Contrary to popular myth, you can obtain any nutrient that is in animal foods from a vegan or vegetarian diet. For example, you can obtain calcium from dark leafy green vegetables, almonds, and calcium fortified almond milk and orange juice. You can obtain iron from beans, cashews and oatmeal, and omega 3s from flax, hemp and chia seeds. You can get the B12 that is missing from plant-based foods from nutritional yeast, or you can simply supplement to get it. The list goes on, but you can meet all your needs from a plant-based menu.

Unless you are a bodybuilder, you likely don’t need as much protein as you think you do. The key is to pay attention to your own body to see whether you need more. The average amount recommended is your weight in pounds multiplied by 0.36. So for a 150 pound person that’s 54 grams a day. You can EASILY get this in a plant-based diet with beans, lentils, nuts, tofu, tempeh and yes greens too. 

The basic calculation here is calories in / calories out. When you eat enough calories, your body uses them to help you to get stronger. And the variety of nutrients and minerals in plant-based WHOLE foods (Beans, Legumes, Veggies as opposed to “Fake Meats”) cannot be matched by any other diet.

Try to go plant-based for one day per week. Adopt the Meatless Monday strategy in your family. Trying to center a meal around foods other than meat will give you new ideas for your menu and give you a rotational balance in the kitchen. Don’t you find your menu boring at times? Try some new recipes that focus on something different!

Finally, if you think that recycling a plastic bottle is doing your part for the environment, consider this: raising animals for food produces more greenhouse gasses than any other source, is responsible for more ocean dead zones, and replaces more natural land all over the world every day. If you cut out meat for just one day a week, in a year you would reduce the same amount of atmosphere emissions as you would by driving around the world almost 2,500 times!