Impact of Health, Environmental, and Animal Welfare Messages Discouraging Red Meat Consumption: An Online Randomized Experiment.

backgroundReducing red meat consumption is a key strategy for curbing diet-related chronic diseases and mitigating environmental harms from livestock farming. Messaging interventions aiming to reduce red meat consumption have focused on communicating the animal welfare, health, or environmental harms of red meat. Despite the popularity of these 3 approaches, it remains unknown which is most effective, as limited studies have compared them side by side.

objectiveOur aim was to evaluate responses to red-meat-reduction messages describing animal welfare, health, or environmental harms.

designThis was an online randomized experiment.

participantsIn August 2021, a convenience sample of US adults was recruited via an online panel to complete a survey (n = 2,773 nonvegetarians and vegans were included in primary analyses).

interventionParticipants were randomly assigned to view 1 of the 4 following messages: control (neutral, non-red meat message), animal welfare, health, or environmental red-meat-reduction messages.

main outcome measuresAfter viewing their assigned message, participants ordered hypothetical meals from 2 restaurants (1 full service and 1 quick service) and rated message reactions, perceptions, and intentions. STATISTICAL ANALYSES PERFORMED: Logistic and linear regressions were performed.

resultsCompared with the control message, exposure to the health and environmental red-meat-reduction messages reduced red meat selection from the full-service restaurant by 6.0 and 8.8 percentage points, respectively (P = .02 and P < .001, respectively), while the animal welfare message did not (reduction of 3.3 percentage points, P = .20). None of the red-meat-reduction messages affected red meat selection from the quick-service restaurant. All 3 red-meat-reduction messages elicited beneficial effects on key predictors of behavior change, including emotions and thinking about harms.

conclusionsRed-meat-reduction messages, especially those describing health or environmental harms, hold promise for reducing red meat selection in some types of restaurants. Additional interventions may be needed to discourage red meat selection across a wider variety of restaurants, for example, by making salient which menu items contain red meat.