Eat More Plants

Piling extra green and less meat on your plate can protect your health, your waistline, and even your brain. But do you need to go vegetarian to reap the rewards? The Good Life explores.

- Sunny Sea Gold

It’s the hottest thing in nutrition right now, but plant-based eating is decidedly not a fad. The approach of putting produce and superfoods center stage has been around since way before beet burgers and mustard-glazed tofu started appearing in your Instagram feed. Evolutionary anthropologists say our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived for the most part on plants—and our bodies are designed to be fueled that way. The message wasn’t lost on people like King Tut, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, all vegetarians.

Somewhere along the way, however, animal products began to hog more and more space in our diets. Plants? They got the side dish treatment or worse: banishment to garnish territory. That’s all changing—and fast. “Americans are eating astonishingly less meat and dairy than they were in the early 2000s,” says Michael Whiteman, president of Baum + Whiteman, a leading global food-and-restaurant consultancy. At the same time, consumption of faux meats (like vegan sausages or “chicken” strips), as well as plant-based yogurts and “milks,” is up. “Nondairy alternatives have been one of the all-time most-requested ideas from customers,” a Starbucks spokesperson says.

Dining at every end of the spectrum, from fast-food joints to Michelin-starred restaurants, is proof of the phenomenon. White Castle now offers a veggie slider served on a vegan bun. And Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the world-famous chef known for his classic French cooking, recently opened his first plant-based restaurant, abcV. Who would have thought a dish of warm carrots with nut butter, chiles, and limes could be your fancy lunch entrée? “Vegetables are no longer an afterthought to fill out the space next to a steak,” says Whiteman. “It’s all very ‘cheffy.’”