Meat eaters who engage in campaigns such as Meat Free Monday (MFM) over a longer period of time are more likely to change their diet to become vegan or vegetarian, according to a new study by Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and MFM. More than 30% of those who engaged with the programme for five years or more stopped eating meat. The MFM campaign aims to encourage and support people to reduce their meat consumption by having a plant-based day every week. The benefits of this include helping to slow climate change, conserving natural resources and improving people’s health. Paul McCartney, co-founder of MFM, 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.” One of the participants of the study, Nick added, “We did it a few Mondays in a row. And then it turned into sort of most weekdays and then all weekdays. And then all weekdays and most weekends. And then, even when I was eating out, I was just choosing not to eat meat as well.” The online questionnaire was completed by an opportunistic sample of 655 people aged 18–82 who were registered on the MFM website, and were meat eaters at the time of registering. (source: LACA, image: pexels)