By eating more plant-based foods, you take good care of yourself, the planet, other people, and animals!
Below, we explain how!
A plant-based diet offers a whole range of health benefits. It contains lots of unsaturated fats, and less cholesterol and saturated fats. You run a lower risk of cardiovascular disease if you eat less meat and more whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits and nuts. No wonder that more and more doctors and health authorities are encouraging plant-based food. It’s also important to get enough iron, protein and vitamin B12. We therefore use a lot of soya in our products, which contains plenty of protein, and we add vitamin B12 and iron, to make sure you get enough.
It’s great to know that you can improve the world with every bite you take by eating plant-based foods. Food is responsible for vast amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. If we stopped eating meat, we could cut global CO2 emissions by 24%; the equivalent of taking 240 million cars off the roads. For example, producing 1 kg of beef causes 10 to 30 kg of CO2 emissions. Producing 1 kg of tofu, on the other hand, only releases 1 kg of CO2.
Another advantage is that much less land and water would be needed to grow the crops that are currently fed to livestock. 7 kg of soya is required to produce 1 kg of meat, so it’s much more efficient to use this soya directly in meat substitutes. Only 6% of the soya grown worldwide is used directly for soya milk or meat substitutes, most is used for the livestock industry and biofuels. If beef was replaced by beans, it would release 42 percent of the agricultural land in the United States.
Plant-based food has a direct impact on the conservation of biodiversity and more sustainable use of resources, which is why the United Nations has said that eating less meat is the best way to tackle the climate crisis.
As an example, Blonk Consultants, a sustainability specialist in the agro-food sector, compared the environmental impact of vegetarian minced meat, Vivera vegetable minced meat and 50/50 beef/pork minced meat.
Intensive livestock farming and fishing causes unnecessary suffering to billions of pigs, cows, chickens and fish and other animals every year. These are all sentient beings, with social skills and the will to live. A plant-based diet reduces the number of animals living in these dire conditions. The average person with a Western diet eats thousands of animals in their lifetime, most of which are sourced from factory farms. You can save 3 animal lives by going vegetarian for a month.
