In 2022, the region of Europe accounted for the highest retail sales of plant-based meat, valued at 3.3 billion U.S. dollars. In comparison, the APAC region had retail sales that year with 326 million dollars.

In the United Kingdom, the share of those following a vegetarian diet was highest among the 18 to 19-year-olds at 11 percent. Among respondents 60 to 64 years of age, the share of vegetarians was only two percent. This data for 2023 aggregates the results of four survey waves carried out during 2023.

EPIC-Oxford is the Oxford component of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), a large multi-centre cohort study with participants enrolled from 10 European countries. The EPIC-Oxford study began in the 1990s and follows the health of 65,000 men and women living throughout the UK, many of whom are vegetarian. The main objective of EPIC Oxford is to examine how diet influences the risk of cancer, particularly for the most common types of cancer in Britain, as well as the risks of other chronic diseases.

EPIC-Europe was initiated in 1992. It involves over 500,000 people from 23 centres in 10 European countries. It is coordinated by the World Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, and supported by the European Union and national funding agencies.

EPIC-Oxford is one of two EPIC cohorts in the UK, the other is EPIC-Norfolk.

For further details on the study design, recruitment, data collection and other aspects of the EPIC-Oxford study, please visit https://www.ceu.ox.ac.uk/research/epic-oxford-1