Brighton medical school study reveals effectiveness of Meat Free Monday

The new study by Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and Meat Free Monday (MFM) – published in the science journal Appetite – also found 20% of those who engaged with programmes like MFM became vegetarian or vegan within 3-5 years.

The MFM campaign was launched by Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney in 2009, and aims to encourage and support people to reduce their meat consumption in order to help slow climate change and conserve precious natural resources, as well as improving their health. You can see a call to action by Paul McCartney on YouTube, where he also performs his song Meat Free Monday.

Paul McCartney said: “By skipping animal products one day a week, the environmental impact is substantial. For example, if every person in Great Britain skipped meat for one day, it would reduce our carbon footprint by more than if every car was taken off the road for a whole day! For those people who end up moving to a completely veggie diet, there is obviously an even greater environmental impact.”

Mary, Sir Paul and Stella McCartney

Dr Richard de Visser

Dr Richard de Visser, Reader in Psychology at BSMS and lead author of the study, added: “Our study showed that behaviour change campaigns like MFM are most effective if they can maintain people’s active engagement. We now need to work on developing the best ways to keep this engagement, through providing the kind of support, information and advice that participants want.”

One of the participants in the study, Nick, said: “We did it a few Mondays in a row. And then it turned into sort of most weekdays, then all weekdays – and then all weekdays and most weekends. Then, even when I was eating out, I was just choosing not to eat meat as well.”

Another participant, Adam, said: “You don’t start taking up jogging and run a marathon straight away: you break yourself in gradually. I think that’s possibly the way to do it, and it certainly was to me.”

The study involved a mixed-method exploration of the behaviour and beliefs associated with reducing or eliminating meat consumption. An online questionnaire was completed by 655 people registered on the MFM website as meat eaters, followed up by 18 in-depth interviews.

Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) is partnership between the Universities of Brighton and Sussex and the local NHS health community, and seeks to identify research areas in medicine which can make a rapid and real difference to improving medical treatment to deliver more personalised healthcare for patients.