BURST
B.C. should increase the proportion of plant-based meals served to patients at all hospitals for health and environmental reasons, suggests new research from the University of B.C.
It’s not about eliminating all meat but more about boosting plant-based main courses while supplementing with healthier, low-carbon options such as chicken, turkey and sustainably caught fish, says Jiaying Zhao, a professor of psychology and sustainability at UBC. Zhao oversaw the three-year study, which was led by PhD graduate Annie Lalande.
The team worked with well-known B.C. chef Ned Bell to revamp the menu at Vancouver General Hospital to align it more closely with the planetary health diet guidelines. The diet focuses on healthy plant foods that are more sustainable for the planet, such as legumes, grains, nuts, fruit and vegetables, while reducing animal products.
They eliminated carbon-intensive meat, such as beef and lamb, from the new menus while significantly reducing the amount of pork. In moderate amounts, red meat provides protein and iron, but some studies have linked high consumption of red meat, particularly processed meats, to a greater risk of heart disease and cancer.
“The new menu had more dietary fibre (than the default menu), which is really important. It had more iron, which is great. It did have more sodium but not in a dangerous zone … and calcium and folate were up,” said Zhao.
For example, a typical dinner menu in a B.C. hospital might include meatloaf, a cream-based soup and Jell-O, all of which contain animal products.
But the planetary menu included dishes, such as a chickpea and cauliflower curry, noodles with tofu, and local fish like trout, along with whole grains, fruit and vegetables.
The 18 new menus used for the study were also more culturally diverse, with Asian- and Pacific Northwest-inspired dishes that patients reported were tastier than the default menu, which was typically a bland Western-style meal that included a lot of meat and highly processed food.
Zhao said the study also shows the new menus reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 39 per cent compared with the original menu, and 84 per cent of the 443 hospitalized patients reported moderate to high satisfaction.
Some patients said the mushroom meatballs tasted better than regular meatballs, while others reported temporarily forgetting about their pain, said Zhao.
The rate of food waste was significantly lower.
Zhao said this is because the food tastes better. Instead of a bland piece of meat or tofu, the patient would get tofu pieces mixed with sauce and noodles, for example.
“In the original menu about a third of the beef or pork dishes were wasted, so we went from a ton of food waste from before,” she said.
“And dishes with fish, the food waste was reduced, and soy as well — 68 per cent of the tofu dishes were wasted in the original menu, and now it went down to 41 per cent. So people like the tofu more. Essentially, what the chef did was he made plant-based foods more tasty.”
The study , published in Lancet Planetary Health, concludes that most patients were open to trying plant-based options and that a focus on food quality was key to improving acceptability.
This research started as a six-month pilot program by Vancouver General Hospital in 2024 to test how patients responded to more plant-based and sustainable meals.
While the researchers didn’t do cost comparisons between the new menus and the default menus for their analysis, they know from previous studies, including one done at New York City Hospital, that reducing meat significantly lowers the cost of food at hospitals.
Zhao said a similar plant-based menu is being rolled out at 20 hospitals in Washington D.C. and she hopes the same will happen across B.C., adding interest has been high from other hospitals in the province.
Royal Columbian Hospital, for example, is looking into ways to serve more climate-friendly meals as part of the Cool Food Pledge, spearheaded by Elaine Chu, director of food service transformation and strategic planning for Fraser Health.
While beef makes up just two per cent of food purchases by weight, it accounts for 36 per cent of the hospital’s food-related carbon emissions, according to the hospital.
Hospitals in Langley and Burnaby have also signed the pledge.
For the VGH-UBC study all survey participants provided informed consent. Funding for the research was provided by a Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute grant.
