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

Romain Espinosa, Thibaut Arpinon, Paco Maginot, Sébastien Demange and Florimond Peureux

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2024, vol. 109, issue C

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).

Keywords: Plant-based diet; Doctors; Information campaign; Veganism; Healthy diet; Sustainable diet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 Q18 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804324000156
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:109:y:2024:i:c:s2214804324000156

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2024.102175

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().