Protein diversification: the underappreciated ally against infectious disease

Aligning eating habits more closely with the Planetary Health Diet is widely recognised as a way to help reduce rates of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. But less attention is paid to its potential to combat the threat of infectious diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, infectious diseases, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance and climate change are among the biggest threats to global health. The growing global demand for meat, coupled with increasing intensification of industrial animal agriculture to meet this demand, are key drivers of these threats. And that demand is forecast to grow by 52% by 2050.

If they are serious about protecting public health, governments can’t rely on individuals changing their eating habits. But by investing in diversifying our protein supply, they can make plant-based foods more appealing and accessible and deliver the familiar meaty dishes people want without increasing infectious disease risk.

Plant-based, cultivated and fermentation-made meat have the potential to help satisfy some of the world’s demand for chicken nuggets, pork sausages and beef mince without antibiotics or industrial animal agriculture. Their strength lies in their potential to offer comparable taste and price to the products of industrial meat, thereby supporting a shift towards healthier and more sustainable eating patterns without requiring dramatic shifts in behaviour. This has real potential to drive change and in doing so complement broader approaches to both expand the audience and demand for beans and pulses, and make more space for sustainable farming practices. 

Reducing the risk of supply shocks and shortages

Most of the time, animal diseases don’t spread to people, but they can still present major problems for food security and biodiversity. 

It is very common for farmed animals to be culled to stop the spread of disease – and the numbers in recent years have been staggering. In 2025, the UK announced that 1.8 million farmed birds had been culled in a space of just three months in response to an outbreak of bird flu, and another in Germany led to the culling of a further 400,000. African swine fever has also been steadily advancing across Europe in recent years, beginning in Russia, and spreading through countries in Eastern Europe to Poland, Germany and Spain. The disease has already led to culls of hundreds of thousands of farmed pigs and wild boar, threatened the livelihoods of many farmers, and cost billions of euros. In 2025, the infection spread to Estonia’s largest pig farm, leading to all 28,500 pigs on the farm being culled. Similarly, in Latvia, the disease was contracted on an industrial farm containing over 20,000 pigs, all of which were culled. 

The responses to these outbreaks have naturally also caused disruptions to food production. Bird flu has led to shortages and price increases of chicken meat and eggs. African swine fever has disrupted global trade, and prompted dramatic falls in exports to major importers of European pig meat like China, which will likely be supplanted by other countries with even larger industrial pig farms and weaker regulations on welfare and antibiotic use. 

We have come to rely on these unstable systems because they produce food that is cheap and tasty. To break this dependence, we need wider access to foods that are just as tasty and affordable but made in more resilient ways. GFI Europe’s research with HarrisX identified that in Germany and the UK, 54% of people wanted to either increase the number of plant-based foods in their diet or reduce their meat intake, but the available options and lack of familiarity with how they could act on this were a real barrier. Using the outputs of this research, we worked to support retailers to help them understand these groups better, helping inform strategies to better target and support people wanting to eat more plant-based foods.  

The impact of animal pandemics on wild populations

The spread of diseases between farmed and wild animals can also have devastating effects.

These diseases cause major problems for wild animal populations. A 2024 report looking at the impact of the ongoing bird flu pandemic on wild birds in the UK found that many species of seabirds were now in ‘catastrophic’ decline. While nine of the 13 species in the report had seen populations fall by 10% or more, worst hit was the great skua, numbers of which declined 76% in just two years.

These impacts are being felt globally, with researchers even in isolated regions of Antarctica reporting devastating die-offs of seabirds, elephant seals and fur seals as the disease spreads. 

There are more than 11,000 species of bird known to science, but due to the explosion in intensive agriculture that began in the 20th century, today around 70% of the biomass of all the birds on Earth are domesticated birds, dominated by one species – the chicken. Farmed birds are often kept in crowded conditions, making them major reservoirs for disease and potentially extending the severity of pandemics, even when diseases originate in wild populations. 

With more diversified protein production, we reduce the demand currently met by the industrial farms which incubate these diseases. However, for a lot of people, currently available alternatives do not offer the same flavour, function and familiarity that conventional meat does, and they are also often more expensive. This underlines the critical need for public funding of research and infrastructure to facilitate better products at lower prices.

Slowing the spread of antimicrobial resistance

Antibiotics represent one of the most important medical discoveries in human history, and penicillin alone is thought to have saved around half a billion lives since its discovery 100 years ago. However, the more we use an antibiotic, the more chance we give disease-causing bacteria to evolve resistance. Many of the antibiotics we use today are taken from the natural defences developed by fungi (eg, Penicillium mould, where penicillin was first discovered) and bacteria over millions of years of evolution. As such, progress on discovering new antibiotics is slow, and resistance is spreading faster than new antibiotics can be developed to replace them. 

