There are loads of great channels out there to help you get started with whole foods,
plant-based cooking, but they often require a baseline level of cooking knowledge and
skill, and the recipes may be a little overwhelming for some.
That's why I made my video series on simple healthy eating ideas - in my opinion, this
series is the easiest-to-follow anywhere here on YouTube and is a great place to start if
you have absolutely zero cooking knowledge or skill to begin with.
So with that in mind, make sure you subscribe and check out that playlist if you haven't
already if that interests you!
Just to quickly summarise my healthy eating video series, I recommend a green smoothie
with a serving of nuts and beet juice, a meal combining a grain and a legume, a serving
of raw veggies dipped in hummus, a serving of cooked veggies, and optionally a home-made
pill containing some of the healthiest spices.
But how nutritionally complete is this?
Are the shortcuts taken in the name of convenience short-changing the benefits you get from eating
a diet consisting mostly of whole plant foods?
To find out, today we're going to pit my dietary recommendations against a number of different
yardsticks - Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen, Cronometer, the 4Leaf survey and finally the cost.
Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen is a terrific app that offers a checklist of the healthiest
foods to help ensure you eat them every day and I recommend it for anyone attempting to
make even the most modest of improvements to diet.
I myself have used it for nearly 2 years.
There's something inherently motivating about having a checklist of foods to eat every day!
To start off with my green smoothie, you can tick off a serving of berries, two servings
of fruits, all your cruciferous vegetables and greens and flaxseeds.
I recommend having your serving of nuts with this meal as well to aid with the absorption
of certain nutrients.
My next video proposed a handy way of getting the traditional combination of a grain and
a legume, and you will easily be able to tick off two servings of beans and two servings
of whole grains with this method.
You can take my spice pill to tick off your herbs and spices, or alternatively just use
some when cooking this meal.
Next is my veggies and hummus video, in which I propose using this tasty dip to increase
your raw veggie intake, such as carrots.
I also recommend a serving of cooked vegetables.
This allows us to tick off another serving of beans, along with two servings of other
vegetables.
Lastly, the remaining few boxes can be easily covered with a wide range of healthy meals,
for example a serving of porridge oatmeal with a banana, and of course you should be
sipping water, tea, coffee and other healthy beverages throughout the day, as well as getting
that all-important exercise in.
Like Dr. Greger, I also recommend supplementation with vitamin B12 and vitamin D.
So that's 24 out of 24 boxes ticked on Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen!
Next we're going to look at Cronometer.
For the input foods I used the smoothie recipe as-is from my green smoothie video, along
with a serving of walnuts and beet juice.
I also like to have a serving of porridge oats or muesli with soya milk along with this,
especially if heading for the gym.
This is a good time to take the spice pill as well, since you're guaranteed a certain
amount of fat to help with absorption of the turmeric.
For the grain/legume meal, I'm going to use the kidney bean, pasta and pasta sauce example
from my video.
I also like to add some extra garlic to this meal for flavour, and garnish with some nutritional
yeast for that parmesan-like taste and to help out with some of the B vitamins.
I wash it down with another couple of glasses of soya milk and usually have another serving
of nuts for more healthy fats and to help with nutrient absorption, and any kind of
fruit for dessert, in this case an apple.
My last recommendation is for a raw vegetable dipped in hummus, in this example a carrot,
and a cooked vegetable.
Since going whole foods, plant-based I have absolutely
fallen in love with sweet potatoes, in very much
a "where have they been all my life?"
type of situation, and I have them at least once a week.
Boiling is a great way to cook them and they are very tasty just on their own like that,
but you can have any cooked vegetables you like.
I've included a glass of soya milk here again for this meal.
I love my soya milk!
One last little trick I've been employing recently is a small serving of goji berries
before bed.
Gojis are very high in melatonin and I find they really help with getting to sleep at
night.
Anecdotally I also find bananas help too, so I've added both of these here as a night-time
snack.
So how does this super-simple day's worth of eating stack up nutritionally?
These are just the default ranges for my weight and height here.
Looking at macros first of all, I kind of need minimum 3000 calories to maintain my
weight, I didn't bother counting beverages, water and that.
Carbs high of course and of very good quality, but check out that fibre!
Nearly 100 g, now that's a real Paleolithic level!
Sugar all from whole plant foods and no refined sugar apart from a small contribution from
the beet juice.
Fat next, as you can see I'm not a fat phobe, plenty of the good stuff here, but the proportion
of omega-6 to omega-3 is well under that 3:1 ratio, and this is before I've even added
the contribution from a golden algae-based EPA/DHA supplement, which I take just to be
safe despite having my ratio in check.
Whole foods, plant-based diet of course naturally low in
saturated fat and devoid of trans-fat and cholesterol.
Protein not a problem, hitting 130 g here and all amino acids easily accounted for.
Onto the micros next, B vitamins all present in abundance, including B12 in this case but
of course I still recommend supplementation to be safe.
Vitamin A, I don't know where this notion has come from recently that a plant-based
diet is low in vitamin A, it's one of the easiest nutrients to get and is abundant in
many whole plant foods, as you can see here.
Vitamin D of course should be supplemented, and a plant-based diet is a terrific source
of vitamins C, E and K which are all nutrients of concern for those eating more typical diets.
Minerals all accounted for, we'll just look at some of the ones that people worry about
on a plant-based diet - loads of calcium, loads of iron, potassium of course abundant
in whole plant foods.
Sodium a little higher than I'd like, equating to around 4.5 g of salt here, but you have
to accept some trade-offs for convenience - in this case the pasta sauce was the biggest
contributor.
This is still well-under the usual recommendation of 6 g, but I'd like it to be as close as
possible to the American Heart Association's recommendation of 3.8 g.
Just a quick check on the 4Leaf survey next, 5 servings of fruit, 5 servings of veg, over
6 servings of whole grains, legumes and starchy vegetables, plenty of omega-3, no dairy, no
eggs, no milk, very little added sugar and white flour, minimal processed snacks, no
meat, poultry or fish and only a tiny amount of oil from the pasta sauce, resulting in
not quite a fully perfect score but still putting us in the top pentile of healthy diets.
So what did all of this cost?
I do most of my shopping at Tesco so I'm just going to use all their prices mostly.
All this food cost just €8.70 total.
So that's it guys, not quite 100% fully optimised whole foods, plant-based nutrition, but the
compromises made may be acceptable if you're just getting started with healthy eating and
want to make it as easy as possible without breaking the bank, whilst resting assured
that you're getting all the nutrition you need.
Thanks for sticking with me 'til the end if you're still here, hope you found the video
informative, let me know in the comments section if you have any questions or thoughts.
That's it for now guys, talk to ye next time!
Sláinte!