Switzerland's New National Nutrition Strategy Puts Plant-Based Eating at Its Heart

The Swiss government has published a new national nutrition strategy that makes eating more plants one of its six official goals for the next eight years.

The Swiss Nutrition Strategy 2025-2032, drawn up by the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO), is blunt about the problem. Swiss people, it says, eat too much meat, animal fat, sugar and salt, and too few fruits and vegetables.

The numbers are striking. According to the strategy document, 43% of adults are now overweight or obese, up from 30% three decades ago, and non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes are the country's biggest public health challenge. Food also accounts for around a quarter of Switzerland's total environmental footprint.

So the six goals include “strengthen plant-based nutrition” alongside a balanced diet, better food knowledge, healthier food environments and halving avoidable food waste by 2030. An action plan for 2025 to 2028 will set measurable targets, covering everything from school food and catering to advertising aimed at children.

In her foreword to the strategy, Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, head of the Federal Department of Home Affairs, explained the wider thinking (our translation):

The new nutrition strategy is broader in scope than the old one, integrating different health and sustainability approaches, including Switzerland's 2050 climate strategy. This holistic perspective is essential to strengthening the effectiveness of the Swiss nutrition strategy. It also requires close cooperation between the relevant federal agencies, stakeholders from the nutrition and food sector, as well as science and civil society.

It builds on the country's updated dietary recommendations for adults, published last year, which already told the Swiss to eat more whole foods and plant proteins. Soizic Larcher, EU policy officer for ProVeg International, welcomed the move:

We welcome the progressive approach taken by the Swiss government to ensure that plant-rich diets are prioritised in its nutrition strategy. There is a growing trend to integrate sustainability considerations in national dietary recommendations, and Switzerland is one of several countries leading by example.

This is a country famous for cheese and chocolate telling its own people to eat more beans. If that isn't progress, we don't know what is. And the reason is simple: the science on plant-rich diets is now strong enough that governments can't ignore it. The EAT-Lancet commission told the world to halve red meat back in 2019, and Oxford researchers have shown a plant-based shift could save millions of lives.

Switzerland now joins a growing club. Canada's food guide ditched the dairy group in 2019, and Denmark published the world's first national plant-based action plan in 2023. Years before that, Germany's environment ministry banned meat at official functions and 24 MEPs called for a shift to plant-based diets.

The future is looking brighter.