3 simple steps to transition your family to a whole foods, plant-based diet

Family Challenge

Encouraging your family to follow a healthy, vegan diet is no easy feat. There will be plenty of challenges along the way, but the result is more than worth it – with plant-based, whole foods diets often outweighing the nutritional value of a simple, vegan diet. LeAnne Campbell, author of ‘The China Study Cookbook’, has given her top tips on how to kick start the process…

GET RID OF PROCESSED FOODS

The first step in transitioning your family to a whole foods, plant-based (WFPB) diet is eliminating processed and animal-based foods.

What do I mean when I say ‘processed food’? Although often considered as a defined class of foods, ‘processed food’ does not have a reliable, settled definition. Theoretically, the label of ‘processed’ could be given to anything from pre-chopped vegetables to carefully-manufactured salty snacks.

Complex definitions such as this can often trip you up when making the transition (or helping your family make it), so for now we’ll mostly concentrate on processed foods as those with inappropriate amounts of added salt, sugar, fat, and, often protein, as in convenience store snacks or energy-rich desserts that are high in fat and refined carbohydrates.