Findings from a new study in PLOS Medicine conducted by researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford University, and the University of Edinburgh indicate that warning label and tax policies effectively reduce purchases of red meat-containing items, such as burger patties, pepperoni pizza, and ham luncheon meat.

Consumption of red meat has gained attention as a nutrition and environmental concern, given its link to harmful climate and health impacts, including high greenhouse gas emissions and increased risk of noncommunicable diseases. The landmark 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission encourages consumers to decrease red meat consumption to improve health and consume a more environmentally friendly diet. Yet, there is limited research assessing how food policies could encourage this decrease in red meat consumption. Warning labels and taxes on processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages have been found to effectively reduce their purchase and consumption, but this study is the first to assess the impact of warning labels and tax policies specifically on red meat-containing products.

Online shopping for red meat

Researchers randomly assigned participants to a control group or to one of three intervention groups: warning labels, tax, or combined (warning labels + tax). A total of 3,518 participants completed an online shopping task where they were instructed to purchase items from a predetermined 9-item shopping list with a $40 budget: 1 pizza, 1 burrito, burger patties (meat or vegetarian), breakfast sausages (meat or vegetarian), 1 frozen individual meal, 1 loaf of bread, 1 sandwich filling (for example, ham, turkey, or peanut butter), 1 pack of tortillas, and 1 taco filling (for example, steak, chicken, or beans). Researchers counted the number of products that contained red meat and proportion of red meat products in the shopping haul.

They found that warning label, tax, and a combination of both interventions all led to reductions in purchases of red meat-containing items: 39% of control group participants purchased red meat items compared to 36% of those who saw warning labels, 34% of those in the tax group, and 31% of those exposed to a combination of the two interventions.

Exposure to the combined intervention of warnings and the tax also resulted in less calories (-312 kcal) and saturated fat (-12.8 g) in participants’ shopping baskets, but not sodium, when compared to the control group.

“These results show that taxes and warning labels on red meat work similarly to sugary drinks and tobacco, helping consumers reduce their purchases of these products,” said first author Lindsey Smith Taillie, PhD, associate professor and associate chair of academics in the Department of Nutrition at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Gillings Global School of Public Health. “Policies like taxes and warning labels to reduce red meat purchases could yield both public health and environmental benefits.”

Key findings:

“Moving forward, it is also important to determine how to encourage a shift away from red meat purchases to more healthy and environmentally friendly products,” said Taillie. “While reducing red meat is important, we also need to understand the environmental and health impacts of the substitutes that consumers are choosing to ensure the shift does indeed lead to improved outcomes.”

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This research was funded by Wellcome Trust and support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH and the NICHD-NRSA Population Research Training grant.

AUTHORS

Lindsey Smith Taillie
Maxime Bercholz
Carmen E. Prestemon
Isabella C. A. Higgins
Anna H. Grummon
Marissa G. Hall
Lindsay M. Jaacks

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MORE RESEARCH ON RED AND PROCESSED MEATS:

Americans consume red meat from a variety of foods, creating opportunities to introduce meat-free substitutions Read more…

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Health, environmental messages boost Meatless Monday campaign Read more…

Messages that emphasize the health and environmental benefits of participating in Meatless Monday are an effective way to encourage people to eat less meat, according to new findings from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Meatless Monday, launched by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2003, is a campaign that encourages people to remove meat from their diets on Mondays to reduce the negative environmental and health impacts of meat consumption in the United States. While studies have shown that many people are aware of and have participated Meatless Monday, this new study is the first to test the perceived effectiveness of the campaign’s messaging.

By comparing subjects’ responses to health and environmentally friendly Meatless Monday campaign messages to control messages about credit scores, nutrition researchers found that the Meatless Monday messaging was more attention-grabbing and positively received, increased negative perceptions of red meat consumption on health and the environment, and effectively reduced the intention to consume red meat products.

