The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) came out fighting this Veganuary with its ‘Eat Balanced’ campaign, spending a reported £1.5 million on ads that specifically mention vegan diets and nutrients such as B12 and iron. There’s a strong focus on health, some mention of the planet, but nothing about the impact on animals. So, of course, we’ve released our own ad to set the record straight.

The animal agriculture industry is clearly feeling the pressure as every year they come up with some kind of marketing gimmick in a desperate attempt to address the problem of plant-based diets and successive record-breaking years for Veganuary. The shambles that was #februdairy comes to mind.

They know full well that trends show a steady decline in the focus on animal products as part of our everyday meals, with the message now getting through that meat and dairy are not good for our health, the environment nor the non-human animals we exploit in the most awful ways.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), a levy body that represents growers and producers, has a history of supporting these misguided attempts to convince people to go back to the days of meat and two veg and a pint of cows’ milk on the doorstep every morning. Last year it was the highly manipulative Milk Your Moments campaign, a taxpayer-funded £1 million damp squib that we countered with our Milk this is your moment campaign, and this year we say hello to Eat Balanced, yet another opportunity for counter-advertising and hashtag hijacking.

One look at the Eat Balanced website and the agenda is clear: “There are a lot of mixed messages in the media around food and nutrition, meaning it’s easy to get confused. That’s why we’ve started the Eat Balanced campaign, to provide an evidence-based antidote to the misinformation.” Ironic, really.

The whole premise of the campaign is that the flesh of certain animals - such as cows, pig, sheep and chickens - plus bovine lactation stolen from calves, is somehow essential for a balanced diet. That’s the first big lie, and the one they most want audiences to swallow.

To do this, the AHDB and its so-called Food Advisory Board (FAB) - formerly the Meat Advisory Board, a rebranding that tells us that even they don’t want to be associated only with meat - have focused very heavily on nutrients that vegans are advised to supplement, such as B12. This is most blatant of all in its advert currently running on UK networks that include not-so-subtle digs about B12 and its presence in flesh and cows’ milk:

While the TV spot doesn’t draw attention to vegans, everything else does. Take for example the description from the ad as uploaded to their YouTube channel:

“An ideal diet is one that offers variety, nourishment and enjoyment whilst remaining in harmony with the environment. To keep you and your family healthy it’s best to follow a balanced diet.  Meat and dairy naturally provide nutrients, including the essential vitamin B12 not naturally present in a vegan diet.  Enjoy the food you eat. Eat balanced.”

The Eat Balanced website completely ignores heart disease, type 2 diabetes and other diseases associated with the consumption of animal products, and to say that they’re clutching at straws with B12 is something of an understatement for many reasons that are probably best explained by watching this video from our friend Mic the Vegan:

Also, the discovery now of a truly plant-based source of B12 - that being duckweed and specifically the Mankai variety - somewhat throws a spanner in the works of the Eat Balanced campaign’s flagship claim. In fact, in a study from 2018 that compared duckweed to cheese made from cows' milk, with peas as a control group, results showed that the “increase in vitamin B12 by Mankai was higher as compared to changes induced by either cheese or peas”. If duckweed doesn’t sound particularly appetising, it is commonly eaten in Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, as a vegetable named ‘Khai-Nam’ as this study into its acceptability as a Western food highlights.

Eat Balanced fails to mention that a lot of people take vitamin supplements and eat fortified foods like cereal anyway and deficiencies in nutrients found in abundance in plants, like vitamin A, vitamin C and magnesium, are common in omnivorous diets especially in ‘developed’ countries where meat consumption is high. In the UK, for example, you’re far more likely to be advised to eat your five portions of fruit and veg a day than to eat a steak, block of cheese or an egg.

The last point we’ll make about animal B12 is that research shows it is actually harder to absorb than the crystalline B12 used in supplements, owing to the fact that animal B12 is bound to proteins and so requires adequate acidic digestion. This is a particular problem in the elderly, who would have to supplement anyway regardless of whether they “eat balanced” or not.

Iron is the other nutrient mentioned on the Eat Balanced website, but we won’t waste our time debunking that other than to tell you to eat your leafy greens and remind readers that the American Dietetics Association has for more than a decade stated that properly planned plant-based diets provide adequate nutrition for all ages.

The Eat Balanced website gives a cursory overview of the sustainability of animal agriculture, but their scope is limited to UK practices - this is more an advert for ‘buying British’ than anything else, and does not discuss issues associated with animal consumption in other parts of the world. Presumably, we’re to ignore that eating animals isn’t only a UK thing. We wonder therefore if the AHDB is vegan when they go on holiday, or maybe they fill their suitcases with British beef in the name of sustainability.

On to the last issue that the AHDB raises, one which they conveniently left out of their ad: farming standards, a euphemism in this case for animal welfare. The website page devoted to this uncomfortable topic is predictably lacking in substance, with a bit about the use of hormones and antibiotics and a link to Red Tractor, for what that’s worth (not much).

This is probably the most jarring omission and the reason why we felt the need to produce our own version that tells viewers about the one billion animals killed for food in the UK every year. Our friends at Plant Based News, as outraged by the audacity of the AHDB as we were, have also released their own remake of the advert along very similar lines with footage from investigations that show animals being subjected to shocking abuse.

The AHDB - seemingly more inclined to make ads about eating dead animals than promoting the work of arable farmers - just doesn’t know when to give up, with this reported £1.5 million campaign centred on vegans and B12. You have to feel for them if that’s really the best they can do. Eat Balanced, which already feels outdated and clunky, is set to be yet another failed attempt to modernise meat and dairy messaging. We don’t know who they’re paying to come up with these terrible campaigns, but whoever it is, their finger is so far off the pulse it’s embarrassing.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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