However, Veganuary can be begun at any time. Anyone who registers on the Veganuary website will receive emails with articles, videos and information about a vegan lifestyle for 31 days. We signed up for the first time this year and were pleasantly surprised. Registration is free and, in our opinion, offers valueable information. The daily emails are informative and varied and answer the most frequently asked questions on the subject.

We really enjoyed the 31-day journey and can recommend it to anyone who is interested. After all, a vegan diet can improve your health and help protect animals and the planet. We will therefore go into more detail about these three common reasons to try a vegan diet.

To make Veganuary easier, we recommend our vegan cookbook. More than 100 recipes cover every meal from breakfast and main dishes to snacks and desserts. The recipes give you step-by-step instructions so that everyone (even beginners 😊) can easily prepare plant-based dishes. Grocery shopping is a breeze with the enclosed detailed list.

1. For animal welfare

The FAO estimates that nearly 78 billion animals were killed for meat production in 2020. Many of these animals are kept in deplorable conditions until they are sent to the slaughterhouse.

Avoiding dishes containing animal products sets an example – not only during Veganuary, but also the rest of the year. Every meal makes a difference. Which brings us to the second reason:

2. For the health of the planet

On average, plant-based foods have significantly lower CO₂ emissions than products of animal origin. Over the entire supply chain, this can mean 10-50 times lower CO₂ emissions for plant-based food compared to animal-based food. According to Our World in Data, factors such as transportation distance, processing and packaging play a very minor role for all foods. So if you want to reduce your CO₂ emissions, you should pay more attention to the food itself than to its origin. If you would like to find out more about this topic, we recommend our article How to easily reduce your CO2 footprint.

3. For your own health

Plants are naturally free of cholesterol. Our body is able to produce its own. However, if we ingest cholesterol through food, as is the case with animal products, we can have too much of it. If you are taking cholesterol-lowering medication, you can usually reduce or even stop taking the medication after a few weeks by switching to a whole food plant-based diet – but please only do so with your doctor’s permission.

Another nice side effect of a vegan diet is often weight loss without dieting or exercising more. This is because most plants have a lower calorie density than animal products and contain fiber. This cleanses the intestines and feeds the “good bacteria” in our gut. This makes us feel full and also gives us a good digestion! 😊

However, this is not the case with highly processed plant-based foods such as sugar, refined grains and oil. If you want to do even more for your health, cut out processed foods as well.

Are you highly motivated to take part in Veganuary? Great! Sign up on the Veganuary website or simply challenge yourself for a month. Make sure to look into our cookbook where you’ll find more than 100 healthy, vegan recipes ranging from breakfast to starters, main courses and even desserts!

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But what does this “simple decision” look like? Well, each and every one of us gets to choose several times a day. Three times a day, the decision for a healthier planet, greater biodiversity and against rainforest deforestation is in our hands. When we choose what we eat.

Every day, we consumers have the choice between, for example, a beef fillet or a peas dish. Both foods contain proteins, but on average, 1 kilogram of beef causes emissions of 60 kg of CO₂ equivalents across the entire supply chain. That’s over 66 times more than 1 kilogram of peas with an average of 0.9 kg CO₂ equivalents according to the figures of Our World in Data. Incidentally, the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation are only a small fraction of the total CO₂ emissions for both foods.

The more environmentally friendly choice

Meat and dairy products in general have a very high CO₂ footprint. If you want to consciously choose environmentally friendly foods, you should preference fruit, vegetables, legumes (beans, lentils, peas), wholegrain foods, nuts and seeds.

Therefore, opting for a vegan meal is the better choice for our planet (and therefore also the better choice for us earthlings 😊). But is it also the healthier choice for our bodies?

The healthier choice

Plant-based foods have many benefits for example they contain fiber which are important for a healthy digestion and they contain no cholesterol. However, vegan doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. That’s why we at Keller’s Kitchen go one step further. We show you how to eat a healthy vegan diet. It’s called whole food plant-based. This fancy term means vegan (plant-based) and unprocessed (whole food). By ‘unprocessed’, we mean food from which nothing healthy has been removed or unhealthy added in a processing step.

Whole-wheat flour, for example, is a plant-based whole food, whereas white flour is not. Most of the fiber, vitamins and minerals have been removed in processing steps, leaving starch with a low nutritional value. Both flours are vegan, but they are different for the health of our body. Whole wheat flakes or whole grains are even healthier.

The impact of food on our health

Does our choice of food really have such a big impact on our health? Many scientific studies have shown that we can cure or prevent chronic diseases with a whole food plant-based diet. We are talking about high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, for example. This does not require pills with unpleasant, sometimes even painful side effects. Diet alone can have the power to give us our health back! Side effects include feeling fitter and losing weight, to name just a few.

Our goal is to make the world healthier. That’s why we’ve written our first cookbook. It contains more than 100 recipes, many of which can be prepared in less than 30 minutes. Eating healthily can be very easy.

Every meal can help

Everyone can decide for themselves whether they want to eat a whole food plant-based diet every day or just enjoy a delicious plant-based meal every now and then. The great thing is that every single meal helps to make our planet and ourselves a little healthier. The decision is entirely up to us.

Start with a healthy, delicious dish right away with our low-in-CO₂ -emissions Yellow Peas Meal recipe. As we say in Switzerland: En Guetä!

Follow us on Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube for quick, healthy recipes and videos about the impact of diet on health and beauty. Sign up for our newsletter to not miss any news from Keller’s Kitchen.