“Mass media campaigns are a promising but understudied area for changing meat consumption,” noted Hannah Rayala, BSPH, the study’s first author. “We chose to study whether the campaign had an impact on perceived message effectiveness because this approach has been used to evaluate many other health communication campaigns and is predictive of actual behavioral change.”

“The U.S. is one of the top consumers in the world of meat,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and the Carolina Population Center. “We know that production and consumption of red and processed meat are linked to a wide array of negative environmental and health impacts, and yet there are few population-level interventions available to help increase awareness of these problems and promote shifts to healthier, more sustainable diets. The Meatless Monday campaign has been widely implemented in a variety of settings, including schools, universities and cities, as well as in many countries across the globe, and yet virtually no research has investigated whether the type of messaging used by this campaign is perceived as effective or moves the needle on intentions to change behavior.”

The study, published recently in the American Journal of Public Health, was led by Rayala, a recent graduate of the Gillings School with a Bachelor of Public Health degree in nutrition, under Taillie’s mentorship, with additional guidance from Natalia Rebolledo, PhD, recent doctoral graduate in nutrition. The study also included input from assistant professor Marissa Hall, PhD, from the Department of Health Behavior.

The study evaluated the effectiveness of messaging through a survey of 1,244 U.S. adults who had eaten meat at least once a week in the last 30 days. Participants viewed a random set of four graphics that pertained to control messaging, Meatless Monday health messaging or Meatless Monday environmental messaging. They then answered a series of questions about the messaging related to health concern, environmental concern, discouragement and unpleasantness, which all factored into the overall perceived message effectiveness.

Study participants found the health-focused and environmental-focused messaging nearly equal in effectiveness. Both types of messages were more effective at attracting attention and increasing negative perceptions of meat consumption. They also led participants to think about the health and environmental harms of consuming meat and made them more interested in talking with others about the Meatless Monday campaign.

“These findings are exciting because they suggest that a wide variety of health or environmental messages hold promise for helping American consumers cut back on red meat,” said Rebolledo. “Although our findings will need to be replicated in a behavioral trial, this study provides important evidence that communication campaigns can play an important role in promoting healthier, more sustainable diets in the U.S.”

Rayala said that “the next step for this research would be to evaluate the campaign’s impact on actual behavioral changes, like purchases and intake of red and processed meat.”

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Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.

AUTHORS

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Read the full paper in the American Journal of Public Health:

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Read more about Americans’ red & processed meat consumption

The typical American diet is high in red and processed meat, contributing to health risks and raising concerns for environmental sustainability. A study published this week in Public Health Nutrition used data from national diet surveys to look at which specific types of foods make up the bulk of U.S. red and processed meat intake among adolescents and adults.

The authors found that consumption is not dominated by any single food type. Americans most commonly consume unprocessed red meat in the form of burgers, steaks, and mixed dishes such as meatloaf, lasagna, or shepherd’s pie. For processed meats, the most widely eaten forms were deli cold cuts, sausages and frankfurters, pizza, and bacon.

The authors view this variety of food sources as an opportunity, in terms of efforts to reduce average intake or red and processed meats — currently around 450g per adult each week — towards the recommended limit of 100g per week.

“The ways in which Americans eat meat are quite diverse,” said Sarah Frank, PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill and the study’s lead author. “While meat-centric foods like burgers are popular, we found that a lot of meat is actually consumed in mixed dishes like casseroles. This is exciting for behavior and policy work because it means there are a lot of opportunities to promote healthier, more sustainable, plant-based options into the diet beyond, for example, substitutes for a large cut of meat.”

Dr. Lindsay Jaacks, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Chancellor’s Fellow at the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security, adds: “Unlike dairy, for which more than 50% of intake comes from just one food group (milk), red meat is highly variable. This means there are a lot more opportunities to promote alternatives to red meat. But we need to be careful and closely monitor these alternatives to make sure environmental gains are not traded at the cost of public health.”

The authors note that for adolescents, concern about climate change might provide more inspiration to eat less meat. Adolescents were found to consume most of their meat from burgers and pizzas purchased at fast-food outlets.

This study was funded by the Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health program.

AUTHORS