A multicriteria analysis of meat and milk alternatives from nutritional, health, environmental, and cost perspectives

Abstract

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

Keywords: alternative proteins; healthy and sustainable diets; meat and milk replacements; multicriteria analysis.

Fig. 1.

Per-serving comparison of meat and milk alternatives across nutritional (A), health (B), environmental (C), and cost (D) aspects. The nutritional comparison (A) displays nutritional densities (nutrients per serving as a proportion of daily recommended intake of that nutrient) for nutrients relevant to current nutritional imbalances in high-income countries. The health comparison (B) displays changes in overall disease risk that result from specific changes in the risks for coronary heart disease, stroke, and cancer. The environmental comparison (C) is expressed in relation to a benchmark food, in particular beef in the comparison of meat alternatives and milk in the comparison of milk alternatives, whose environmental impacts were normalized to 100% for the comparison. The cost comparison (D) displays the costs per serving of meat and milk alternatives in US Dollars adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity (PPP) across countries.

Fig. 2.

Nutritional (A), health (B), environmental (C), and cost (D) implications of replacing, per calorie, all meat in diets with meat alternatives and all dairy in diets with milk alternatives. All changes are expressed in comparison to the nutritional, health, environmental, and cost implications of current diets. Changes in nutritional imbalance are expressed in pp.

Fig. 3.

Multicriteria analysis of meat and milk alternatives. The analysis displays the synthesis scores of a food product’s overall performance in replacing meat or dairy per calorie (A) or per serving (B). The score is based on the nutritional, health, environmental, and cost changes of replacing meat and dairy with meat and milk alternatives. It gives equal weight to health, environmental, and cost impacts. The health domain includes the nutritional and mortality analyses with equal weights. The environmental domain includes analyses of changes in GHG emissions, land use, and water use, with weights assigned based on the needed contribution of dietary changes toward staying within food-related environmental limits (or planetary boundaries), which meant assigning a greater weight to changes in GHG emissions (0.65) than changes in land use (0.17) and water use (0.18).