A wholefood plant-based diet is particularly well suited to people using GLP-1 drugs because it can provide plenty of fibre, protein, vitamins and minerals without packing large amounts of energy into small portions.

How do GLP-1 drugs work?

GLP-1 is a hormone naturally released by the gut after eating. It helps signal fullness, slows stomach emptying and regulates blood sugar. GLP-1 medications mimic these effects, reducing appetite and helping people feel satisfied with less food.

Clinical trials have reported weight losses of 15% or more, but maintaining that loss after treatment means developing eating habits that can last.

Make every meal count

If you are eating smaller portions, nutrient density matters. Base meals around vegetables, fruit, beans, lentils, chickpeas, wholegrains, tofu, tempeh, nuts and seeds. These foods provide fibre alongside vitamins, minerals and other beneficial plant compounds.

Protein deserves particular attention during rapid weight loss because it can help protect muscle mass. Good sources include pulses, tofu, tempeh, fortified soya milk and yoghurt, nuts and seeds.

High-fibre plant foods may also work with the body’s own appetite-regulating system. One study found greater satisfaction after a tofu-based meal than after a calorie-matched meal containing meat and cheese.

GLP-1 drugs may also change what people want to eat

Interestingly, people taking these drugs do not simply report eating less.

In one survey of 1,955 consumers, nearly half of current and former GLP-1 users said they were eating less beef or pork. Many also reported reducing chicken, fish, eggs and dairy, while more than 70% were eating fewer processed foods.

Fruit, leafy greens and water were among the only foods people reported consuming more of.

Another analysis found that households containing a GLP-1 user spent more than 5% less on meat during the first 6 months. If millions of people begin eating fewer animal products as GLP-1 use expands, the effects could reach far beyond individual health and into the wider food system.

The bottom line

GLP-1 drugs can help reduce appetite, but they cannot build healthy habits for you. A fibre-rich, protein-rich wholefood plant-based diet can help make smaller meals more nutritious, support muscle and fullness, and provide a sustainable way of eating long after the injections stop. And if these drugs are already nudging people away from animal products, that is a shift worth encouraging.

Subscribe now

Share

Sometimes this develops into something much more dramatic: “My body can’t absorb iron from plants.”

At which point you could be forgiven for wondering whether there is a mysterious medical condition that turns otherwise ordinary humans into vampires.

There are genuine medical conditions that cause iron deficiency. There are genuine conditions that affect absorption. There are people who need more iron than others. But none of that is the same as having a medical requirement to obtain iron from another animal’s body.

Those are very different claims.

Plants Have Iron

Iron is essential because our bodies use it to make haemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, and myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscles.

Animal tissue contains haem iron. Plants contain non-haem iron.

The second type is sometimes treated as though it barely counts, but plant foods can provide substantial amounts of iron. Good sources include lentils, tofu, tempeh, beans, chickpeas, pumpkin seeds, tahini, quinoa, wholegrains, fortified breakfast cereals, dried fruit, peas and dark green leafy vegetables.

For perspective, a 120 gram serving of cooked green or brown lentils can provide around 4.2 mg of iron. A typical 100 gram serving of tofu provides around 3.5 mg. Some fortified cereals provide considerably more.

The recommended daily amount for adult men is 8.7 mg. For women aged 19 to 50 it is 14.8 mg, falling to 8.7 mg after 50.

Your Body Is Not Stupid

The usual comeback is that haem iron is absorbed better. True. But that leaves out an important part of the story.

Our bodies regulate iron absorption.

When iron stores are low, more iron can be absorbed. When stores are full, absorption decreases. Non-haem iron is particularly responsive to this regulation.

A controlled trial published in 2025 provides an interesting example. Researchers gave vegans and non-vegans pistachios as a source of non-haem iron and measured their blood iron afterwards. The vegans actually showed a significantly greater increase in serum iron at 120 minutes and a significantly greater overall iron response.They also had lower levels of hepcidin, a hormone that restricts iron absorption. The researchers suggested that people accustomed to obtaining their iron from plants may develop physiological adaptations that improve their ability to absorb non-haem iron. It was a small study, so nobody should pretend it proves every vegan absorbs plant iron better than every flesh eater. But it certainly makes “humans just can’t absorb plant iron properly” look rather silly. Our bodies appear to be considerably more adaptable than the vampire theory allows.

You Can Help Absorption Too

There are simple ways to increase the amount of iron you absorb.

Vitamin C helps your body absorb non-haem iron, so combine iron-rich foods with foods such as peppers, broccoli, cabbage, kiwi, strawberries, oranges or other vitamin-C-rich fruit and vegetables. Think lentil curry with peppers. Beans with vegetables. Fortified cereal with fruit.

Tea and coffee can reduce iron absorption, so if iron is a concern, having them away from meals can help.

Phytates in wholegrains, pulses and seeds can also reduce absorption, although soaking, sprouting and fermentation can reduce their effects. Wholegrain foods may still provide plenty of iron because they contain considerably more of it than refined alternatives.

This is nutrition. It is not sorcery.

What If You Really Are Iron Deficient?

Iron deficiency is real.

Heavy periods can substantially increase iron requirements. Gastrointestinal problems, blood loss and conditions affecting absorption can make maintaining healthy iron levels more difficult.

Those things should be taken seriously.

But “I have iron deficiency” and “therefore I need to eat animals” are not interchangeable statements. If someone cannot obtain enough iron through food, iron supplements exist. People with heavy menstrual losses, for example, may need supplementation rather than simply trying to cram increasingly large quantities of iron-rich food into every meal. And in more serious circumstances, medicine can provide iron directly, including intravenously.

If your body needs iron, the medically relevant substance is iron. Not a cow. Not a pig. Not somebody else’s blood.

Get Tested, Not Spooked

If you are unusually tired, weak, cold, struggling to concentrate or concerned about iron deficiency, speak to your doctor and get your levels checked rather than diagnosing yourself through TikTok comments. There may be an underlying reason for low iron that actually needs investigating. And if your levels are low, deal with the deficiency properly.

Eat iron-rich foods. Include vitamin C. Be sensible about tea and coffee around meals. Supplement if medically appropriate. Get professional advice when you need it. But we should stop turning “I had low iron” into the much grander claim that the human body has some mysterious biological need to consume animals.

Some people need more iron. Some people need supplements. Some people may need medical treatment. So far, nobody has been diagnosed as a vampire.

Subscribe now

Share

At a commercial free-range egg farm near Belford, approximately 2,000 hens died after contracting H5N1. The surviving birds were killed as part of the disease-control response. The farm’s operator described walking into a building that normally housed 16,000 living birds and finding a carpet of dead bodies. And what was the press worried about? Whether there would be enough turkeys left to kill for Christmas.

It’s difficult to imagine a better illustration of our relationship with other animals. Tens of thousands of individuals are dead, and the emergency is that we might struggle to put another dead bird on the dinner table. But these industries aren’t merely victims of a dangerous virus. They can provide conditions in which influenza spreads, evolves and potentially becomes more dangerous to other species, including our own.

The Industry That Feeds the Virus

Bird flu is frequently presented as a problem caused by wild birds. Migrating ducks and geese carry influenza viruses across continents, occasionally introducing them into commercial farms.

That’s true. But wild birds aren’t breeding tens of billions of chickens and ducks into commercial production facilities, transporting animals between premises or creating an international trade in their bodies and reproductive products.

A virus needs susceptible hosts to reproduce. Every infection creates opportunities for replication, mutation and further transmission. Influenza viruses can also exchange genetic material when different strains infect the same cell, potentially producing new combinations. Not every mutation is dangerous, and large populations don’t automatically produce more deadly viruses. But sustained transmission gives evolution more opportunities to experiment.

The H5N1 lineage behind the ongoing global crisis was first identified in farmed geese in Guangdong, China, in 1996. Subsequent circulation in poultry contributed to its genetic diversification, alongside exchanges with influenza viruses carried by wild birds. The consequences of bringing enormous populations of animals into agricultural systems extend far beyond the boundaries of individual farms.

Ducks are particularly concerning because they can carry influenza without displaying obvious symptoms. The danger is sufficiently recognised that Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture explicitly advises farmers to keep ducks and geese separate from other poultry species. Humans nevertheless continue breeding ducks for their flesh and feathers, alongside chickens bred for eggs and chickens bred to be killed for their flesh.

