores, generally subsisting on a plant-based diet, but supplementing with meat when possible.