 In the United States, the number one risk factor for death is the American diet, associated with more deaths than any other risk factor, responsible for like half a million mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, and family dying every year because of what they ate, mostly from cardiovascular disease. That's where plant-based diets can come in, associated with the lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease, lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, and in fact the lower risk of dying from all causes put together, progressively increasing the intake of plant foods by reducing the amount of intake of animal foods may enable us to live longer, healthier lives, and it doesn't take much. If you look at the largest cohort study on diet and health in history, the NIHARP study, they found that replacing just 3% of energy from animal protein with plant protein, was associated with a 10% lower overall mortality in both men and women. Of all the animal protein sources, eggs were the worst, swapping in 3% plant protein for egg protein, was associated with twice the benefit, exceeding 20% lower mortality in men and women. The researchers concluded that the study provides evidence for public health recommendations regarding dietary modifications in terms of choice of protein sources that may promote health and longevity, and plant protein is preferable. Now, healthy plant-based diets are associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, but with an emphasis on healthy. When individuals increase their consumption of plant foods, while decreasing their intake of animal foods, there could be an increase in their consumption of less healthy options, highly processed plant foods like Coke and Wonder Bread. One cannot assume that simply avoiding animal foods will necessarily produce such a healthy diet. In order to distinguish between healthful and unhealthful vegan diets, the term whole-food plant-based diet is attributed to Cornell Professor Emeritus and nutritional biochemistry Dr. T. Colin Campbell. If you look at India, for example, you see a decreasing in whole plant food content of their diets, along with an increasing risk of obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases. This may help explain why disease rates are on the rise, even in a country with a large vegetarian contingent. This may help explain why health-wise, vegans in the US do better than vegans in the UK. The number one reason people in the US eat plant-based is health, and so they eat more plants. More fiber, vitamin C, only found concentrated in whole plant foods. Whereas the number one reason given in the UK is animal welfare reasons, and so they may be more likely to just switch over to vegan donuts. You can't know if vegans really have to eat more plants, though, until you put it to the test. An evaluation of an eight-week whole-food plant-based lifestyle modification program, in which two dozen were already eating vegetarian or vegan, but not necessarily whole-food plant-based. And after eight weeks, even those who already started out vegetarian or vegan experienced significant weight loss and reductions in cholesterol. They lost 10 pounds and dropped their LDL cholesterol 15 points. So even a short-term whole-food plant-based dietary intervention may provide significant benefits for non-vegetarians, vegetarians, and vegans alike. We have a food supply in which junk is a food group, willfully engineered to maximize eating for profit, and the industry will happily make all the vegan junk we're willing to buy. In fact, if you compare the consumption of ultra-processed junk across different eating patterns, vegetarians and vegans were found to be eating the most junk, like potato chips and cookies. Not all plant-based foods exert the same health effects. But what about animal food? These researchers separately scored the quality of different plant-based foods with a plant-based diet quality index, and also various animal foods in an animal-based diet quality index. For example, if you consider processed meats and red meats as unhealthy animal foods, but fish, seafood, dairy, and poultry as healthy animal foods, and you throw eggs in with the unhealthy too, based on the most recent evidence, they found that the higher quality of plant foods, the longer you live, the lower all-cause mortality. But no independent association was found for the quality of animal foods, meaning they all seemed just as bad in terms of cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, and all-cause mortality. In light of the expanding global threat of cardiovascular disease, large-scale shifts towards healthy plant-based diets are imperative to ensure future human health, but all plant foods are not created equal.