Significance

Many meat and milk alternatives have been assessed from nutritional, environmental, and cost perspectives, but the analyses are rarely consistently combined, which limits the ability to identify cobenefits and trade-offs across domains. Our study advances each analysis and provides a comprehensive multicriteria assessment of meat and milk alternatives from nutritional, health, environmental, and cost perspectives. For a full contextualization, we compared the meat and milk alternatives to the animal products they intend to replace as well as to the unprocessed plant-based foods they are made from; we considered comparisons along multiple and complementary units of measurement, including per serving and per calorie; and we included comparisons per product as well as per overall diets in dedicated replacement analyses.

Abstract

Reducing meat and dairy intake has been identified as a necessary strategy for mitigating the high environmental impacts food systems are currently having on climate change, biodiversity loss associated with land-use changes, and freshwater use. Having a choice of dedicated meat and milk replacements available to consumers can help in the transition toward more plant-based diets, but concerns about nutritional and health impacts and high costs can impede uptake. Here, we conduct a multicriteria assessment of 24 meat and milk alternatives that integrates nutritional, health, environmental, and cost analyses with a focus on high-income countries. Unprocessed plant-based foods such as peas, soybeans, and beans performed best in our assessment across all domains. In comparison, processed plant-based products such as veggie burgers, traditional meat replacements such as tempeh, and plant milks were associated with less climate benefits and greater costs than unprocessed foods but still offered substantial environmental, health, and nutritional benefits compared to animal products. Our findings suggest that a range of food products exist that when replacing meat and dairy in current diets would have multiple benefits, including reductions in nutritional imbalances, dietary risks and mortality, environmental resource use and pollution, and when choosing unprocessed foods over processed ones also diet costs. The findings provide support for public policies and business initiatives aimed at increasing their uptake.

Cost

"For analyzing the cost implications of meat and milk alternatives, we collected price data from British online supermarkets (40), adjusted them for differences in price levels across countries by applying purchasing power parities, and paired them with globally collected market prices that were similarly adjusted (41, 42)."

while unprocessed plant-based foods (soybeans, beans, and peas) were 88% lower in costs than beef burgers and 72% lower in costs than poultry. Among the milk alternatives, soymilk was 69% more expensive per serving in high-income countries than milk, oat and almond milks were 91% more expensive, and rice milk 108% more.

Replacing all calories from meat or dairy in high-income countries with alternatives decreased costs by up to 6-36% for unprocessed alternatives