Petition Promote plant-based foods over meat and dairy for a healthier Britain
To help protect planetary and human health, the Government must promote plant-based foods like fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, and legumes, and end any support for campaigns promoting meat and dairy. We believe the UK needs to eat less, not more, of these foods.
More details
Campaigns encouraging dairy and meat consumption conflict with climate science and legally binding environmental targets. The NHS advises limiting consumption of red and processed meat due to associated health risks. The Climate Change Committee has called for a 20% reduction in dairy consumption in the UK by 2035 and a 35% reduction in meat consumption by 2050. We think public bodies have a duty to inform people of these facts and inspire the population to eat more plant-based foods.
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Government responded
This response was given on 30 May 2025
The government’s guidelines for a healthy diet recommend that the majority of food we eat should be plant-based. However, a healthy balanced diet can include meat and dairy.
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The Eatwell Guide sets out government recommendations for a healthy diet, based on recommendations from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition. This guidance recognises the valuable contribution of plant-based foods and drinks, illustrating that both plant-based products and animal-based products can be part of a healthy balanced diet.
Adherence to the Eatwell Guide has been shown to improve both health and environmental outcomes (Scheelbeek et al., 2020), with appreciably lower environmental impact than the current UK diet (Carbon Trust, 2016). The Eatwell Guide also emphasises that our diets should include plenty of fruit and vegetables and wholegrain or higher fibre foods, and that we should eat more beans and pulses, and less red and processed meats.
We promote healthy eating, including the Eatwell Guide principles, through the NHS.uk website and the government’s social marketing campaigns, Better Health Start for Life and Better Health Families.
Better Health Start for Life provides parents of babies and young children with guidance on a wide range of topics including what to eat when pregnant, breastfeeding and introducing solid foods. Start for Life is designed to help expectant and new parents and carers to establish healthy habits to give their children the best start in life. We deliver this via the Start for Life website, including tools such as Breastfeeding bot, educational campaigns, and the ‘Information Service for Parents’ email programme. The Start for Life website can be viewed here: https://www.nhs.uk/start4life.
Better Health Families aims to help families with primary aged children in England to eat well and move more in support of the Government’s Childhood Obesity Plan. Better Health families uses personalised email programmes, digital and social media, partnership marketing, and other tools as appropriate to the programme’s objectives and the needs of its target audiences. The Better Health Families website can be viewed here: https://www.nhs.uk/healthier-families/.
As well as promoting healthy eating, we are working to make UK agriculture more environmentally sustainable and exploring options to help consumers make informed choices about the environmental impact of the food they buy.
Alongside the upcoming food strategy and farming roadmap we are developing a credible plan to decarbonise food and farming, working closely with stakeholders to design and implement solutions, ensuring the transition to low-carbon food and farming is fair and just for all parties.
Additional, consumers are interested in a wide range of issues including environmental sustainability. It is important that consumers have the information they need to buy products that align with their values.
Eco-labels based on robust environmental impact data are a tool that could support informed consumer choices and business competition through sustainability. Defra has conducted engagement on eco-labelling across the food and drink sector, identifying two fundamental data challenges we need to address to enable robust labelling.
The first is how to accurately quantify product level environmental impacts. The second is the insufficient availability and quality of data used to inform these assessments. Defra has commissioned research (the LED 4 Food project) that will provide recommendations on how to standardise product level environmental footprinting and expand the volume, accessibility and quality of environmental impact data for agri-food products.
The Climate Change Committee’s independent report on Carbon Budget 7 (CB7) provides valuable advice to government and is one of several important sources of evidence government is considering for the setting of CB7. The government will determine its own pathway for CB7, and will ensure that this delivers energy security, protects bill payers, creates good jobs, and helps to protect future generations from the costs of climate breakdown.
We welcome the contribution offered by the CCC’s citizen panel, which reflects public perspectives on how a shift to lower-carbon diets could be made more accessible and affordable for households across the UK.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
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