From Bird Farms to Fur Farms

In Utah, an investigation by ProPublica exposed a bird flu outbreak at a mink fur farm that had continued for approximately 2 months, alongside serious concerns about disease surveillance and the failure to test potentially exposed workers. Mink are imprisoned and killed for the fur industry. They are also mammals, meaning influenza infections among them raise particular concerns about viral adaptation. Scientists fear that circulation in farmed mink could give avian influenza opportunities to acquire mutations that improve its ability to infect or spread between mammals.

That doesn’t mean infected mink will inevitably produce a human pandemic. A virus capable of infecting mammals isn’t necessarily capable of spreading efficiently between humans. But deliberately maintaining populations of mammals for fur production, while potentially dangerous influenza viruses circulate among them, creates risks that extend well beyond the mink condemned to die.

The stakes are hardly imaginary.

The 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Its H1N1 virus contained genes of avian origin, although its precise evolutionary history remains disputed. Some say it started with a Kansas chicken farm but there is no established evidence that poultry farming caused that pandemic.

What history does establish is the catastrophic potential of influenza viruses that acquire the ability to spread efficiently among humans. We know the consequences of getting this wrong. We also know that animals have been paying the price of our exploitation long before any threat to humans emerges.

The Victims Beyond the Farm Gates

Bird flu has already devastated wild populations. Recently, on Australia’s remote Macquarie Island, H5 avian influenza was detected in a southern elephant seal and a kelp gull. Elsewhere in the Southern Ocean, more than 13,000 elephant seal pups were believed to have died from bird flu on Heard Island. The virus has also devastated seabird colonies around Britain. At Pagham Harbour, Sandwich terns abandoned their breeding colony following the 2022 outbreak, although conservation efforts have since helped them recover.

These outbreaks cannot simply be attributed to particular farms. Wild birds naturally carry influenza, and tracing the origins of individual infections is complex. But the potential for animal farming to amplify and alter influenza viruses makes its consequences a concern for animals who have never been anywhere near a farm.

Managing the Disease, Preserving the Exploitation

Commercial poultry vaccination remains prohibited in England, while industry representatives have identified international trade restrictions as a significant obstacle to adopting vaccination. Meanwhile, the standard response to outbreaks involves killing the surviving birds. According to an industry estimate reported by Farmers Weekly, approximately 60% of infected premises in the previous UK season underwent whole-house gassing.

Biosecurity, surveillance and vaccination can reduce disease risks. But they cannot justify the industries themselves.

A hen whose life is cut short by influenza has been deprived of the same fundamental interest as a hen killed when her egg production declines. The farmer’s preferred timetable doesn’t make the killing acceptable. Neither does a disease-free fur farm give humans the right to breed and kill mink for clothing. Animal agriculture turns living individuals into production units, creates opportunities for dangerous viruses to circulate and then responds to outbreaks by killing the animals.

We should be working to eliminate those opportunities for infection and evolution, not by simply trying to manage them indefinitely while breeding billions more victims, but by managing the industry into extinction.

Subscribe now

Share

Nitrite-free bacon sales are booming. Waitrose has doubled its range over the past year, with sales increasing by more than 34%. Denhay, a Devon-based manufacturer, has introduced two new products across 570 Tesco stores. British shoppers spent £34.8 million on bacon made without added nitrites in the year to September 2026, an increase of 11.4%, while conventional bacon sales declined.

There’s just one problem. Nobody has established that nitrite-free bacon is safer. Nitrites help preserve meat, prevent dangerous bacterial growth and maintain its familiar pink appearance. They can also contribute to the formation of nitrosamines, compounds suspected of harming human health. Removing them might sound sensible, but the Food Standards Agency says there’s currently no evidence that processed meat made without nitrate or nitrite additives is safer. Their removal can actually introduce new food safety challenges.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization classifies processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning there is sufficient evidence that consuming it causes colorectal cancer. Tobacco belongs to the same category, although that reflects the certainty of the evidence rather than an equivalent level of danger. Eating approximately 50 grams of processed meat daily, roughly two rashers of bacon, is associated with a 16% increase in the relative risk of colorectal cancer. Scientists haven’t established which components of processed meat are responsible. Nitrites may contribute, but removing them doesn’t automatically remove the danger. Equally, we cannot assume nitrite-free bacon carries exactly the same risk. That hasn’t been established either. What we have is a proven carcinogenic food being reformulated to address one suspected contributor, then sold to consumers who increasingly associate the absence of that ingredient with improved health. And they’re paying more for the privilege.

Denhay’s managing director, Marlene Godwin, explained that the company’s new products responded to demand from supermarkets and consumers.

“We definitely don’t want to be telling people what to eat,” she said, describing the expansion as offering “choice, not replacement.”

That phrase neatly captures the industry’s approach. Consumers express concern about bacon, so manufacturers provide another version that allows them to continue eating it. Whether that change delivers the health benefit customers might expect remains uncertain. Of course, companies can offer alternatives, but the existence of a market for supposedly healthier bacon shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence that healthier bacon has been produced.

Cancer Research UK recommends reducing processed and red meat consumption to lower bowel cancer risk. It doesn’t recommend shopping around for a different curing method. This is particularly relevant as researchers investigate rising rates of bowel cancer among younger adults. UK incidence among people aged 25 to 49 has increased by more than 50% since the early 1990s. The reasons remain uncertain, and it would be irresponsible to attribute that increase to bacon. But we don’t need to identify every cause of early-onset bowel cancer before acting on established evidence that processed meat causes colorectal cancer.

More importantly, the entire debate exposes an extraordinary contradiction in how we understand choice.

The bacon manufacturer says that it doesn’t want to tell customers what to eat, while advertising it heavily, that their customers preferences deserve accommodation, and satisfying those preferences means developing entirely new product ranges. How generous.

But consider whose preferences are never accommodated.

The pig isn’t an incidental ingredient that manufacturers can remove or replace. He or she is an individual whose body has been turned into the product. We’re apparently reluctant to interfere with someone’s freedom to choose breakfast, while accepting that another individual can be bred and killed to provide it.

That’s a rather selective interpretation of personal freedom. And it explains why so many proposed improvements to animal products leave the underlying injustice untouched. People can demand better conditions for pigs, different methods of killing them, fewer additives in their flesh or more reassuring labels on the packaging. Some changes may reduce suffering or risks to consumers, but none establishes an entitlement to kill pigs in the first place.

Indeed, the supposedly healthier alternative can make the original practice easier to defend. Someone worried about cancer can buy nitrite-free bacon. Someone concerned about animal suffering can buy a product marketed around improved treatment.

Both can feel they’ve addressed their concerns while continuing to pay for pigs to be killed. Meanwhile, the fundamental assumption that these individuals are ours to use goes unchallenged.

We can demand better public health information, particularly when manufacturers benefit from consumers associating an unproven reformulation with improved safety. UK readers can sign this parliamentary petition. Everyone, wherever they live, can also demand cancer warnings on processed meat and support removing processed meat from British hospitals.

But warnings and institutional changes address only part of the problem. Bacon isn’t merely a food carrying a recognised cancer risk. It’s the remains of an individual who was killed to satisfy someone else’s preferences. Manufacturers can change the preservatives, the packaging, the price and the promises.

Apparently, everything about bacon is negotiable except the pig’s life.

Subscribe now

Share

The calculation only includes pig and chicken farms large enough to fall under environmental permitting rules and report more than 1,000kg of ammonia emissions a year. Cattle farms are missing entirely, despite cattle being responsible for more than 40% of UK ammonia emissions. Pollution from animal waste transported away from farms is also excluded, even though emissions from spreading or handling that waste can exceed those produced at the farms themselves.

So £131 million is not the full cost of animal agriculture’s air pollution.

We have covered this problem before. In 2024, agriculture produced 89% of UK ammonia emissions, with most coming from farmed animals, their waste and fertiliser. Factory farming concentrates enormous numbers of animals in relatively small areas. Their waste does not disappear. Ammonia escapes into the air, where it can react with other pollutants to form tiny particles known as PM2.5. Those particles can enter the lungs and bloodstream.

The Bureau spoke to Dr Helen Wood of Queen Mary University of London, who explained that once these particles enter the blood they can travel around the body. They can worsen lung conditions, increase inflammation, exacerbate asthma and contribute to cardiovascular disease. People can become chronically ill, require long-term care, become unable to work and lose years of healthy life. The public pays for that through NHS treatment, lost productivity and premature deaths.

The animals breathe it first.

