Plant-based meat beat the real thing on the Nutri-Score in Norway. Plant milk, cheese and yoghurt mostly lost, and the grade never looks at vitamins

Look at the sales and plant-based food seems to be taking over. Asko, Norway's largest grocery wholesaler, saw plant-based meat products rise 244% by weight from 2016 to 2021, and by 2023 they were still 208% above 2016. That sounds like a revolution until you see the next number: about 0.2 kg per person for the whole of 2023. A team from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the University of Oslo went to the country's national diet survey, Norkost 4, to see what adults actually eat, then graded those products against the animal foods they copy. The results appeared in the European Journal of Nutrition on 28 October. The survey itself ran in 2022 and 2023, and this analysis covers 1,815 adults aged 18 to 80 who completed two phone interviews about the previous day's food and a questionnaire about the past year.

Trying is common and habit is rare. Just over half (52%) had eaten one of these products in the past year, 19% had one monthly or more often, 11% weekly and 8.1% at least twice a week. Nearly all of that habit is plant milk: 7.4% had dairy alternatives twice a week, 1.2% meat alternatives and 0.6% plant cheese. On average the products supplied 0.3% of food energy, and just 3.2% even among the 147 regular consumers. Those regulars averaged about 4.5 g a day of plant-based burgers, mince, sausages, meatballs and nuggets combined, against 97 g of meat (the sum is ours). They were more often women (76% vs 53%) and younger (median age 38 vs 47), and intolerance looks like part of the reason: 20% reported lactose intolerance against 6% of everyone else. Only 28 of the 147 called themselves vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian.

Then the grading. The team ran the Nutri-Score, the A to E front-of-pack label used in several European countries, on the 41 plant-based products recorded in the survey and on 90 animal products matched to them. Meat and cream alternatives generally beat their animal counterparts, on the strength of less saturated fat and salt and, for the meat alternatives, more fibre. Milk, cheese, yoghurt and egg alternatives generally lost, because of more saturated fat, sugar or salt and less protein. One detail shows how fragile this can be. Plant yoghurt carried up to a third of the daily saturated fat limit per 200 g serving, but there were only two plant yoghurts in the data and one was made with coconut, which the authors say likely explains it.

The more useful finding is what the grade cannot see. The Nutri-Score counts energy, saturated fat, sugar, salt, protein, fibre and the share of fruit, vegetables and legumes. It does not count vitamins or minerals, and fortification earns nothing. Yet that is where these products differ most. Unfortified plant milks provided negligible vitamin D, B12 and calcium, while fortified soy, almond, oat and coconut drinks supplied vitamin D and about as much B12 and calcium as vitamin D-fortified dairy milk, though no iodine. Plant cheese had about half the calcium of the real thing. Plant meats brought more fibre, folate and iron but less B12, and the authors note that iron and zinc from plants are generally less well absorbed. So an unfortified product could still earn a favourable grade if it was low in salt, sugar and saturated fat. A proposed Nordic revision of the label, the NewTools-score, gave exactly the same grade on all 131 products here, so it does not close that gap.

It is tempting to read the regulars' whole diets as the effect of these foods. They ate more fibre (28 g vs 24 g) and folate, less vitamin B12 (5.2 vs 6.6 micrograms) and zinc, slightly less salt, and got 16% of energy from protein against 18%. But at 3.2% of their energy, these products can hardly be doing most of that, in our reading; they also ate about a third less meat and well under half the milk. The comparison was not adjusted for energy intake, age or sex, and it leaves out supplements, which 71% of regulars and 57% of the others took. Other limits matter too. Some product categories held very few items, not every food was recorded by its exact product name, and some nutrient values were estimated. The authors say the results cannot be extended to everything on the market, and tofu, falafel and home-cooked animal dishes were left out altogether. What holds up is modest and practical: a plant-based swap can gain on some counts and lose on others depending on the product, and if a plant drink is replacing milk, the grade on the front will not tell you what the fortification list on the back does.