What is a “plant-based diet” or “vegan diet”? Most people will answer that it is a diet that excludes all types of meat and other foods of animal origin. But defining it solely on the basis of this criterion, which simply excludes certain foods, is incorrect: if that were the case, we could include a great many dietary choices under this umbrella, even the most restrictive or eccentric ones, such as eating only fruit, feeding an infant only almond milk, eating only salad, or only apples, etc.
A plant-based or vegan diet, on the other hand, must be defined on the basis of what it includes, not what it excludes: it must include all types of foods edible by humans belonging to the plant kingdom, from the various food groups, namely grains, legumes, fruit, vegetables and nuts.
Diets that, in addition to plant foods, also include small amounts of indirect animal foods — i.e. dairy products and eggs — are defined as lacto-ovo-vegetarian (a term that also encompasses the sub-variants lacto-vegetarian and ovo-vegetarian). It is important to note that, in the scientific literature, the term “vegetarian diet” includes all variants of diets without meat and fish, therefore both vegan and lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets.
Vegetarian diets (i.e. vegan or lacto-ovo-vegetarian) must therefore not be confused with the various restrictive diets that limit the variety of plant foods, excluding some foods from one or more groups (such as nightshades and sweet foods in plant-based macrobiotics, and many types of legumes in raw food diets), or even entire groups (as in the fruitarian diet, which involves consuming only fruit, nuts, seeds and fruiting vegetables). These diets may not be nutritionally adequate, as they may lack the variety and completeness of standard plant-based diets.
The reduction of animal foods from the diet of Italians represents a growing trend. According to the most recent estimates from EURISPES, people who identify as vegetarian account for 9.5% of the Italian population, divided into lacto-ovo-vegetarians (7.2%) and vegans (2.3%).
But why are more and more people choosing to follow a vegan diet? And what is the difference between a lacto-ovo-vegetarian and a vegan diet, in terms of health, ecology and ethics?
Given that every step taken by an individual in the direction of reducing any type of animal food from their diet is more than commendable, let us briefly examine the main motivations behind this choice.
1 – ETHICAL MOTIVATION: eating animals means being complicit in their suffering and death. Therefore, reducing or eliminating all types of meat, including fish, reduces animal suffering. But if we want to be consistent, it must be remembered that raising animals for the production of milk and eggs also implies their exploitation, up to and including their death through slaughter when they are no longer productive (in which case the meat is a by-product of the dairy and egg industry), or through organic deterioration when they are completely exhausted, or from diseases contracted during farming. Not to mention all the other sectors that benefit from the by-products of this production, such as the leather industry and the pet food industry. Therefore, the greater the elimination of animal foods from the diet, the fewer animals will be subjected to suffering.
2 – HEALTH MOTIVATION: animal foods, far from being indispensable, carry nutrients and compounds that are harmful to health: red and processed meat, animal fats and proteins, haem iron, and substances generated during cooking have all been linked to an increased risk of chronic non-communicable diseases (cancer, obesity, diabetes, vascular diseases). Conversely, many studies support the protective effects of plant foods, which are rich in substances beneficial to health such as fibre, plant fats and plant proteins. It is now well established that the health of vegetarians is better than that of non-vegetarians, and this is thought to be attributable precisely to the better balance, present in vegetarian diets, between elements that are beneficial and elements that are harmful to health. Many studies have analysed “vegetarians” indiscriminately, i.e. including both lacto-ovo-vegetarians and vegans in the sample. However, studies in which vegans have been analysed separately from lacto-ovo-vegetarians show that the health benefits are greater in vegans.
3 – ENVIRONMENTAL MOTIVATION: the production of animal foods involves a waste of resources, since raising an animal until it has reached the target weight for slaughter, or until it becomes productive, requires resources (specially grown feed, land for grazing or for growing feed, water, energy, various chemical substances used in cultivation and farming), and in the course of the process polluting waste is produced (especially greenhouse gases but also slurry and chemical waste). The disproportion in the conversion of plant foods into animal foods is enormous; it is a loss-making process with very high costs, which could be avoided if we consumed plant foods directly instead of preferring their conversion into animal foods. This conversion process can continue to exist only because its costs are externalised onto the environment and the community (see subsidies to farmers, compensation to communities for the consequences of environmental devastation due to climate change, all paid by the state and therefore by us taxpayers through taxes). Even the Mediterranean diet, the passepartout used to reassure citizens about the sustainability of consuming animal foods, has been shown in a recent study to have an environmental impact far greater (+78%) than that of a vegan diet.
In conclusion, reducing or eliminating animal foods from the diet is a choice that will produce positive effects on human, animal and environmental health, fully respecting the criteria defined by the one health approach, which recognises that human health, animal health and ecosystem health are inextricably linked. Choosing one’s own food is an individual action that requires no permits or authorisations, comes at zero cost (indeed, at a lower cost, since a vegan diet costs less than an omnivorous one) and above all represents the most powerful choice in the hands of the individual consumer.
