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This post presents findings from the omnibus survey related to “low impact diets”‚ where people choose to change their diet and/or eat less of certain foods to reduce the environmental impact of their diet. Table 28 summarises the findings from three questions related to low impact diets.

Respondents were asked to assess how much they knew about low impact diets, based on their own understanding of the term. Less than half (43%) of respondents said they had at least heard of the term “low impact diet” although respondents generally reported low levels of knowledge about such a diet. Just 5% of respondents said they knew a lot about low impact diets, 8% said they knew a fair amount and one in five (20%) said they knew just a little about low impact diets.

Respondents who claimed to know at least a little about low impact diets were asked more specifically if they knew how they could adopt this type of diet. Just over half (55%) of those asked said that they did, with the rest saying either they did not (42%) or that they did not know / were unsure (3%).

At this point, all respondents were presented with a description of low impact diets and asked how willing they were to change their diet to make it more low impact: “Some food products have a higher impact on the environment than others. One way to adopt a low impact diet would be to change or eat less of certain foods”. When prompted in this way, more than half (59%) of respondents said they would be either quite (50%) or very (9%) willing to change their diet in this way. One third (33%) of respondents said they would not be willing to change their diet to make it more low impact, with the remainder saying they didn’t know how willing they would be.

Willingness to change diet to make it more low impact was linked to prior knowledge about how to adopt a low impact diet‚ respondents who said they knew how to adopt a lot impact diet were a lot more likely to be willing to change their diet (82%) than those who did not know or had not heard of low impact diets prior to the survey (50%).