I agree in principle with the core idea here, and I think several of the key challenges are highlighted are very important, but I also think there are areas where this is overstated while missing some of the key considerations, and if we're calling for a more evidence based discussion we need to make sure we are being careful to make sure we ourselves are adhering to that. Honestly I think the best accounting of the genuine challenges are from dietetics bodies such as the British Dietetic association who have clinical expertise: https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/vegetarian-vegan-plant-based-diet.htm/ 

Generally - I agree that there are a lot of misconceptions around protein and some micronutrients on a vegan diet and those are genuinely misleading to people. Nowhere is this more obvious than at restaurants where a vegetable is treated as a like-for-like replacement for a piece of meat (e.g., cauliflower wings / mushroom instead of a burger). This is not nutritionally sound. Likewise, a lot of people going vegan like the self selected diet in the referenced study do not make nutritionally sound choices all the time because information is often of poor quality. 

However, I actually think the conclusion goes too far the other way in saying that vegan diets are neccessarily either a lot of effort or inadequate - it may be that this was once the case but it is no longer and I think limits the scope of the movement pretending it is. In today's environment, many of the challenges are fairly straightforward to mitigate with swaps and alternatives based on fairly simple criteria, and with more consistency in those alternatives that will hopefully increasingly be the case. 

I don't think it makes sense to be overly prescriptive on what an optimal diet looks like as it's different for different people, but I do think as more and more people want to be vegan, we need to make sure that it is accessible without needing a lot of knowledge or extra work. We do this with public health all the time such as with the fortification of flours etc and I think there has been for too long exceptionalism in treating vegan diets like they don't need the same support systems that are built into our mainstream food system and this has let people down. We see in the preliminary findings from the follow-up to the Oxford EPIC study however that there have been major improvements in diet quality in vegans in just 10 years https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.09.26357676v1. I agree nutritional epidemiology is a challenging topic (though not neccessarily for the above reasons outlined - the primary challenges in my view are the tiny samples and the non-representative people who are over-represented in vegan cohorts broadly) but as we get more vegans we get better data - especially when we can match it up with the growing number of RCTs and interventional studies. 

A pet peeve too, but I have a very strong aversion to non-clinicians giving advice on pregnancy and nutrition at any point, as this is a very sensitive topic with so much scaremongering, which is really unhelpful and and best left to health professionals. 

More broadly though, I think the focus on vegans misses maybe the point if we want to have real change towards healthier and more sustainable diets - because the truth is most people aren't going to be going vegan anytime soon. For the average person, increasing the proportion of their diets coming from plants and fungi is going to be beneficial - and plant-based alternatives can also be a really easy and accessible way of cutting down particularly health-damaging foods like processed meat. 

Currently, it is clear people are not familiar with plant-based foods, their nutrition or how they can be useful to improve their diets. I work on plant-based alternatives and nutrition and the lack of knowledge from most people - even in sustainable diet spaces - is really striking (and badly skewed by the UPF discourse which as you point out above often misrepresents them). I think there are some really cool foods with some really interesting nutritional properties (like mycoprotein and extruded vegetable protein) which are badly underexplored expressly because people view them as simply an uncanny valley meat replacement for vegans, when they have a lot of really interesting properties when viewed as valuable foods in their own right - and that's what gives them the biggest potential to move the needle on public health, the environment and animal suffering. 

Thanks for your response and sincere apologies for being flippant in the previous comment. New to the forum and clearly misjudged my language, too used to less friendly parts of the internet i guess. I also certainly agree with the overall thesis you make that its not so simple as 'if you build it they will come', and as far as pmas go far more complex than parity of taste, price, convenience. 

That said, I do still think that the framing of pma 'just replacing veggies' seems at odds with the research design and presents a risk of misinterpretation and alienation of those who don't share the same goals for reducing farmed animals in our food system. If this were true we should absolutely flag it, but the headline presents it as though the pma option was nutritionally less complete. If it had been against chickpeas or something that would be a more reasonable conclusion in my view, but not compared to nothing and free guacamole. 

I appreciate the limitations were acknowledged but also do think that relative to the broad headwinds for vegan diets generally at the moment, we as a community need to be careful not to overfit. Relative to the extent of the uncertainty for this kind of study design, the conclusions do maybe paint a stronger picture than is justified - particularly relative to the existing research we have from more robust real world studies and the relative performance of such options when a genuine choice is offered (albeit there is wide variation in exact methods). 

I do think broadly that parity is not likely to be sufficient to genuinely shift mainstream behaviour, and non meat whatever form it takes must be better on some averaged matrix of cost price and convenience (or normalcy), however I don't think this study is compelling evidence of the stated conclusion in the title and the way it is posed i think presents a risk of misinterpretation that could be quite harmful. 

The methods of the paper just don't bear any useful relationship to the real world. 

1. this was a survey, not a real pilot where people had to actually spend real money, or had a choice as to whether or not to go to the shop. They could 'decline to order' and notably this was higher in the no PBMA arm.
2. The veggie option in this instance was just the same as the other options without any protein added (albeit 'free guac'). Arguing therefore that people choosing the Plant-based meat one are 'forgoing veggies' is incorrect, if the orders had been real, they would have just had the veggie wrap plus plant protein. 

Even if we assume this survey is a reasonable reflection of real world behaviour, the main thing that jumps out to me is that you can force vegetarians to spend the same amount of money on a wrap that has less in because they are a captive audience, and when you add plant protein, some of those people prefer to have plant-based protein in. 

The most leveraged audience to target with meat reduction is those on board but struggling, not random people out of the blue. Plant-based meat shows clear utility in this, and this study doesn't really undermine that proposition in my view.