The rise of the vegan lifestyle

Public Health Nutrition Editorial Highlight: Pattern analysis of vegan eating reveals healthy and unhealthy patterns within the vegan diet.

Veganism is becoming an increasingly popular lifestyle choice with over 600,000 of the UK population and up to 12% of Europeans now following a dietary pattern that eliminates all animal products. In response, the food industry is producing more ultra-processed vegan alternative food products than ever before; leading to concerns about the nutritional quality of some vegan diets.

For this study, we aimed to identify the types of foods that constitute a vegan diet and establish patterns within the diet. Dietary pattern analysis, a key instrument for exploring the correlation between health and disease was used to identify patterns within a vegan diet. Our hypothesis was that the majority of vegan diets would incorporate a range of food groups representing a traditional well-planned vegan diet, however we also predicted that a convenience style eating pattern could emerge, representing a small proportion of the participants

What did we find?
Two methods of pattern analysis (factor and cluster analysis) revealed four dietary patterns in our sample of 129 mainly young adult vegans including convenience, health conscious, unhealthy/takeaway and traditional. Whilst two healthy patterns were defined, a pattern of convenience food was most identifiable accounting for up to 49% of the sample. The convenience pattern showed a prominence of ultra-processed vegan convenience meals and snacks, vegan sweets and desserts, sauces, condiments and fats. A further concern was the emergence of an ‘unhealthy’ ‘takeaway’ dietary pattern that included a high frequency of alcohol, vegan takeaway, and salt consumption.

What does this imply?
Despite the growing number of people choosing to follow a vegan diet, there are still no specific official dietary guidelines for vegans. The expectation for vegans to adapt their diet without any public health guidance can be problematic. Credit must be given to the Vegan Society for recently creating a vegan version of the UK Eatwell Guide publication educating vegans about their diet. However, the unexpected findings from our study show the predominant vegan dietary pattern does not represent the Vegan Eatwell guide.

What needs to happen next?
These novel results highlight a need for further dietary pattern studies with full nutrition and blood metabolite analysis in larger samples of vegans to enhance and confirm our current results.

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