Why are meat-free diets so popular today?

The popularity of meat-free diets has been increasing steadily over the last decade for various reasons. There are many concerns over high levels of meat intake and the relationship it has with environmental and health impacts. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) which is the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) wing for cancer research published data in 2015 which was instrumental in classifying highly processed red meat as carcinogenic and found that consuming 50g of highly processed meats (salted, cured, fermented and smoked) each day increased risk of bowel cancer by around 18%. At the time of publication, there was a media frenzy; we were presented with this information in every way you could imagine, on TV, on the radio, on social media and in the papers.