Our Plant Powered meal kit that gives you choice!
We’re so excited to have launched our new My Plant Power Bag, giving our plant based and veggie foodies more choice. With 7 different recipes each week, including 4 plant based and 3 vegetarian, it’s time to let us sort dinners!
It’s no lie it can be a daily struggle to think about what to make for dinner. Especially being veggie or plant based. As Kiwi’s, a lot of our dinners tend to revolve around ‘meat and two (or three) veg’ – focusing on the protein, and building a meal around that. Vegetarian and plant based on the other hand, often requires a little more creativity. There’s only so many things you can do with tofu after all! Our Veggie and Plant Based Bags have been solving this problem for our foodies at home, and now with more recipes, it’s even easier to eat with plants at the centre of your plate.
At My Food Bag we love to get creative with our Veggie & Plant recipes. One reason our Nutritionist Sam loves plant based cooking and eating, is that when she’s thinking about what’s for dinner, she focuses on what she’s adding (vegetables, variety), as opposed to what she’s leaving out (the meat!) Focusing on the fruit and veg, and adding lots of awesome extras, such as nuts, seeds, plant-based proteins, and wholegrain carbohydrates.
Shifting this focus towards building meals that hero fruit & veggies, can also mean a wider variety of plant foods in our diet – pushing us closer to the goal of 30+ plant foods per week, which research group “The American Gut Project” (1) has hailed as the magic number to protect us from gut and heart disease. Don’t forget it’s not just fruits and veggies which count here – legumes, nuts, seeds and grains all add up too, even herbs and spices are awarded a quarter mark each! Our delicious Fragrant Lentil Pumpkin Curry has 11 different plants in it!
Here are some of the many health benefits that can come from increasing your plant and veggie intake:
- Plant foods have fibre, which help to feed our gut bugs, also known as our microbiome. Some prebiotic plant foods (garlic, onion, legumes, soy, oats, cashews, leeks, chicory root, asparagus to name a few) have also been shown to specifically increase our number of friendly gut bugs! (2)
- Plant fibre is also great for making us feel satisfied and full after a meal – making it a fantastic tool for weight management (3)
- Research suggests that higher fruit and vegetable intake is associated with better, more consistent mood (4)
- Whole plant foods tend to be lower in salt, and saturated fat, making them a great option when it comes to reducing our risk of stroke, heart disease, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure (5,6,7,8).
- Plants also boast a range of phytonutrients. Phytonutrients are naturally occurring chemical compounds found in plant foods which work to protect the plant, but also play a really important anti-inflammatory and antioxidant in our bodies too – both of which support our general wellbeing and immunity (9).
Explore our My Plant Power Bag for a delicious range of vegetarian and plant based recipes.
- McDonald, D., Hyde, E., Debelius, J. W., Morton, J. T., Gonzalez, A., Ackermann, G., … & Knight, R. (2018). American gut: an open platform for citizen science microbiome research. Msystems, 3(3), e00031-18.
- Simpson, H. L., & Campbell, B. J. (2015). dietary fibre–microbiota interactions. Alimentary pharmacology & therapeutics, 42(2), 158-179.
- Slavin, J., & Green, H. (2007). Dietary fibre and satiety. Nutrition Bulletin, 32, 32-42.
- Liu, X., Yan, Y., Li, F., & Zhang, D. (2016). Fruit and vegetable consumption and the risk of depression: a meta-analysis. Nutrition, 32(3), 296-302.
- Aune, D., Giovannucci, E., Boffetta, P., Fadnes, L. T., Keum, N., Norat, T., … & Tonstad, S. (2017). Fruit and vegetable intake and the risk of cardiovascular disease, total cancer and all-cause mortality—a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of prospective studies. International journal of epidemiology, 46(3), 1029-1056.
- Zhan, J., Liu, Y. J., Cai, L. B., Xu, F. R., Xie, T., & He, Q. Q. (2017). Fruit and vegetable consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease: A meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Critical reviews in food science and nutrition, 57(8), 1650-1663.
- Dauchet, L., Amouyel, P., & Dallongeville, J. (2005). Fruit and vegetable consumption and risk of stroke: a meta-analysis of cohort studies. Neurology, 65(8), 1193-1197.
- Huang, T., Yang, B., Zheng, J., Li, G., Wahlqvist, M. L., & Li, D. (2012). Cardiovascular disease mortality and cancer incidence in vegetarians: a meta-analysis and systematic review. Annals of nutrition and metabolism, 60(4), 233-240.
- Poles, J., Karhu, E., McGill, M., McDaniel, H. R., & Lewis, J. E. (2021). The effects of twenty-four nutrients and phytonutrients on immune system function and inflammation: A narrative review. Journal of Clinical and Translational Research, 7(3), 333.
