Removing barriers to plant-based diets: Assisting doctors with vegan patients

Abstract

Shifting to plant-based diets can alleviate many of the externalities associated with the current food system. Spontaneous shifts in diet are often hindered by consumers’ imperfect knowledge about the health risks and benefits, which leads them to seek advice from their doctors. However, doctors have often had only limited nutrition training, and often express negative opinions of plant-based diets, even though recent evidence suggests that they confer substantial health benefits. We here explore whether providing doctors (general practitioners) with information about the risks and benefits of plant-based diets significantly changes their attitudes and medical practices. We run a survey experiment on a representative sample of French doctors and assess the impact of an information campaign developed by doctors to inform their colleagues about plant-based nutrition through case studies. Our confirmatory analysis shows that our information campaign effectively changes doctors’ views about plant-based diets (Cohen's d: 0.71). To a smaller extent, we find a positive but not statistically nor economically significant effect of the intervention on the doctors’ (hypothetical) medical practice with patients who follow a plant-based diet (Cohen's d: 0.22).