The Forks Over Knives Diet is Easier Than You Think

The Forks Over Knives Diet is all the rage right now. Here’s what you need to know about getting started and sticking with it.

Okay so this is a bit of a new one: a film getting the celebrity diet treatment. That’s right, feature documentary “Forks Over Knives” is now also known as theForks Over Knives Diet. There’s evena Forks Over Knives cookbook. Move over, Dr. Atkins. You won’t see that happening to “Mad Max” anytime soon (“Magic Mike” though, we might consider).

So, what exactly is the Forks Over Knives Diet? In short, it’s a vegan diet, or a plant-based diet built on the critically acclaimed film that looked at the effects of the Western diet on the human body and the benefits of switching to a plant-based diet.

The Forks Over Knives Diet is all the rage right now. Here's what you need to know about getting started and sticking with it.

The film suggests that we’re sicker than we’ve ever been—cancer will effect nearly one in two people, and diet-related illnesses like obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease are at all –time highs.

But, still, the vegan diet is not panacea; even vegan or vegetarian diets can often fall short on the health spectrum. There are plenty ofvegan and plant-based junk foods out there, and it’s just as easy to slip into a potato chips and chocolate bar for breakfast habit whether or not you also eat meat. Forks Over Knives hopes to change that with its diet plan.

What is the Forks Over Knives Diet?

“全食品、植物性饮食是以完整的、未经提炼的或最少提炼的植物为中心的。It’s a diet based on fruits, vegetables, tubers,whole grains和豆类;and it excludes or minimizes meat (including chicken and fish), dairy products, and eggs, as well as highly refined foods like bleached flour, refined sugar, and oil,” Forks Over Knives explains on its website.

It’s part of the reason some people are moving away from the term “vegan diet” and opting for “plant-based” instead—because it implies a healthier more rounded approach to food rather than just eschewing animal products. But the Forks Over Knives Diet seems to take that even further, drilling into the benefits of five specific food categories: fruits, vegetables, tubers and starchy vegetables, whole grains and legumes.

The Forks Over Knives Diet points out that it’s not a flimsy approach to food—you shouldn’t try to subsist exclusively on leafy greens and raw fruits and vegetables, for example. “While leafy vegetables are an important part of the whole-food, plant-based diet, they are a very poor calorie, i.e., energy, source to be sustainable,” FOK says on its website. “We would need to eat almost16 poundsof cooked kale to get 2,000 calories of food!” While most any vegan certainly know a few kale heads who might find that not only appealing but totally doable, it’s clearly unsustainable (who has a fridge big enough to hold that much kale?), not to mention imbalanced. The body needs a lot of nutrients from a wide range of foods, and not surprisingly, meat and dairy don’t have to be part of that scenario, but it can’t be done only on kale and beet juice, either.

How Does the Forks Over Knives Diet Work?

According to Forks Over Knives, a number of staple foods that many a meat-eater may already love, make up the bulk of the Forks Over Knives Diet: think starchy squash and sweet potatoes, corn, peas, whole grain brown rice, quinoa, and all kinds of beans, which are not only loaded with healthy plant protein and amino acids, but also a good dose of necessary fiber—something you won’t ever find in a steak—even though the cow it came from ate lots of it.

《餐叉胜于手术刀》也指出了“整套”食物的好处。“在我们的文化中，吃一种特定的食物来获取一种营养的想法很普遍。我们一直被引导着相信我们应该吃肉类来获得蛋白质，奶制品来获得钙，鱼来获得欧米伽-3脂肪酸，甚至西红柿来获得番茄红素，等等，”医学博士阿罗娜·普尔德和医学博士马修·莱德曼在FOK网站上写道。

“This sort of thinking is misguided and has caused grave harm to human health. The quest for protein, for example, has steered us toward meat consumption. In this quest, we not only consume protein inexcessof our needs, but also many harmful substances like dietary cholesterol that are only present in animal foods.

“No food is a single nutrient, and we should never think of foods in that way. Any given food hascountlessnutrients. What matters most is the overall nutrient profile, i.e., the whole package. Whole, plant-based foods containallthe essential nutrients (with the exception ofvitamin B12), and in proportions that are more consistent with human needs than animal-based or processed foods. So our question is really this: Why wasteanyof what we eat on inferior packages? As long as—over time—we choose a variety of whole, plant-based foods, we will easily meet our nutritional needs.”

The Western diet loves to isolate nutrients, especially in the booming dietary supplements industry, but also in food: You’ll see a number of nutrients “fortifying” breads, cereals, juices and milks. And some research now suggests that we may be getting too much of certain nutrients by eating fortified foods and taking vitamins.

《餐叉胜于手术刀》计划建议坚持其建议的食物类别，但也不要担心热量或营养等问题。在一个均衡的饮食中，重要的不是你实际吃了多少，而是你吃了什么。用心吃饭，倾听身体的声音，可以帮助你知道什么时候吃饱了，让暴饮暴食变得不那么常见。“餐叉胜于餐刀”的另一个好处是它富含纤维——一种非常重要的大量营养素——它有助于身体感到更饱、更持久，减少暴饮暴食的诱惑或对含糖食物的渴望。

为了帮助有兴趣尝试“餐叉胜于手术刀”减肥法的人，甚至有一款用于智能手机或移动设备的食谱应用程序。该应用程序提供了180多种食谱，每周都会添加新的食谱。你还可以通过应用程序创建购物清单，简单的步骤说明使准备食物变得简单。还有植物性厨师专家的贡献，以及植物性生活方式的生活技巧。

Vegetarian food imagevia Shutterstock