Inside industrial units, thousands or tens of thousands of individuals live surrounded by the waste produced by bodies humans have deliberately concentrated together. Ammonia builds up inside the same system before spreading beyond it. Factory farming creates the pollution, exposes the animals to it, releases it into surrounding communities and then hands part of the resulting healthcare bill to everyone else.

One former pig farm worker interviewed by The Bureau described repeatedly struggling to breathe while working near the pollution. Even after retiring, he said pollution from the nearby farm could blow across his home and village, forcing him indoors.

This is not necessarily a local problem either. Ammonia can travel hundreds of kilometres through the atmosphere. The pollution produced by industrial animal farming does not respect farm boundaries. Previous research has estimated that halving agricultural ammonia pollution in the UK could avoid thousands of deaths each year. The new investigation found the highest reported emissions from intensive pig and chicken farms in East Anglia, followed by Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, and the West Midlands. But even those numbers leave huge holes.

Cattle farms currently do not require the same environmental permits, meaning the sector responsible for a substantial share of ammonia pollution remains outside this reporting system. The government has previously said it plans to consider extending environmental permitting to intensive beef and dairy farms. That may improve monitoring. It will not remove the underlying problem.

We already know the financial consequences stretch far beyond this latest £131 million estimate.

Earlier analysis estimated that UK pig and chicken factory farming imposes more than £1.2 billion a year in hidden costs, including pollution, health impacts, subsidies and lost rural employment. That analysis estimated ammonia air pollution alone at around £458 million a year. The figures are not directly comparable because they use different methodologies and scopes. The new £131 million calculation is tied to reported emissions from farms captured by the environmental permitting system.

What both reveal is the same problem.

The price on the supermarket shelf is not the price society pays.

We have seen the same thing with disease. Industrial chicken farming creates conditions where bacteria can spread and evolve, while intensive production is associated with heavy antibiotic use. As we explored in Chicken Farms Are Spreading Dangerous Bacteria, supposedly cheap animal products can generate costs that surface elsewhere in healthcare, environmental damage and biological risk. Factory farming survives partly because those costs are separated from the product.

The company sells the chicken. The public pays for the pollution. The NHS treats the disease. Communities breathe the air. Rivers receive the waste. Animals endure the system from inside it.

Industry representatives can talk about better infrastructure, reduced emissions and improved regulation. Those measures may reduce particular harms, and preventing pollution is better than allowing more of it. But cleaner exploitation is still exploitation.

The root problem is breeding enormous numbers of sentient individuals because humans have decided their bodies are commodities. Once animals become production units, everything around them is organised around extracting value as efficiently as possible. Their waste becomes an environmental problem. Their confinement becomes a disease problem. Their emissions become a health problem. And everybody else receives the invoice.

£131 million is not evidence that factory farming needs slightly better accounting. It is another reminder that the apparent efficiency of animal exploitation depends on hiding who really pays for it.

Subscribe now

Share

Health comes first.

In a survey of 2,596 dog guardians, 94.5% said health and nutrition were important when choosing food, ahead of quality, palatability, naturalness and price.84% were feeding either conventional or raw meat-based food. Just 12.8% were feeding a plant-based diet. But if our concern is what dogs need, why are we so attached to meat?

Dogs do not need cows. They do not need chickens. They do not need pigs.

They need nutrients. And increasingly, the evidence suggests those nutrients do not have to come from another animal’s body.

The science has moved on

A 2026 review of 31 studies examined the digestibility of plant-based and vegetarian diets and ingredients for dogs and cats. Across different study designs, ingredients and methods, digestibility was consistently high and broadly comparable with conventional meat-based food. Among studies looking specifically at complete diets, all 7 concluded that the plant-based or vegetarian diets were well digested.

That does not mean you can throw some lentils in a bowl and call it dog food.

Protein digestibility is not the same thing as complete nutrition, and researchers have called for more work on micronutrients, older animals, puppies, unwell dogs and real-world feeding.

But that is an argument for properly formulated food. It is not an argument for slaughter. The same review notes that by early 2026, most research examining health outcomes in dogs fed well-formulated plant-based diets supported their use.

So why does meat remain the default?

Loving one animal, eating another

We have built an entire culture around treating dogs as family while treating cows, chickens, pigs and fishes as ingredients.

The researchers behind the dog food acceptance study call this the “animal lover’s paradox”: caring deeply about one group of animals while purchasing food produced through the killing of others. And the usual defence that dog food merely uses slaughterhouse “waste” does not make the contradiction disappear. The same paper notes that almost half of animal-derived ingredients used in US dog food were suitable for human consumption, while slaughter by-products have economic value and support animal agriculture rather than simply making unwanted waste vanish. Calling part of someone’s body a “by-product” does not make their death irrelevant.

It just changes the accounting.

The environmental cost is enormous too

Even if we ignored the animals being killed, meat-based dog food carries another cost. A UK study of 31 commercially available dry dog foods found plant-based foods had the lowest environmental impact across every measure assessed, including land use, greenhouse gas emissions, acidification, eutrophication and freshwater withdrawal. Per 1,000 kcal, beef-based food required an estimated 102.15 m² of land, compared with 2.73 m² for plant-based food. Greenhouse gas emissions were 31.47 kg CO₂e for beef-based food, compared with 2.82 kg for plant-based.

The broader environmental review is even harder to dismiss. It found ingredient choice was the biggest driver of companion animal food’s environmental impact, with animal-derived ingredients responsible for much of the burden.

So we are killing animals to feed dogs while using dramatically more land, producing more emissions and placing more pressure on ecosystems to do it.

For what?

Guardians are interested, but habit still wins

The survey does offer some hope.

Among guardians feeding conventional or raw meat-based diets, more than 43% said they would consider at least one more sustainable alternative if their requirements were met. Cultivated meat was the most popular, followed by vegetarian, insect-based and plant-based food. But 56.8% rejected every alternative offered. That is striking when the same respondents overwhelmingly claimed health and nutrition were their priorities. The survey was not globally representative. Most respondents were women, most were from the UK, and people with higher education and vegans were overrepresented.

Still, the contradiction it exposes is familiar. We say dogs are family. We say animals deserve compassion. We say climate change matters. Then we open a tin containing the body of another animal because that is what we have always done.

There is nothing wrong with putting a dog’s health first. We should. But protecting one animal does not require pretending everyone else is expendable.

A nutritionally complete plant-based food asks a much better question than whether we can make animal exploitation slightly more sustainable.

It asks why another animal should have to die for dinner at all.

Subscribe now

Share

Not salads and side dishes.

The menus include overnight oats, hazelnut pancakes, chickpea sandwiches, vegetable quiche, lentil risotto, chickpea curry, soy-based desserts and carrot banana cake. Across the week, they provide 90 to 97 grams of protein per day.

Every meal also met the researchers’ threshold for protein quality, with all essential amino acid scores above the adult reference pattern.

And the price?

Between €10.50 and €12.30 per patient per day. The researchers found the menus could remain within hospital food budgets, with plant protein sources generally costing less than animal-derived alternatives.

There are caveats.

None of the 7 menus met the recommended calcium intake, and only one reached the target for vitamin B12. The researchers say fortified foods or supplementation may therefore be necessary. The inclusion of oat milk or a soya yogurt could make the difference.

They also did not test the meals on patients. Taste testing was carried out by the expert team, so real-world patient acceptance and actual food intake remain unknown.

Those are problems to solve. They are not evidence that hospitals need animals on the menu. In fact, the study demonstrates something much more useful: clinicians, dietitians and chefs can deliberately design plant-based hospital food around protein, amino acids, portion size, taste and cost.

The researchers frame this as a way for hospitals to adjust the ratio between animal and plant protein.

We ask if we can feed patients without using animals, why are animals still being treated as ingredients in the first place?

We created a petition calling on British hospitals to remove processed meat from patient menus.

Add your name here.

Subscribe now

Share

This should not be revolutionary. Beans contain protein. Lentils contain protein. Chickpeas contain protein. But we have somehow built a food culture where animal products are treated as the serious sources of protein and plants are the alternative.

The new School Food Standards at least begin pushing against that idea. The rules will retain the requirement for a portion of meat, poultry or pulses on three or more days each week, while at least one vegetarian main option must contain pulses on three days. Baked beans are also being added to the protein food group. And the government’s own consultation response gives the reasons. Respondents highlighted pulses as sources of protein, fibre and micronutrients, alongside their lower environmental impact compared with meat. The Department for Education says the changes are intended to support a wider range of protein sources and increase the use of pulses.

