Original title: One meal, not the next: a two-day RCT testing effects of increased plant-based availability on direct and later food choice
Lotte de Lint, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Adriana Metje van Rookhuijzen, Rachelle de Vries, Emely de Vet · September 2026
Eating more plant-based meals benefits public health, animal welfare, and the planet. Scientists know gentle prompts, called nudges, can guide people toward plant-based food in the moment. However, they wondered what happens next. Does picking a veggie option make someone stay consistent and eat more plants later, or does it trigger them to compensate by eating more meat? To test this, researchers ran a two-day experiment. On day 1, one group saw a menu offering 3 plant-based sandwich varieties for every 1 meat variety. Anyone picking a plant option also received a message saying their choice showed they care about the environment. This intervention tripled immediate plant-based lunch choices, jumping from 22% to 66%. Yet on day 2, it caused no change in lunch picks, and 24-hour animal product intake stayed virtually unaffected. People ate more plants immediately without compensating by choosing more meat later.
Imagine you are at a snack table with bowls of chips and carrot sticks. Normally there are three bowls of chips for every one of carrot sticks. Now someone switches it so there are three bowls of carrot sticks for every one of chips. You are much more likely to grab carrot sticks right then. But later that evening, when you choose your own snacks at home, do you eat more chips to make up for it? In this paper, the snack table is the lunch menu on day one, and the evening snacks are the non-targeted choices on day two. The researchers found that the switch to more carrot sticks did not lead to extra chips later.
Cafeterias and restaurants often worry that pushing plant-based options one day will backfire as people 'compensate' with meat the next. This study shows that simply offering more plant-based sandwiches (3 to 1 instead of 1 to 3) tripled plant-based choices immediately, with no detectable increase in animal product consumption over the next 24 hours. That means food providers can shift menus toward plants without triggering a rebound effect.
The abstract does not specify the setting or population, so generalizability to other contexts (e.g., home cooking, different cuisines) is unknown. The intervention combined availability with an identity cue, so the separate effect of availability alone is not isolated. The study measured only 24-hour animal product consumption, not longer-term patterns. The null effects on non-targeted behavior are supported by equivalence tests, but the abstract does not report the equivalence bounds or confidence intervals.
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One meal, not the next: a two-day RCT testing effects of increased plant-based availability on direct and later food choice — Lotte de Lint, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Adriana Metje van Rookhuijzen, Rachelle de Vries et al. — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/kdhwt_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.