Easy to Eat More Plant-based Foods

Most of us will be familiar with the advice that eating 5+ fruit and vegetables a day (more recently upgraded to 7-10 per day along with ‘eat a rainbow’) will improve our health. Now with a focus on gut health, I’ve been hearing that we should have at least 30 different plant-based foods a week and ideally 150-200 different plant-based foods a month for optimum health. That seemed incredible until I discovered that it can actually be quite easy to do.

The advice around eating at least 30 different plant-based foods is based on getting as diverse a range of foods as we can. All plants have different nutrients and other compounds in them, and by making sure we get a wide range of plants means that we should be getting everything we need to keep us healthy. It also takes into account that we are not eating for one but eating for trillions of microbes in our microbiome (see my post on Getting to Gut Health). Eating a wide range of plants means that we are helping keep the balance between these microbes, each with different dietary preferences.

This all made perfect sense to me – but how on earth was I going to achieve it? I was pretty comfortable with the advice to eat 5+ fruits and vegetables a day and I could manage ‘eat the rainbow’ but wasn’t so sure when it got raised to 7-10 serves per day, mostly because serves seemed to be measured in cups and I didn’t think I could eat that much. This also came at a time when I was at the most restrictive part of the diet I was on to try to overcome my Long Covid gut issues. I was lucky if I could eat 7-10 different fruits and vegetables in TOTAL!

The difference came when I realised that we are now including herbs, spices, nuts, seeds and more in the calculations (and you certainly don’t want to eat a cup of everything). This was a game changer! I thought it would be fun to see how many different plants I was consuming in a single day even with extreme dietary restriction – it was 42! I was astounded.

I had by that stage started down the path of My Unexpected Journey into Herbalism, and knew that I was including lots of herbs and spices into my tea blends, adaptogenic and strength building herbs into my smoothies. When I added them up it was a lot higher than I had previously anticipated.

• my Chai tea had 9 different plants in it (see Different Ways to Make Chai Tea)
• my breakfast smoothie had 9 (spinach, blueberry, strawberry, almond & coconut milk, ashwagandha, chia & flax seeds, hemp hearts)
• my herbal coffee had 4 (see Healthy Herbal Coffee & Chocolate Alternatives)
• my lunch salad had 7 different types of salad greens (just a bag from the supermarket) with avocado and cucumber, and 3 edible flowers (nasturtium, marigolds, pansies) with a raspberry-infused vinaigrette (raspberry vinegar, olive oil, mustard)
• my dinner had 5 vegetables/herbs: carrot, courgette and a few broccoli florets, along with some rice with chopped parsley stirred through it.

Since then I have been making different herb and spice blends, and even making my own vegetable and chicken stock powders (without onion & garlic). I’ve been infusing garlic and herbs into olive oil (garlic this way is okay) and infusing all sorts of different vinegars. These are a great way to increase your ‘plant count’. I’ll post on these in the future.

And it is easy to increase your plant diversity further by including different tea blends (e.g. other chai or Earl Grey tea blends) or herbal chocolate tea; by switching out the greens, fruit, nuts and seeds in your smoothies; and using different spice blends across the week. One recipe I have come to love is ‘Seven Herb Rice’ – for each cup of cooked rice you add a cup of chopped mixed fresh herbs in whatever combination you have to hand (aiming for 7 different herbs).

As to how much should you eat, the rough guide I was given was:

• 2+ fist sized portions of non-starchy vegetables @ at least 2x main meals
• 1/2 fist sized portion of starchy carbs (root veg, rice etc, fruit) @ 3x main meals
• 1 palm-sized portion of protein @ 3x main meals
• 1-2 thumb sized portions healthy fats @ 3x main meals