We recently looked at the same mythology from another angle in Tofu Is Better Protein Than Beef. Researchers comparing 20 high-protein foods across health and environmental measures found that every food in the top 20% was plant-based, including tofu and beans.

The changes go beyond pulses.

Deep-fried food will no longer be permitted. Cheese, which has a habit of becoming the default vegetarian option whenever anyone runs out of imagination, will generally be limited to two portions a week as a main ingredient. Fortified pea drinks will join permitted soya and oat drinks, while houmous and suitable plant-based yoghurts will be allowed as snacks.

Of the 5,216 responses to the consultation, 2,273 came through a Plant-Based Schools campaign calling for greater access to plant-rich meals. The government explicitly says plant-based options have subsequently been incorporated throughout the revised standards.

None of this creates vegan schools.

Children will still be served animals. Meat, fish, eggs and dairy remain embedded throughout the standards. This is a nutritional reform, not an animal-rights policy. But school meals do more than fill a tray. They teach children what ordinary food looks like.

We have already seen polling showing support for plant-based school meals in the USA, while research suggests the food environments surrounding people can make reducing animal products easier or harder. If children routinely eat beans, lentils and chickpeas at school, those foods stop being the strange alternative. They become lunch.

Subscribe now

Share

A new systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Nutrition analysed 8 prospective cohort studies involving 143,380 people and 20,665 cases of hypertension. People eating the most nuts had a 16% lower risk of developing hypertension compared with those eating the least.

But the dose-response analysis was even more interesting.

Eating 28g of nuts per day, roughly one handful, was associated with a 20% lower risk. At around 30 to 35g a day, the reduction reached 26%, then the curve began to flatten, suggesting you don’t need to eat mountains of almonds to see the association.

More than 1.4 billion people worldwide have high blood pressure. It increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney failure, and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease.

So why might nuts help?

They’re rich in unsaturated fats, protein, fibre, vitamins, minerals and compounds including polyphenols and phytosterols. The researchers point to several possible mechanisms, including improved blood vessel function, L-arginine increasing nitric oxide production, fibre feeding gut bacteria that produce beneficial short-chain fatty acids, and anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects.

This also isn’t happening in isolation.

Research cited in the paper has found lower blood pressure or hypertension risk in dietary patterns rich in plant foods, including plant-based diets, alongside diets containing plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and nuts. This was observational research, so the authors cannot simply prove that nuts caused the reduction. But after assessing the wider evidence using World Cancer Research Fund criteria, they rated the likelihood of causality as probable. Sometimes healthier eating really can be that uncomplicated.

A handful of nuts.

Every day.

Subscribe now

Share

A new modelling study published in Earth’s Future found that the lowest-income 10% in parts of sub-Saharan Africa could be spending around half their income on food. In Southern Africa, the median projected food burden reaches 49.6% for the poorest 10%, compared with just 5.5% for the richest 10%. Western and Eastern Africa reach 48.4% and 42.5% respectively. These are not predictions of one inevitable future. The researchers tested thousands of scenarios involving income, population, land use, agricultural productivity, trade, energy and consumer behaviour. The point is to show which conditions could make food insecurity better or worse.

And one thing should be impossible to ignore. We are already wasting enormous quantities of food by feeding crops to animals. As we have previously reported, 766 million tonnes of grain suitable for human consumption are fed to farmed animals every year. For every 100 calories of edible grain fed to animals, only around three to twenty-five calories come back as animal products.

We keep being told the answer to food insecurity is to produce more. More crops. More technology. More intensification. But if a pipe were leaking most of its water before it reached the tap, the obvious answer would not be to pump more water through it. Unless, of course, you’re Thames Water. You fix the leak. Animal farming is a colossal leak in the global food system. We grow edible crops, feed them to billions of sentient animals, then kill those animals to recover only a fraction of the calories we started with. If some of the world’s poorest people could be spending half their income on food by 2050, continuing to funnel edible crops through animals is not just inefficient.

It is indefensible.

Subscribe now

Share

By the 19th of September, South Australia had recorded 313 confirmed H5 bird flu events, with new detections involving greater crested terns, a fluttering shearwater, a little penguin, a Pacific gull and an Australian raven. An “event” can involve more than one animal, so even that figure does not represent an individual death toll.

Across Australia, there were already 576 confirmed H5 events in wildlife by the 17th of September. This is not just about chickens anymore. It never was.

Wildlife Could Take a Huge Hit

Attention is now turning to places such as the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales, internationally recognised wetlands supporting tens of thousands of waterbirds, including threatened species. H5 had not reached the marshes when ABC reported from the area on the 14th of September, but conservationists were already preparing for what could happen if it does.

Waterbirds gather together in enormous numbers. That makes wetlands particularly dangerous environments once a highly contagious virus arrives.

University of New South Wales conservation biologist Richard Kingsford warned that bird flu can sometimes kill half of a population. As wetlands dry and birds become concentrated into smaller areas, opportunities for transmission increase further. Imagine losing half a population. Animals who were simply trying to migrate, breed, feed and survive.

We Have Been Watching This Happen

None of this should feel like a bolt from the blue. Herbivore Club has been following bird flu precisely because the boundaries keep disappearing.

In 2025, we reported how a Nevada farm worker contracted bird flu after exposure to infected dairy cows in Bird Flu Confirmed In Nevada.

We reported the death of a three-year-old girl from bird flu in Mexico in From Farm to Family: Bird Flu Kills a Child, and the dozens of confirmed human infections already being recorded in the United States in Bird Flu Is Spreading - And the USA Is Failing to Track It.

Then there were companion animals.

In Feeding Cats Raw Meat? You Might Be Feeding Them Bird Flu, we covered cats infected after being fed raw chicken flesh contaminated with H5N1. Some were subsequently euthanised.

Again and again, the same boundary collapses. Birds. Cows. Cats. Humans. Seals. Sea lions. And now another expanding list of wild species in Australia.

And Yes, Animal Farming Is Part of This Story

There have currently been no H5 detections in Australian poultry or other farmed animals, according to Australian authorities. The present Australian outbreak is overwhelmingly a wildlife crisis. But pretending animal farming has nothing to do with the wider bird flu problem would require ignoring everything we have already watched happen elsewhere.

In Another Pandemic in the Making, we covered H5N9 appearing on a Californian duck farm, where nearly 119,000 birds were killed following the outbreak. Dense populations of animals bred for human use do not become irrelevant simply because this particular outbreak is currently tearing through wild populations. They are part of the same world. Viruses do not recognise the conceptual boxes humans create around “wildlife”, “food animals”, “companion animals” and ourselves.

Wild Animals Keep Paying

Earlier this year, we wrote in Antarctic Species Face Extinction about animals already struggling against collapsing sea ice, warming oceans and disappearing food sources, with bird flu adding yet another threat. Now Australia is watching the virus spread through terns, gulls, penguins, pelicans and marine mammals. Different continent. Same warning. We cannot prevent every mutation. We cannot stop every wild bird migrating. We cannot put the planet inside a biosecurity shed. But we can question why humans continue breeding vast numbers of susceptible animals into systems designed around extraction, killing and consumption.

Animals, ecosystems and diseases are deeply connected, while humans continue behaving as though our exploitation of one can somehow be separated from the suffering of all the others. Viruses evolve naturally. They always have, and they always will. But animal farming supercharges that process. Industrial farms are packed with genetically uniform animals, confined in filthy, crowded sheds where disease spreads like wildfire, the perfect conditions for deadly viruses to mutate, spread, and potentially make the jump to humans. Bird flu is not just a problem for birds. Every single person who buys flesh, fur, down, or an egg-laden pastry is casting a vote for this to continue.

Subscribe now

Share

A new peer-reviewed review published in Physiological Research has examined the safety of cultivated meat alongside conventional meat, including one of the most persistent attacks on the technology: the claim that cultivated meat is effectively made from cancer cells. The review was written by researchers connected to cultivated meat company Bene Meat Technologies. 3 of the 4 authors work in the company’s research and development team, while the fourth is a scientific adviser to the company. That conflict of interest is declared, and the authors state that the review received no funding. The researchers directly address the use of immortalised cell lines. Their argument is simple: immortalisation is not the same thing as malignancy. Cells used to produce cultivated meat may be selected or modified so they can continue dividing for long periods in controlled conditions. According to the review, comparing that process with cancer is scientifically misleading. The researchers point to immortalised HEK293 and CHO cell lines that have already been used for decades in biopharmaceutical production. They also note that harvested cultivated cells are subsequently inactivated, while cooking breaks cellular material down into proteins, fats and nucleic acids.

