Why we shouldn’t all be vegan

AFTER decades in which the number of people choosing to cut meat from their diet has steadily increased, 2019 is set to be the year the world changes the way it eats.

At least, that’s the ambitious aim of a campaign under the umbrella of an organisation called Eat. The core message is to discourage meat and dairy.

In the three years following 2014, according to research firm Globaldata, there was a six-fold increase in people identifying as vegans in the US.

It’s a similar story in the UK, where the number of vegans has increased by 350%, compared with a decade ago, at least according to research commissioned by the Vegan Society.

And across Asia, many governments are promoting plant-based diets.

Big food companies have noticed the shift and have jumped on to the vegan wagon, the most prominent tightly associated with Eat through its FRESH programme.

Unilever, for instance, is a very vocal partner. Recently, the multinational announced it was acquiring a meat-substitute company called “The Vegetarian Butcher”.

It described the acquisition as part of a strategy to expand “into plantbased foods that are healthier and have a lower environmental impact”.

Like Eat, the Vegetarian Butcher seeks to “conquer the world”. Its mission is “to make plant-based ‘meat’ the standard”.

Of course, there is much that both can and should be done to improve the way we eat. And yes, a key plank of the strategy will be shifting consumers away from beef.

But the extreme vision of some of the campaign’s backers is startling. Former UN official Christiana Figueres, for example, thinks that anyone who wants a steak should be banished.

“How about restaurants in 10 to 15 years start treating carnivores the same way that smokers are treated?”, Figueres suggested during a recent conference. “If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant.”

The campaign to “conquer the world” can be rather simplistic and one-sided, and we think this has some dangerous implications.

Eat, for example, describes itself as a science-based global platform for food system transformation. It has partnered with Oxford and Harvard universities, as well as with the medical journal The Lancet.

“But we have concerns that some of the science behind the campaign and the policy is partial and misleading. It is long on things that we all know are bad, such as some excesses of factory farming. But it is mostly silent on such things as the nutritional assets of animal products,” said Figueres.

And, if vegetarian diets show that traditional markers for heart disease, such as “total cholesterol”, are usually improved, this is not the case for the more predictive (and thus valuable) markers such as the triglyceride/hdl (or “good” cholesterol) ratio, which even tend to deteriorate.

More importantly, most nutritional “evidence” originates from epidemiology, which is not able to show causation but only statistical correlations. Not only are the associations weak, the research is generally confounded by lifestyle and other dietary factors.

In any case, even if plant-based diets can in theory provide the nutrients people need, as long as they are supplemented with critical micronutrients, that is not to say shifting people towards them will not result in many following poorly balanced diets and suffering ill health in consequence.

Too fast or radical a shift towards “plant-based” diets risks losing realistic and achievable goals, such as increasing the benefits of natural grazing and embracing farming techniques that reduce the wasteful feeding of crops to animals, lower climate impact and enhance biodoversity.

Sustainable, ecological and harmonious animal production really should be part of the solution of the “world food problem”, considered from both the nutritional and environmental scenarios.

The Earth is an extraordinarily complex ecosystem – any one-sizefits-all solution risks wreaking havoc with it.