Rethinking Plant-Based Meat Alternatives (The Food Foundation)

This report contains an executive summary. As requested, it is reproduced exactly below.

Executive summary and key messages

• While the environmental case for eating less meat in higher income countries is clear, the health implications of shifting diets towards more plant rich diets is more nuanced, depending on what is being substituted and by whom.
• Plant-based alternatives to meat offer a route for reducing meat consumption with the market for plant-based meat alternatives having grown exponentially in recent years. However, focussing on those alternatives that offer the best outcomes for both health and environmental outcomes in order to minimise any potential trade-offs ought to be central to the transition to more healthy and sustainable diets.
• In this briefing we devise a taxonomy for a range of plant-based alternatives to meat, looking at both nutrition and environmental indicators as well as price to assess how different categories and individual products compare to meat. Based on the OECD’s taxonomy we split plant-based meat alternatives into three different subcategories: processed (new generation), processed (traditional), and less processed (beans and grains). In total we analysed 104 products sold in UK supermarkets.
• This taxonomy finds that the vast majority of plant-based meat alternatives come with significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs) and water footprints compared to meat, but the nutritional profile of plant-based alternatives varies depending on the product and level of processing.
• Much greater nuance is needed when discussing the healthiness of plant-based meat alternatives. Grouping all plant-based alternatives into a single category is an unhelpful strategy for encouraging a shift away from meat and towards more plant-rich diets as it hides a wide variety of options with differing nutrition and health profiles within the plant-based alternative category.
• The proportion of ultra processed foods (UPFs) within each plant-based meat alternative category analysed varies considerably, despite media and popular discourse often depicting all plant-based meat alternatives as being UPFs.
• Although research on health outcomes associated with plant-based meat alternatives remains limited, this analysis does not find evidence that the nutritional profile of plant-based meat alternatives is on average notably worse than for meat products.
• More processed plant-based meat alternatives can therefore be a useful stepping stone for encouraging citizens to shift their diets, although less processed alternatives (beans and grains) offer the greatest number of co-benefits.
• All three plant-based meat alternative categories analysed in this taxonomy contained fewer calories, lower levels of saturated fat, and higher levels of fibre on average compared to the meat products analysed.
• Plant-based meat alternatives are on average lower in protein relative to meat, but the UK does not have any protein deficiency issues at a population level.
• Only a third of the more processed plant-based meat alternatives are fortified with iron and vitamin B12, and the processed (new generation) category has the highest level of salt of all three categories, with scope to improve fortification and reformulate to reduce salt content.
• Less processed alternatives to meat (beans and grains) perform strongly on a number of different nutrition indicators, containing notably lower amounts of saturated fat, calories and salt and the highest amount of fibre per 100g of all categories compared to both meat and other plant-based meat alternatives. They are also the most affordable category per 100g.
• There is therefore a real opportunity in the UK to champion and better promote beans as an affordable, healthy and sustainable alternative to meat, and to understand how best to increase uptake. They offer a win-win-win for environmental, health and equity outcomes.