There are legitimate questions to ask about cultivated meat.

The review itself discusses microbial contamination, genetic modification, residues from cultivation media, allergens and nutritional composition. Cultivated meat should be subjected to rigorous safety testing before people eat it. But “CANCER CELLS!” is not rigorous analysis. Especially when we look at what already happens in slaughterhouses.

Tumours are already arriving at slaughterhouses

In 2014, the UK Government published figures showing what Food Standards Agency inspectors had found during post-mortem inspections.

Among poultry, 380,892 instances of tumours had been identified since April 2012 and prevented from entering the food chain. Inspectors had also identified millions of cases involving contamination, cellulitis, ascites, peritonitis, septicaemia and other conditions. Among animals classified by the industry as “red meat animals”, inspectors recorded 1,490 animals with tumours, alongside hundreds of thousands of abscesses and nearly 28,000 cases of tuberculosis during the period reported.

A systematic review published in 2023 examined 1,873 reported spontaneous neoplasms in cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, including carcinomas, melanomas and other tumours. Cattle accounted for 1,308 of the reported cases.

Chickens are not exempt either. Marek’s disease, a contagious herpesvirus disease found in chickens, can cause T-cell lymphomas. And the UK Government itself warns that cattle infected with enzootic bovine leukosis can develop tumours throughout their bodies. Internal tumours may only become visible after the animal has been killed and butchered, which is why slaughterhouse workers are instructed to look for them. The tumour may only be discovered once the animal has already been killed and cut open.

And the rest of the body can still become food

US regulations make the reality even clearer. If an individual organ or part of a carcass contains a neoplasm, that part must be condemned. If the cancer has metastasised, or the animal’s general condition has been affected, the entire carcass must be condemned. But where the tumour is localised, the rules allow the affected part to be removed while the remainder can still be passed for human consumption.

USDA guidance for poultry is even more explicit: tumours can be trimmed from an affected organ or other part of a carcass, and if there is no evidence of metastasis or wider effects, inspectors can pass the trimmed carcass as human food.

So no conventional meat comes from some magical population of pristine, cancer-proof animals. People already eat flesh from bodies in which tumours can occur. The slaughter system simply attempts to identify diseased tissue, cut away what regulations say cannot be sold, and send the remainder into the food chain. Suddenly being horrified by abnormal cells when nobody had to be bred, confined and killed to produce the flesh is a strange place to draw the line.

Cultivated meat should face proper scrutiny. So should conventional meat.

And if the thought of eating flesh grown from cells bothers you, there remains an extraordinarily simple alternative.

Eat plants.

Subscribe now

Share

During the first half of 2026, compared with the same period in 2025, combined unit sales of beans, pulses, tofu and tempeh increased by 7.3%. Dried beans, peas and lentils jumped 16.7%. Tofu rose 7.2%. Tempeh exploded by 71.5%. Meanwhile, plant-based products specifically designed to imitate meat fell 4.3% by units sold.

For years, headlines about the supposed decline of plant-based food have often focused on companies selling expensive burgers, sausages and nuggets. But falling sales of one type of plant-based product do not mean people are suddenly abandoning plants. They may simply be buying different ones. And the shift goes beyond bags of lentils. Meat-free products based on vegetables and pulses increased 24.6%, while mycoprotein products such as Quorn increased 2.4%. The figures are evidence that the plant-based market is rebalancing rather than collapsing. Perhaps we should not be surprised. People do not need a £4 imitation steak to stop eating cows. They need food.

Beans are food. Lentils are food. Tofu is food. And tofu is hardly some nutritionally inferior substitute. As we reported recently, researchers comparing 20 protein sources across nutrition, affordability and environmental impact placed tofu first overall. Beef was near the bottom. None of this proves that Britain has suddenly stopped exploiting animals. These sales figures do not tell us whether purchases of animal products have fallen alongside them. But they do expose a basic mistake. Plant-based eating is not a product category invented by Beyond Meat. Humans have been eating beans, lentils and tofu for centuries.

If people are buying fewer imitation burgers but more actual plants, plant-based eating is not disappearing.

It might simply be growing up.

Subscribe now

Share

It is probably one of the most common medical excuse for eating animals.

There is just one problem.

Anaemia does not create a medical requirement to eat animals.

Anaemia means there is not enough haemoglobin, or not enough healthy red blood cells carrying it. Iron deficiency is one possible cause, but so are deficiencies of B12 or folate, blood loss, inflammation, chronic disease, pregnancy and several other conditions.

The World Health Organization specifically warns against treating “anaemia” and “iron-deficiency anaemia” as though they mean the same thing. At no point does an animal become an essential nutrient.

People Eating Plant-Based Can Get Plenty of Iron

Iron is not an animal product.

Beans, lentils, peas, nuts, vegetables, wholemeal foods and fortified cereals can all provide iron. The NHS explicitly lists pulses, wholemeal bread and flour, fortified breakfast cereals, dark leafy vegetables, nuts and dried fruit as good iron sources for people eating fully plant-based. But there is an even more interesting piece of evidence.

The British EPIC-Oxford study looked at more than 65,000 people, including 2,596 vegans, alongside meat eaters, fish eaters and vegetarians.

Who consumed the most iron?

The vegans.

The fully plant-based group had the highest average iron intake of all four dietary groups. And this was not some one-off anomaly. A later EPIC-Oxford analysis again found that vegans had the highest iron intake, alongside the highest intakes of fibre, vitamin C, vitamin E, folate, magnesium and copper.

So the idea that somebody has to eat animals because they “need iron” falls apart rather quickly.

They need iron.

Plants contain iron.

“But Plant Iron Isn’t Absorbed As Well”

Plant foods contain non-haem iron. Animal flesh contains haem iron as well as non-haem iron. Non-haem iron is more affected by the rest of what you eat. Vitamin C improves its absorption, while tea and coffee consumed around meals can reduce it.

The NHS therefore recommends eating vitamin-C-rich foods alongside iron-rich plant foods and avoiding tea or coffee during or after main meals.

Lentils with tomatoes.

Beans with peppers.

Tofu with broccoli.

Fortified cereal with fruit.

This isn’t some impossible nutritional balancing act. It is lunch.

It’s also why so many traditional meals around the world combine legumes and grains for protein and minerals, and vegetables for vitamins. In the modern world we have somehow created a standard where learning one basic fact about nutrition is treated as evidence that plant-based eating is dangerously complicated. Meanwhile, someone can eat animals, know absolutely nothing about nutrition, develop iron deficiency anyway, and nobody declares their entire diet medically impossible.

People Who Eat Animals Get Anaemia Too

Of course they do.

The NHS lists heavy periods and pregnancy as very common causes of iron-deficiency anaemia. Bleeding from the stomach or intestines can also cause it, including bleeding associated with ulcers, bowel inflammation, some medicines and gastrointestinal cancers.

WHO goes further, listing nutritional deficiencies, infections, inflammation, chronic disease, gynaecological and obstetric conditions and inherited red-blood-cell disorders among the possible causes of anaemia.

You can eat animal flesh every day and still become iron deficient if you are losing iron faster than you replace it.

So if someone is anaemic, the useful question is:

Why are they anaemic?

Not:

When did they last eat a cow?

Everybody Needs B12

B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia.

But let’s stop talking about B12 as though it is some special vegan requirement.

Everybody needs a reliable source of B12.

B12 is produced by microorganisms, not magically manufactured by cows, pigs or chickens. In animal agriculture, supplementation is already part of the system. Vitamin B12 is widely used in feed for animals including pigs, poultry and calves. Ruminants such as cows and sheep can instead rely on microorganisms in their rumen to produce B12, but those microorganisms need sufficient cobalt, which can itself be supplied through supplemented feed.

So there are two basic options.

We can obtain B12 directly through fortified foods or a supplement.

Or we can feed B12, or the ingredients needed to make it, to another animal and then obtain some of that B12 by eating their body or secretions.

Why is the second route supposedly more “natural”?

People eating fully plant-based simply cut out the middle animal. Again, notice what the human body actually requires.

B12. Not beef. Not milk. Not eggs. B12.

Taking the nutrient directly is not evidence that plant-based eating is nutritionally inadequate. It is evidence that we understand nutrition well enough to obtain the nutrient without exploiting an animal.

Anaemia Is a Reason to Investigate Anaemia

WHO describes anaemia as an indicator of an underlying health or nutritional problem and says treatment depends on its cause. That is the medically relevant point. If someone has iron-deficiency anaemia because they are not consuming enough iron, increase their iron. If they need supplementation, supplement it. If they have B12 deficiency, correct their B12. If they are losing blood, find out why.