The latest European data suggests that the EU is likely to miss four of the five targets set to counter antimicrobial resistance, which already causes 35,000 deaths each year in Europe alone. 

While progress has been made in recent years, a significant proportion of antibiotics used in Europe are still used in farmed animals – not humans. This proportion is even higher in other parts of the world. 

The overuse of antibiotics in industrial animal agriculture increases the number of opportunities for bacteria to develop resistance to these life-saving drugs, and – like with pandemic spread more broadly – provides a reservoir for these ‘superbugs’ to spread. 

The current national dietary guidelines in Germany recommend an increased proportion of plants in our diets, with meat intake at around 300g per week or 40g per day. It is estimated that if global meat consumption were to align with these guidelines, antibiotic use worldwide could fall by two-thirds. 

Recommendations to eat more plants have long been recommended by public health bodies across Europe, but meat consumption has stabilised at a high level. 

This is the area where alternative proteins offer real potential, as they can meet people where they are at and compete on the same terms as industrial animal agriculture. While intensive meat production is deeply unpopular, many people in Europe are driven to keep buying it because they are not in a position to spend more on their food, or spend longer preparing meals. This is the strength of plant-based, fermentation-made and cultivated meat within the broader push for protein diversification, as with the right support they are particularly well placed to increase the availability of tasty, affordable, familiar foods that don’t add to the pressure on these life-saving medicines. 

Reducing the likelihood of human zoonotic disease and pandemics

Food poisoning is by far the most common way diseases can spread from farmed animals to humans, and rates in Europe have been increasing in recent years. However, it is not the only way. 

In very rare cases, animal diseases to cause pandemics in humans, and the risks of such jumps are increasing.

The Spanish flu – thought to be responsible for more than 20 million deaths in 1918 alone – was a mutated form of a virus that originated in birds. 

There are several ways that plant-based foods can reduce the likelihood of these outbreaks occurring: 

• They reduce habitat destruction and deforestation. This reduces the frequency with which people and farmed animals come into contact with wild animals. Even when diseases originate in wild animals, the jump to humans is often made via an intermediary domesticated animal – such as farmed animals or pets. 
• Their production uses plants or fungi, which have very different diseases and immune systems to humans and have far less risk of either incubation or transmission to humans. Conversely, intensive animal farming places large numbers of animals in cramped, unsanitary conditions, thereby weakening their immune systems. This gives diseases an increased opportunity to evolve to be more infectious or more resistant to medical treatments, and to spread between individuals. Working conditions in such systems are also typically poor, increasing the vulnerability of farm workers to infection. 
• They produce far less waste and pollution. The large volumes of slurry and manure produced by farmed animals can allow diseases to escape the farm, and, if not properly managed, can pollute the environment (for instance, through runoff into rivers where people swim or fish) and spread disease.

Increasing the proportion of our food that comes from plants and reducing our dependence on intensive animal production can reduce threats to wild populations and also make room for lower-risk, higher-welfare farming practices – both important goals. However, we cannot achieve this without support for approaches that facilitate mainstream shifts in behaviour to increase the proportion of Europe’s diet coming from plants. 

Taste, price and familiarity remain as unsolved barriers to plant-based foods achieving this in Europe today, but to date, plant-based meat has proved one of the solutions that has achieved the broadest and fastest uptake among plant-based foods, outpacing more traditional options like tofu despite being a more recent feature on supermarket shelves. GFI’s work focuses on how best to ensure this initial promise can translate into broader impact. 

Even with relatively little public investment to overcome barriers on taste and texture, significant improvements have been seen in recent years, and there is potential for major advances through new approaches like precision fermentation and cultivated meat. With greater public investment in research and infrastructure, alternative proteins have real potential to help drive this change – and our work seeks to help showcase this opportunity to policymakers and outline a practical pathway to a healthier, more secure and more sustainable food system. For example, a recent analysis conducted by Systemiq, commissioned by our policy team, explored the economic potential of alternative proteins within the European Union, identifying a €111 billion opportunity with the right policy support and highlighting the policies and strategies with the most potential to help policymakers realise ambitions on economic growth with co-benefits for public health and climate resilience. 

There is no silver bullet, but protein diversification is an essential part of the solution

As global demand for meat rises, so too will the burden of infectious diseases unless we are able to address the pressing issues with our current production practices and reduce the demand for industrial meat. But this is not a problem that will fix itself. We need a plan and a theory of change. 

GFI’s work focuses on identifying and removing the roadblocks to making this change happen. Our research grant programme targets the key research bottlenecks that undermine progress across the field, and makes the findings open access so that everyone can benefit from them. Diversifying our protein supply through the development and scaling of tasty, affordable and nutritious options made from plants and fungi, or cultivated directly from cells, can offer an important – and currently very neglected – opportunity.

Author

Alex Mayers Managing Director

Alex directs GFI Europe’s strategic planning and coordinates all areas of our work.