Hello, this is Monica Reinagle, and you're listening to the nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Thanks for tuning in today. I'm sure you've been hearing

about plant-based diets lately. It's a very trendy new term, but I've noticed that there seems to be a lot of confusion

about what this term actually means.

I recently polled my Facebook followers, how they would define a plant-based diet and the results were very interesting.

About 70% responded that a plant-based diet consists mostly of plants but may include some animal products.

The other 30% believed that a plant-based diet should include no animal products whatsoever.

Now that right there is a pretty big discordance, but the confusion went far

deeper than that. Some people defined the word plant the way I would as

referring to all foods of non-animal origin, fruits, vegetables, grains,

nuts, seeds, and so on. But others thought of plants as referring primarily to vegetables.

And a lot of people attached additional meanings to the phrase

that had nothing to do with whether a food came from a plant or an animal.

For example, some defined a plant-based diet as one that avoids processed foods,

and others used it to describe a vegan diet that also avoids fats and oils from all sources.

Even among those that defined a plant-based diet as one that could include some amount of meat or

other animal products, there was a wide range of opinion on how much meat a plant-based diet

might reasonably include. Some drew the line at one serving per week, others at one serving per month. One person suggested that a

plant-based diet could reasonably include an ounce of meat per meal, while

another suggested that a diet could be defined as plant-based if meat took up less than

one quarter of the plate. Obviously, this was not a scientific survey that I did, but the range of conflicting responses that I got was perfectly representative

of the contradictory ways I see this term being used by various nutrition experts, authors,

...