What you should not do is turn a medical condition with numerous possible causes into evidence that humans biologically require animal products. Especially when one of Britain’s largest dietary studies found that the people eating no animal products whatsoever consumed the most iron. Anaemia is a reason to find the cause and treat it. It is not a reason to eat an animal.

Subscribe now

Share

A new survey of 1,102 US men found that just 20% knew milk and other dairy products had been associated with increased prostate cancer risk. Only 20% had ever received information from a healthcare professional about the relationship between nutrition and prostate cancer. When men were actually told about the association, 66% said they would be likely to avoid dairy products. People cannot make informed choices about what they eat if nobody tells them what the evidence says. And the evidence cited by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is not based on one isolated study.

A meta-analysis of 32 studies found evidence linking higher dairy consumption with increased prostate cancer risk. One study found that consuming at least one serving of skimmed or low-fat milk each day was associated with a 19% higher risk compared with rarely drinking it. Another study followed 3,612 men for between eight and ten years. Those consuming the most low-fat dairy, around three servings per day, were more than twice as likely to develop prostate cancer as those consuming less than one serving per day. The concern does not end with diagnosis. A meta-analysis involving more than 700,000 participants found that men consuming the most whole milk had a risk of death from prostate cancer as much as 50% higher than those consuming the least. Meanwhile, plant-based eating patterns have been associated with substantially better outcomes. The Adventist Health Study-2 found that men following a vegan diet had a 35% lower risk of prostate cancer compared with men following several other dietary patterns. Among more than 2,000 men already diagnosed with prostate cancer, those eating the most plant-based foods had a 56% lower risk of progression and a 59% lower risk of recurrence compared with those eating the fewest.

So why are men not being told?

More than three-quarters of those surveyed supported warning labels on dairy products informing consumers about prostate cancer risk. If a food is repeatedly associated with increased cancer risk, people deserve to know before they buy it. Especially when so many say that information would change what they choose to eat.

TAKE ACTION

If people deserve clear warnings about foods linked to cancer risk, processed meat should not get a free pass either.

Processed meat is classified by the World Health Organization as a Group 1 carcinogen, yet there is still no cancer warning on the packet. Our petition is calling on the UK Government to require clear cancer warnings on processed meat products so people can make informed choices.

SIGN THE PETITION: PUT CANCER WARNINGS ON PROCESSED MEAT

Subscribe now

Share

Eating more fruit and vegetables could make you look more attractive, smell better and potentially help you achieve your desired body shape. Yes, really.

A scientific review has pulled together more than 30 studies looking at the relationship between food and physical attractiveness. And while it absolutely does not prove that every vegan is hotter than every meat-eater, the evidence suggests that what you put on your plate can change how other people perceive you. Sometimes within weeks.

Researchers David Goldman and Matthew Nagra looked at 3 major ingredients of human attractiveness: our faces, our body odour and our body composition.

The face evidence is particularly striking.

Fruit and vegetables contain carotenoids, the natural yellow, orange and red pigments found in foods such as carrots, tomatoes and leafy greens.

When we eat them, those pigments can accumulate in our skin. And apparently humans are into that. In experiments where researchers altered photographs of faces, people repeatedly preferred skin with stronger carotenoid colouring.

In one series of studies, carotenoid-enhanced faces beat the alternatives in 75.9% of comparisons. Researchers have also watched people’s skin actually change after they started eating more fruit and vegetables.

One six-week study found that increased consumption changed both skin yellowness and redness. Researchers calculated that eating around 2.9 extra portions of fruit and vegetables per day was enough to make people look healthier. Around 3.3 extra portions was enough to produce a change judged more attractive.

In other words, your mother telling you to eat your vegetables may have undersold the benefits.

Then we get to sweat.

In one controlled experiment, 17 men ate either a meat-rich diet or a non-meat diet for 2 weeks. Women then smelled samples of their armpit odour.

The sweat produced while the men were eating the non-meat diet was rated as more attractive, more pleasant and less intense. Another study found that men whose diets were associated with higher fruit and vegetable intake produced sweat described as more floral, fruity and sweet. Lower fruit and vegetable intake was associated with smells described as animal-like, meaty and oily.

And then there is garlic. Garlic is treated as the food most likely to destroy your chances of romance. It may deserve an apology. Experiments found that men eating larger amounts of garlic produced body odour that women rated as more attractive, more pleasant and less intense. Researchers suggested garlic’s antioxidant and antibacterial properties might alter the compounds and microbes responsible for body odour.

There is, admittedly, a limit to how confidently we can declare garlic an aphrodisiac for your armpits. The evidence comes from one publication containing 3 experiments, and the review authors themselves say more research is needed.

Then comes body shape.

Plant-based eating patterns have been associated with lower BMI and greater reductions in body fat compared with omnivorous diets, while separate research has found that body fat influences attractiveness ratings.

But this is where we need a cold shower.

Nobody has yet shown directly that switching to a plant-based diet changes someone’s body composition and therefore causes other people to rate them as more attractive. The researchers themselves call that connection indirect. And some attractiveness findings are downright uncomfortable. Research cited in the review found that the body-fat level rated most attractive for women could fall below the physiologically healthy range. So turning this into “lose weight and become hotter” would not just be scientifically sloppy. It could be harmful.

The researchers instead think the more interesting opportunity lies in visible changes such as skin glow up.

Because public health has a problem.

“Eat more vegetables because it might reduce your disease risk in 30 years” is sensible advice. It is not necessarily exciting advice.

“Eat more vegetables and you might look better in a few weeks” has rather more immediate appeal to our short term brains. And there is evidence that vanity works. In one randomised trial, people shown personalised images of how eating more fruit and vegetables could change their appearance significantly increased their intake for 10 weeks.

People given ordinary information did not. Another study involving 802 people found that 57% were motivated after seeing a demonstration of diet-related skin colour changes.

This research mostly concerns plant-forward diets, meaning diets rich in plant foods that may still contain some animal products. It is also a narrative review rather than a systematic review, and the authors acknowledge a risk that the studies selected could favour their hypothesis. But the basic finding is difficult to ignore. Eat more plants and your skin can change. Your smell can change. People may notice.

Perhaps vegetables just needed the marketing budget that animal flesh has.

Subscribe now

Share

Vegans have heard it approximately seventeen billion times. The assumption behind the question is usually obvious: animal products are the serious protein sources, while tofu, beans and lentils are somehow nutritional consolation prizes.

A paper published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems makes that assumption look increasingly ridiculous.

Researchers introduced the BPI Score, a system designed to compare 20 high-protein foods across more than nutrition alone. Instead, it asks a much more useful question: which protein sources actually perform best when we consider their impact on people and the planet?

The answer was tofu.

Protein Is More Than Protein

The BPI Score divides its assessment into two categories.

The Planet Score looks at greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, land use and freshwater use. The People Score considers sodium, saturated fat, cholesterol, whether the food contains all nine essential amino acids, affordability and availability.

Tofu scored 36 points, the highest overall. Cheddar cheese came last with just 13. And this was not some freak tofu victory. Every protein source in the top 20% was plant-based: tofu, chia seeds, beans and quinoa. Every protein source in the bottom 20% was animal-based: mozzarella, lamb, beef and cheddar.

So much for plants being the inferior option. Tofu also destroys one of the favourite nutritional objections. It contains all 9 essential amino acids and therefore qualifies as a complete protein. Meanwhile, every plant protein examined contained zero cholesterol.

Then there is the environmental cost.

Producing 100g of protein from tofu required just 2.16 square metres of land, compared with 211.38 square metres for beef. The paper also reports 0.61kg of greenhouse gas emissions for tofu compared with 64.19kg for beef.

And Animals Were Not Even Included in the Score

Perhaps the most striking part is what the scoring system leaves out. The researchers acknowledge that ethical considerations were not included in this first version. They argue that including them would likely widen the divide between plant and animal proteins. Because protein does not magically appear as a steak, cheese slice or chicken breast. There is someone on the other side of that product.

So when tofu beats animal products on environmental impact, performs strongly on health, remains accessible, and provides complete protein, what exactly is left of the argument that we need to exploit and kill animals for protein?

We don’t. We simply have better choices.

Subscribe now

Share

End of discussion.

