all right [Music] according to a survey of more than 30 000 U.S residents a third of American adults self-identify as meat reducers meaning one in three of us are trying to cut down on our meat consumption why for those earning less than forty thousand dollars a year the number one reason is cost for those earning more than 40K the number one reason is health and indeed if we were to define a healthy diet compared to how we're eating now we should be eating more plant-based Foods including fresh fruits and vegetables whole grains legumes meaning Bean
split Peach hook bees and lentils seeds nuts and at the same time lower in animal Foods particularly fatty and processed Meats in an editorial entitled plant-based diets for personal population and planetary Health co-authored by the chair of nutrition at Harvard healthy plant-based diets are not only more sustainable but have also been associated with lower risk of chronic diseases such as obesity type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease and some cancers what do we mean by plant-based basically any diet that reduces the amount of animal products and increases the amount of plants again vegetables fruits whole grains legumes
nuts and seeds transitioning Global diets towards healthy plant-based dietary patterns would require large-scale Public Health efforts but could be instrumental in ensuring future human and planetary Health indeed the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change describes plant-based diets as a major opportunity for mitigating and adapting to climate change and includes a policy recommendation to reduce meat consumption okay but how do you do it in a systematic review of experimental studies on strategies to reduce meat consumption one of the most effective experiments came out of the Midwest sadly research shows that the provision of information on
its own can be of limited utility in facilitating behavioral change however default interventions have been successfully employed in a variety of pro-social contacts making the right option or the healthiest option the easiest option the default option take for example organ donation every year thousands of people in the United States have died waiting for a suitable donor organ but wait 85 percent of Americans approve of organ donation yet less than half have made a decision about donating and fewer still have granted permission by signing a donor card if you look at Europe there's nearly a tenfold
difference in the organ donor rates across different countries in some countries consent is only about 10 percent while in others it's up to like 99.9 percent what's the difference between the two colors gold is opt-in blue is opt out in opt out countries the default is that people are organ donors unless they actively register not to be in the opt-in countries like the United States the default is nobody is an organ donor without explicitly registering to be one so there's all sorts of calls for campaigns to change public attitudes about organ donation but remember 85
percent are already on board if we want to change behavior and not just attitudes changing the default condition may be more effective so does it work for diet in the default treatment participants received at their table a menu listing only five meat-free options but they were informed verbally and in writing on the menu that they could also consult a second menu that was posted on the wall about a dozen feet away which had your standard array of popular non-vegetarian dining hall dishes and in the control condition both the list of options were mixed together on
the same menu they were handed now when you do that only a minority of people choose to meet free options between five and forty percent depending on if you describe the meat-free options in an appealing way like pasta with Provencal vegetables or in unappealing terms like vegan calzone okay but what about the default condition where the menu in front of them is all meat free they can still get up and order all the meat they want but the alternate menu is a few steps away you're not taking away any people's options but just by making
it the default meet free choices shot up like the 75 and 90 even an unappealingly described meat-free option totally won out and even just adding more veg options from a quarter of the option to half the options may increase the sales of the veg options between about 40 to 80 percent foreign
