By Rebecca Tobi RNutr, Food Foundation

We caught up with Rebecca Tobi from the Food Foundation on one of their most recent reports, “Rethinking plant-based alternatives to meat” The bottom line is that grouping  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. We asked her to summarise the findings in a bite-sized summary for our partners and followers and here is what she has kindly shared.

We are running out of time to hit the UK’s Net Zero goal. Unless emissions from the food system (and therefore livestock production and consumption) are reduced we will simply not be able to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees (Clark et al, 2020). Yet the question of how best to approach a reduction in meat consumption has led to fierce debate, with the discussion frequently politicised and polarised. While the environmental and health case for eating a more whole food plant-based diet  as a way to reduce meat consumption is clear, and the majority of plant-based alternatives have lower carbon footprints compared to meat, counter arguments frequently focus on the negative nutrition profiles of some meat alternatives and the level of processing required to produce them.

We wanted to explore the truth of some of these claims and explore which plant-based alternatives to meat are the best options for meeting health, environmental and affordability objectives.

In August 2024 we published our report, Rethinking plant-based alternatives to meat, analysing over 100 products including 68 different plant-based alternatives to compare and contrast how they perform compared to meat against a range of different indicators.

What we did

We looked at 104 products currently available for UK citizens to buy from supermarkets and categorised these into a taxonomy devised around three plant-based categories and a meat (red and white) category. The three plant-based categories were:

1. Processed (new generation). This includes plant-based meat alternatives such as Beyond Meat, THIS branded products, Quorn, and Vivera that are more recent additions to the market. These are foods which aim to directly mimic equivalent meat products and are marketed as such
2. Processed (traditional). This includes products such as tofu, tempeh and seitan which have a long culinary history in other parts of the world such as Southeast Asia
3. Less processed plant alternatives. This includes beans, legumes and pulses (‘beans’), as well as grains, both of which are sources of protein. We included ready-to-eat and tinned products within this category given the role played by convenience in driving food choice

We focused on frequently eaten and purchased meat products with plant-based alternatives available to buy in the UK. The five most commonly consumed types of meat in the UK are chicken, chicken breast, sausages, bacon and beef steak, but given the lack of plant-based alternatives that directly replicate whole cuts of meat (e.g. roast chicken), we decided to focus our analysis on commonly eaten types of meat with close plant-based equivalents.

We aimed to select a range of different types of products (tinned, frozen and dried) and product formats (sausages, fillets, meatballs, etc) within each category for a range of different brands.

We then captured nutrient and price data in addition to carbon and water footprint information. We excluded dairy and dairy alts, nuts and seeds, mushrooms, and counted mycoprotein (a fungi) as a plant for the sake of simplicity.

Cultivated meat and insects were also excluded as they are not plant based and not (currently) available to buy in the UK.

Key takeaways

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.

We found that all four categories included some ultra processed products, with sausages, bacon and ham examples of UPF meats that are frequently eaten in the UK. However, 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. The processed (new generation) category has the highest proportion of UPFs overall (100%) and almost twice as many UPFs as the processed (traditional) category (55.6%).

Price is a key driver of food choice, yet our analysis shows that there is a notable price premium for the two processed meat alternative categories compared to meat products. This is concerning given that these two categories offer products that aim to directly, or closely, mimic meat and can therefore more easily encourage the substitution of meat for plant-based products than unprocessed alternatives can. The processed (new generation) alternative category is 73% more expensive per 100g than the meat category while the processed (traditional) category is 38% more expensive.

Although research on the health outcomes associated with plant-based meat alternatives remains limited, our analysis does not find evidence that the nutritional profile of plant-based meat alternatives is on average notably worse than for meat products. All three plant-based meat alternative categories that we analysed contained fewer calories, lower levels of saturated fat, and higher levels of fibre on average compared to the meat products analysed.  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.

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 ad per 100 calories.

Conclusion

Much greater nuance is needed when talking about plant-based meat alternatives. Beans were the meat alternative with the largest number of co-benefits for both health and the environment as well as being affordable. 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 try to better understand how best to increase uptake. They offer a win-win-win for environmental, health and equity outcomes!

To read the full report visit The Food Foundations website.