Except science has an inconvenient habit of carrying on after internet arguments have declared a subject settled. A new review of 31 studies has found that nutritionally sound vegan and vegetarian plantbased foods are generally well digested by both dogs and cats, with digestibility broadly comparable to conventional meat-based foods. That does not mean every homemade bowl of lentils is suddenly appropriate for every cat. It does mean one of the most confidently repeated objections to plant-based companion animal food is looking increasingly shaky.

Dogs And Cats Can Digest Plant Proteins

Andrew Knight, a veterinary professor affiliated with several universities, reviewed research examining complete meat-free diets as well as individual plant and fermentation-derived ingredients. Of the 31 studies included, 22 were specific to dogs, two to cats and seven applicable to both species.

Across the 5 studies measuring apparent total tract digestibility of complete vegan or vegetarian diets, digestibility exceeded 80% for dry matter, 85% for organic matter, 80% for crude protein, 89% for fat, 88% for nitrogen-free extract and 86% for energy. Researchers also found dogs and cats could digest proteins derived from soy, other legumes, pulses, grains and microbial fermentation. Were plant ingredients always more digestible than animal ingredients? No.

Sometimes they performed better. Sometimes animal ingredients did. Sometimes there was no significant difference at all. But that is rather different from the claim that dogs and cats cannot properly digest plant protein. Even where individual plant proteins showed lower digestibility for particular nutrients, overall digestibility generally remained high.

One study comparing two vegan dog foods with a chicken-based food found all three highly digestible. Fat digestibility was actually slightly higher in both plant-based foods, while organic matter digestibility was slightly higher in the chicken food. There were no significant differences in dry matter, crude protein or energy digestibility.

Another real-world trial involved 61 companion dogs eating either a plant-based kibble or chicken-based kibble for 12 weeks. Digestibility exceeded 80% for dry matter, 85% for protein and 97% for fat in both groups, with no significant differences between them.

Not exactly the digestive catastrophe we are frequently warned about.

Nutrients Matter More Than Marketing Categories

There is an important distinction. Digestibility is not nutritional completeness. The review itself stresses this. Vitamins, minerals and other nutrients have to be considered separately, and the research focused largely on macronutrients rather than micronutrients. That is why the conclusion is not “feed your cat whatever plants happen to be in the fridge”. It is that nutritionally sound, properly formulated plant-based foods can be well digested. But notice how strangely one-sided this conversation often becomes. Plant-based companion animal foods are expected to prove themselves nutrient by nutrient before some people will even entertain the possibility that they can work. Conventional foods, meanwhile, frequently receive the benefit of the doubt simply because they contain animal flesh. The scientific question is not whether an ingredient sounds suitably carnivorous to us. It is whether the finished food supplies what the animal requires in a form they can use. And the evidence reviewed here challenges the assumption that plant ingredients inherently fail that test.

There are still gaps. Most of the research concerns adult dogs, not puppies, kittens, senior animals or individuals with impaired digestive function. Cat-specific evidence is particularly limited, and more in-home research would be valuable. The review was also not systematic, something the author explicitly acknowledges. Those are reasons for more research. They are not evidence that the existing research says the opposite of what it actually says.

Then There Are The Animals Being Fed To Them

This conversation becomes much bigger once we stop looking only at the animal standing beside the food bowl.

Dogs and cats are estimated to consume around 9% of farmed animals used for food globally, rising to around 20% in the United States. And the environmental cost is substantial.

A separate study examined 31 commercially available dry dog foods in the UK, comparing plant-based, poultry-based, red-meat-based and veterinary renal foods. Plant-based foods had the lowest environmental impact across every category assessed. For every 1,000 calories of food, beef-based diets were estimated to require 102.15 square metres of land. Plant-based diets required 2.73. Beef-based foods produced an estimated 31.47 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per 1,000 calories. Plant-based foods produced 2.82.

Another review found that ingredients themselves account for around 70% of companion animal food’s carbon impact. Packaging and transport are not the main story here. What goes into the food is. And then there is the comforting idea that conventional companion animal foods merely make use of slaughterhouse “waste”. The environmental review challenges that too. Animal byproducts are commodities with economic value. Other industries buy them. In the figures cited by the researchers, such materials generate around 11% of beef revenue and 7.5% of pork revenue. Calling them waste makes their economic role disappear.

Some lower-quality animal ingredients may also require more animal bodies to provide equivalent nutrition. Estimates cited in the review suggest around 1.4 times more carcasses may be required for dogs and 1.9 times more for cats compared with higher-quality animal flesh. So the ethical question cannot simply be: Is my dog okay?

What about the chickens?

The cows?

The pigs?

The fishes?

Their interests do not disappear because their bodies arrive ground up inside a bag with a smiling Labrador printed on it.

The Debate Has Moved On

None of this proves that every plant-based product is nutritionally sound. It certainly does not prove that every plant-based food is suitable for every dog or cat. But that was never the serious claim. The relevant question is whether appropriately formulated plant-based foods certified by veterinarians can meet companion animals’ needs.

The evidence increasingly suggests they can, particularly for dogs, while the research base for cats continues to develop. At the same time, the environmental advantage appears enormous. We can keep repeating that dogs and cats “need meat” as though saying it confidently enough settles the issue. Or we can ask the more useful question. What nutrients do they actually need, and can we provide those nutrients without breeding and killing billions of other animals to do it?

Increasingly, science is giving us an answer worth listening to.

Subscribe now

Share

Hot flushes. Weight gain. Rising blood pressure. Increasing cardiovascular risk. A collection of symptoms and health problems presented as an unavoidable consequence of ageing. But growing evidence suggests diet may have a surprisingly large influence on several of these problems at once.

One long-term study has found that postmenopausal women whose diets most closely resembled a plant-forward Planetary Health Diet had around a 28% lower risk of cardiovascular disease than women whose diets were furthest from it. Another clinical trial found that a low-fat plant-based diet containing soy reduced moderate-to-severe hot flushes by 88%, while women also lost weight. And a major analysis involving more than 309,000 people has linked eating more legumes and soy with substantially lower rates of high blood pressure. These are different studies examining different outcomes. But they keep pointing in the same direction.

More beans. More lentils. More soy. More whole plant foods. Fewer animal products.

Heart Disease Risk Falls After Menopause

Cardiovascular disease becomes increasingly important as women age, with risk tending to rise after menopause. Researchers examining data from the Women’s Health Initiative followed 66,892 women for around 20 years. The women were approximately 63 years old when they entered the study and none had cardiovascular disease at the beginning. Researchers compared their diets using the Planetary Health Diet Index. The dietary pattern emphasises fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and unsaturated fats while limiting animal products, refined grains, added sugars and saturated fats. Women with the highest adherence had approximately 28% less cardiovascular disease than those with the lowest adherence. They also had lower rates of coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure. Importantly, this was not an all-or-nothing effect. Each 10-point improvement in the diet score was associated with further reductions in risk. Dietary discussions are frequently sabotaged by the idea that unless somebody completely transforms everything they eat overnight, there is little point changing anything. The evidence suggests otherwise. Eating more plants appears beneficial even before somebody reaches the most plant-rich end of the spectrum.

This study was observational, so it cannot prove that diet directly caused the difference. Researchers did, however, adjust their analysis for factors including age, smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, body mass index, income and calorie intake. And this is far from the only research pointing towards cardiovascular benefits from plant-based eating.

Protein Is Not Just Protein

Another study looked specifically at postmenopausal women and challenged another remarkably persistent nutrition myth: that protein is basically interchangeable regardless of where it comes from. Researchers followed 84 postmenopausal women over 12 weeks. One group ate a low-fat plant-based diet supplemented with soybeans while the control group continued eating an omnivorous diet. Among women eating plant-based, animal protein intake fell by 23.3 grams per day while plant protein increased by 22.1 grams.

Total protein barely changed.

Their body weight did.

The shift from animal to plant protein was associated with significant weight loss, independent of calorie intake. Researchers calculated that replacing roughly 16 grams of animal protein with around 13 grams of plant protein corresponded with approximately one kilogram of weight loss. One possible explanation involves methionine, an amino acid found at higher concentrations in many animal products. Lower methionine intake was significantly associated with reductions in BMI, although researchers stress that the mechanisms involved still require investigation. The more immediate point is much simpler. Women did not need more protein. Changing where their protein came from was associated with a measurable difference.

Soy And Hot Flushes

In the wider clinical trial, moderate-to-severe hot flushes fell by an extraordinary 88% among women eating the low-fat plant-based diet with daily soybeans. Women also lost an average of eight pounds over 12 weeks. Soy isoflavones are thought to play a role because they have previously been shown to reduce vasomotor symptoms.

