Plant-based vs. vegan nutrition: What's the difference?
To understand why it can be incredibly important to distinguish between "plant-based" diets and veganism, which many people classify somewhere between hip urban trend and militant youth movement, it helps to look at the origins of these terms and movements.
What does vegan mean?
The word "vegan" was introduced in 1944 by Donald Watson, an English animal rights activist and founder of the Vegan Society. According to him, the term describes a person who abstains from using animals for ethical reasons - a reaction to industrial agriculture and factory farming. People who call themselves vegans in this sense and live accordingly therefore not only exclude animal foods such as meat and fish from their diet, but also make a much more far-reaching decision: they also avoid buying products made from animals and avoid using any item that has been tested on animals.
What does plant-based mean?
The concept of a plant-based diet, on the other hand, goes back to the U.S. biochemist and nutritionist Thomas Colin Campbell, who used the term "plant-based diet" in the early 1980s to present the results of his research on nutrition at the National Institutes of Health. In keeping with his scientific background, he focused not on the ethical aspects of nutrition, but on the health aspects, which, according to his research, could best be realized with a low-fat, high-fiber, plant-based diet. Unlike vegan, or even vegetarian diets, a plant-based diet is more flexible because it doesn't require you to completely eliminate other food sources, but rather encourage you to fill your plate with more plant-based foods such as vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, legumes and seeds. Animal products such as fish and meat or milk and dairy products are therefore not excluded completely. It rather seems important that no highly processed foods are consumed, but only whole foods.
