Studies Show Plant-Based Diets Would Save Hundreds of Billions in Health Costs

And millions of lives every year

Image credits: Usman Yousaf & Terry Lai

Adopting a plant-based diet can significantly reduce your food bill, slashing costs by up to one-third. But the savings don’t stop there; plant-based diets also cut overall societal costs like healthcare expenses and lost productivity. Read on!

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a worldwide shift to plant-based eating by 2050 would save $700 billion to $1,4 trillion in healthcare costs per year. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford, also states that if you consider what individuals would be willing to pay for longer lives, the benefits of such a dietary shift would amount to a staggering $30 trillion annually. This is more than the current GDP of the entire U.S. economy — or about the same as the GDP of China, Germany, Japan, and India, combined.

Supporting these findings, a United Nations report estimates that adopting healthier, more sustainable diets could reduce diet-related health costs by up to 97 percent, “with greatest reduction for the most plant-based diets”. A 2023 article in the prestigious Nature Food journal confirms that adopting a plant-based food system would cut health costs by hundreds of billions every year.

Economic valuation of the health and environmental benefits of dietary change: one scenario based on global guidelines for healthy eating and energy intake (HGD) and two based on vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns (VGT and VGN). — Source: Springmann et al. (2016)

Studies conducted in individual countries, such as England, Belgium, and Taiwan, arrived at similar conclusions. Researchers found that even 10 percent of a country’s population switching to a plant-based diet can suffice to save that country billions in healthcare costs.

Why plant-based diets cut healthcare costs

Diet-related illnesses are at an all-time high, placing avoidable pressure on health systems around the world. While the consumption of animal products has been linked to serious health risks, a balanced plant-based diet offers a vast array of health benefits. These benefits include reduced risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and chronic disease — some of the top killers in many western countries. Abstaining from animal products has been found to have a preventive effect against 14 of the 15 deadliest diseases of our time.

People following a plant-based diet have been shown to need less medications and have a lower rate of outpatient visits to the doctor. By contrast, the direct medical costs of meat consumption are comparable to those of cigarette smoking.

In addition, animal agriculture is a leading driver of pandemic risk, world hunger, and antibiotic resistance, three of the biggest overarching threats to global health. These, too, can be mitigated by taking meat, dairy, and eggs off the menu.

Eight million avoided deaths per year

An article published by the World Economic Forum highlights that, in the U.S. alone, switching to a plant-based economy could save 320,000 lives per year as a result of reduced cases of chronic diseases and obesity. Globally, such a transition could reduce mortality by up to 10 percent — in other words: 8.1 million avoided deaths and 129 million life years saved per year.

“On multiple levels, plant-based economies will improve the overall health and wellness of people around the world by reducing hunger in developing countries and reducing chronic diseases in the west.”

— Vijay Eswaran (2018)

And that’s far from all

Beyond saving lives and lowering healthcare expenses, plant-based eating significantly reduces other societal costs:

• Environmental expenses: Transitioning away from an animal-based food system cuts environmental costs, including those tied to climate change mitigation, soil degradation, air pollution, and water contamination. Research suggests that the environmental savings from a global shift to plant-based diets could even surpass the health-related cost reductions. 

• Agricultural subsidies: Moving to plant-based diets also reduces reliance on subsidies for animal agriculture. Currently, over $1 million per minute is spent on farm subsidies worldwide, but only 1% of that figure is used to benefit the environment. The EU, for example, spends nearly a fifth of its entire budget on subsidizing livestock farming. The production of plant-based foods is much more resource-efficient and requires much less financial support.

• Unquantifiable Impacts: Transitioning to plant-based diets reduces the suffering of workers and billions of animals exploited in livestock production. It also alleviates the misery caused by hunger and the health harms linked to animal products. Furthermore, plant-based diets help protect rainforests and other natural ecosystems, preserving biodiversity vital for human survival. While the real value of these benefits can’t be measured in monetary terms, it’s obvious that they are crucial for a sustainable and compassionate future.

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