Public understanding remains poor.

A poll by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine found that only 43% of women knew diet could influence the number and intensity of hot flushes. This is despite around three-quarters of women experiencing hot flushes during menopause. Some respondents even believed women going through menopause should avoid soy. The evidence presented here suggests almost the opposite. Soy may be one of the foods women should be hearing considerably more about. And no, the benefits apparently disappear the moment somebody drinks soya milk or eats a plant-based burger.

Further analysis of the clinical trial found benefits even when diets included plant-based foods classified as ultra-processed. Nutrition is considerably more complicated than the increasingly fashionable claim that everything labelled “ultra-processed” belongs in one giant nutritional dustbin.

Beans Could Protect Blood Pressure Too

Legumes may also help tackle another major cardiovascular risk factor. A meta-analysis of 12 prospective studies involving more than 309,000 participants found that people eating larger quantities of legumes had a 16% lower risk of developing hypertension.

For soy, the reduction was 19%.

The relationship became even more striking when researchers examined quantities. Eating around 170 grams of legumes per day was associated with a 30% reduction in hypertension risk. For soy foods such as tofu, tempeh, edamame and miso, benefits appeared to peak at around 60 to 80 grams per day, corresponding with roughly a 28 to 29% reduction. Researchers rated a causal relationship between both food groups and hypertension as “probable”.

But average legume consumption across Europe and the UK sits at only around 8 to 15 grams per day. We have managed to construct a food culture in which some of the cheapest, most nutritious foods available barely appear on many plates.

Plants Are Not A Miracle Cure

None of this means eating plants makes ageing disappear. Menopause is not a disease. Plant-based eating is not a magical cure for every symptom or health condition. Observational research must not be presented as proof of causation, and individual medical circumstances differ. But neither should we shrug at evidence simply because nutrition cannot promise miracles.

Postmenopausal women face increasing cardiovascular risk. Most experience hot flushes. Weight changes are common. High blood pressure remains a major health problem. And across multiple lines of research, foods such as beans, lentils, chickpeas, peas, tofu, tempeh and other soy foods are associated with better outcomes. Meanwhile, animal products remain so deeply embedded in our idea of a “normal” diet that reducing them is still treated as the unusual option. We have that backwards.

You do not need animals to get protein.

You do not need cows for calcium or chickens for breakfast.

Women should not have to reach menopause before discovering that some of the foods society taught them were essential may be the very foods worth replacing.

Subscribe now

Share

New research has found that industrial chicken farming is accelerating the spread and evolution of campylobacter, the most common bacterial cause of diarrhoea in the world. Campylobacter already causes more than 3 times as many cases of gastroenteritis in the UK each year as all other monitored foodborne bacteria combined. An estimated 60 to 80% of human campylobacter infections are caught from raw chicken. And we are creating increasingly favourable conditions for the bacteria responsible.

We Created This Problem

Before chickens were domesticated around 5,000 years ago, different strains of campylobacter tended to remain associated with individual bird species. Cross-infection was relatively uncommon. Then humans changed the ecosystem. Researchers analysed nearly 2,800 bacterial genomes collected from chickens and wild birds across 30 countries between 1979 and 2024. They estimated that movements of campylobacter strains between chickens and wild birds have increased around 100-fold since 1900 compared with before domestication.

Since the 1960s, the global chicken population has increased seven-fold to around 27 billion birds. Chickens now account for approximately 70% of all bird biomass on Earth. Human demand for chicken flesh has become so enormous that the overwhelming majority of bird biomass on this planet is now made up of one species we selectively breed, confine and kill.

The average person now eats around 6 times more chicken than they did in 1961, and bacteria are taking advantage of the artificial ecosystem we created.

Professor Sam Sheppard, one of the researchers behind the campylobacter study, described chickens as becoming a “cauldron of bacterial evolution”.

When billions of genetically similar birds are continually bred, transported and confined in enormous populations, bacteria have countless opportunities to circulate, encounter different strains and acquire new traits. Apparently turning the planet into one enormous chicken factory has consequences.

Who knew?

Five Weeks From Birth To Death

Modern chicken production is built around speed. Some chickens have been selectively bred to grow so rapidly that they can reach slaughter weight at around 5 weeks old. Their bodies have not evolved to grow like this. Humans deliberately engineered these birds around one economic objective: producing as much flesh as possible, as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Conventional European systems examined in another study could house around 20.7 birds per square metre, with approximately 90,000 chickens housed on a single farm. Disease spreading under those conditions should surprise absolutely nobody. Neither should the industry’s reliance on antibiotics.

The campylobacter researchers identified genetic changes associated with adaptation to chicken farming, including genes linked to antimicrobial resistance. Campylobacter infection occasionally requires antibiotic treatment. As resistance increases, drugs that once worked can become ineffective. The system is therefore capable of creating both the disease risk and conditions that make some infections more difficult to treat.

The Antibiotics Tell Their Own Story

We already have evidence that less intensive production reduces antibiotic use dramatically. Research comparing conventional chickens with slower-growing birds raised under European Chicken Commitment standards found that slower growth and lower stocking densities could reduce antibiotic use by as much as 85%.

In the Netherlands in 2024, 96% of slower-growing flocks received no antibiotics at all, compared with 77% of fast-growing flocks. The enormous antibiotic use associated with intensive farming is not some unavoidable feature of chickens existing. It is connected to how humans breed and confine them.

Slow their growth. Give them more space. Disease pressure falls. Antibiotic use falls. But there is another problem.

Those slower-growing chickens consume more feed and take longer to reach slaughter weight. Producing the same quantity of flesh under European Chicken Commitment standards was associated with greenhouse gas emissions between 6% and 11% higher, depending on the production stage, while land use increased 14% and phosphorus excretion increased 37% per kilogram. So we arrive at the absurd debate animal agriculture creates again and again. Should we breed chickens who suffer more efficiently, or chickens who consume more resources before we kill them? Perhaps there is a third option.

Stop breeding billions of chickens to kill in the first place.

Cheap Chicken Is Not Cheap

The defence of factory farming inevitably comes back to price. We are told intensive farming is necessary because people need affordable food. Except cheap chicken is cheap largely because many of the real costs never appear on the supermarket price label.

A report examining factory farming of pigs and chickens estimated that the system costs UK taxpayers more than £1.2 billion every year. Environmental pollution alone accounted for an estimated £518 million, including £458 million associated with ammonia air pollution and £60 million from river pollution caused by manure. Indirect agricultural subsidies supporting pig and chicken production were estimated at another £269 million. Industrialisation was also estimated to have cost around 14,000 farming jobs compared with a scenario in which the sector had not continued industrialising after 2000.

Then there is public health.

Around two million people in the UK were estimated to live within two kilometres of a megafarm. Higher respiratory disease associated with living near these facilities produced an estimated mortality cost of almost £92 million annually. And even this £1.2 billion estimate did not include antimicrobial resistance, climate change, or healthcare costs associated with excessive meat consumption. Chicken is not cheap. Someone else is simply paying part of the bill. Usually animals, taxpayers, rural communities, ecosystems and future generations.

More Chicken Means More Risk

Global meat supply has risen from around 25kg per person to 47kg over the past 60 years. Chicken consumption has increased particularly dramatically. And this expansion is expected to continue. That means more chickens being bred. More feed being grown. More waste being produced. More enormous sheds. More animals living in conditions where disease can spread. More interactions between industrial chicken populations, bacteria and the wider environment.

Scientists studying campylobacter could hardly have been clearer.

“The scale is what’s bad,” Sheppard said.

But governments continue allowing factory farming to expand while debates about chicken production frequently focus on tinkering with the system.

Give them slightly more space.

Breed them slightly more slowly.

Use fewer antibiotics.

Reduce pollution.

Improve biosecurity.

Every one of those measures may reduce a particular harm. None addresses why we are breeding tens of billions of chickens in the first place.

There is no requirement for humans to consume six times more chicken than previous generations did. This is not an unavoidable natural phenomenon. We created an industrial system based on breeding an unimaginable number of sentient individuals, forcing their bodies to grow at extraordinary speeds and killing them after only weeks of life.

Now we are discovering that turning chickens into biological production units on this scale also creates an extraordinary playground for bacterial evolution. The solution cannot forever be finding increasingly sophisticated ways to manage the consequences of animal exploitation. Sometimes the simplest answer really is the obvious one.

Stop exploiting animals.

Subscribe now

Share