Plasma proteome in vegan Brits in UK Biobank (Tong et al. 2025)

 

"Regular meat eaters" refers to omnivores that are not "low meat eaters" (meat reducers), and "vegetarians" refers to lacto/ovo-vegetarians (no pescatarians). "White" refers to "Caucasian", as the study also contains a large sample of British Indians (people with a family background of migration from India).

This study contained 23,243 regular meat eaters, 721 vegetarians, and 54 vegans.


Vegans compared to regular meat eaters

From the main article:

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[Difference in plasma proteins comparing mostly middle-aged, "white" British vegans with "white" regular meat eaters in UK Biobank database.]

Fig. 1. Volcano plots of proteins in white British vegetarians (top) and vegans (bottom) compared with regular meat eaters. The red dotted line signifies p-value threshold for statistical significance, and each dot represents one protein. Results were based on the multivariable model adjusted for age at recruitment, sex, region, fasting status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking status and physical activity. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

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Fig. 3 Top 10 proteins in vegans by diet group and ethnicity. The top 10 proteins were selected by ranking the p-values of proteins comparing white British vegans with regular meat eaters, and sorted by betas in white British vegans, where the betas represent SD differences. Results were based on the multivariable model adjusted for age at recruitment, sex, region, fasting status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking status and physical activity. The results for GUCA2A, FGF21, FOLR1, CKB and IGFBP2 are the same as shown in Fig. 2.
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Vegans compared to lacto/ovo-vegetarians

From Supplementary Material 3:


Supplementary figure 5: Volcano plots of proteins in white British vegans compared with vegetarians.
The red dotted line signifies p-value threshold for statistical significance, and each dot represents one protein. Results were based on the multivariable model adjusted for age at recruitment, sex, region, fasting status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking status and physical activity.

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Reference:

Tammy Y N Tong, Karl Smith-Byrne, Keren Papier, Joshua R Atkins, Mahboubeh Parsaeian, Timothy J Key, Ruth C Travis: The plasma proteome of plant-based diets: Analyses of 2920 proteins in 49,615 people. Clin Nutr . 2025 Aug 29:53:144-154. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2025.08.032. Online ahead of print. 
PMID: 40912079 DOI: 10.1016/j.clnu.2025.08.032