It Doesn't Get Easier Than These 50 Whole Food Plant-Based Recipes with 5 Ingredients or Less (2024)

FAQs

What is wrong with food with more than 5 ingredients? ›

“Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients. The specific number you adopt is arbitrary, but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it probably is. Note 1: A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same thing; that's fine.

A whole-foods, plant-based diet is a way of eating that celebrates plant foods and minimizes animal products and highly processed foods. Plant-based diets have been linked to a number of health benefits, including reducing your risk of heart disease, certain cancers, obesity, diabetes, and cognitive decline.

According to the American Heart Association, the most unhealthy food includes highly processed foods, just as processed snacks or junk food. These are replete with empty calories and low in nutrition. The refined flours, sodium and sugar in these foods make them the most unhealthy food in the world.

Some studies have shown that those on a plant-based diet are found to have lower plasma vitamin B12 levels and higher levels of vitamin B12 deficiency than those who consume animal products. Vitamin B12 is an important cofactor in DNA synthesis, and deficiency can lead to anemia and severe neurological dysfunction.

It encourages eating little to no processed food and discourages the use of oil and salt. This means that vegan meat and cheese, bread, ice cream, cookies, candy, snacks, and frozen meals are not allowed.

Conversely, you will eat less meat, processed meats, eggs, and dairy on a plant-based diet. Removing or reducing intake of these foods means that your intake of saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium will likely decrease as these foods are more concentrated in these nutrients than plant-based foods.

Stick to the 5 ingredient rule: Choose foods with less than 5 ingredients and all things you recognize and know are real food, such as tomatoes, water, or salt. Or if there are more than 5, make sure they're all food or spices. Buy only packaged foods with ingredients you can pronounce or recognize.

Real food basically means anything not highly processed (like artificial additives) and containing only five or fewer whole ingredients. It means mostly avoiding ingredients you would not cook with at home.

These substances end up in what we eat, thanks to a legal loophole that allows foods to be classified as “generally recognized as safe .” Food and chemical companies have exploited this loophole for decades – instead of the FDA determining which food chemicals are safe to consume, manufacturers decide.

Is too much food additive bad? ›

Some food additives can cause reactions

It is often the additives that are used to give a food a marketable quality, such as colour, that most commonly cause allergic reactions. Some of these hypersensitive reactions include: Digestive disorders – diarrhoea and colicky pains.