A web-based diet quality assessment for plant-based diets – A symposium at ICN IUNS 2025 in Paris

The popularity of plant-based and vegan diets is steadily increasing, driven by rising awareness of animal welfare, environmental concerns related to climate change, and the potential health impacts of consuming animal-derived foods.

However, a plant-based diet is not automatically a healthy one. Like omnivorous diets, it can still be high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fats, or lack dietary variety. Moreover, individuals following a vegan diet may be at risk of inadequate intake of key nutrients typically found in animal products, such as riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B12, vitamin D, iodine, iron, zinc, calcium, selenium, and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids.

In response to these challenges, the VEGANScreener was developed.

VEGANScreener is a pioneering European research initiative funded by the JPI HDHL programme (Joint Programming Initiative “A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life”). The project brought together five scientific partners from across Europe, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Spain, and Germany, alongside additional collaborators from the United States and Switzerland. The project ran from 1st January 2022 to 30th April 2025. 

Designed to be simple, practical, and accessible, the VEGANScreener tool can be used not only by individuals following a vegan diet but also by healthcare professionals without specialised training in nutrition or dietetics. Its applications include assessing overall diet quality, identifying areas for improvement, supporting personalised goal-setting, and enabling the monitoring of vegan diet quality over time, at both individual and population levels.

To validate the tool, 400 vegan participants were recruited across the five partner countries. This cohort helped evaluate the tool’s reliability and laid the foundation for its future application in both clinical practice and public health contexts.

Don’t miss the vegan screener symposium at ICN IUNS 2025 in Paris!

Date: Monday, August 25^th

Time: 8:00 am to 9:30 am

Session Number: SY007

In this symposium, you will be introduced to the VEGANScreener project aimed at assessing vegan diet quality. A key focus will be the presentation of our newly developed and validated screening tool, designed specifically to capture the nutritional adequacy of vegan diets in a reliable and efficient manner. We will share key findings from our validation study, including data on the validity and reliability of the tool, but also investigations into associations between nutritional status and health outcomes in European vegans compared to omnivores, offering insights into diet-related health patterns. In the final section of the symposium, the VEGANScreener consortium members will be available for an interactive discussion. This will be an opportunity to ask questions about the tool, its potential applications, as well as the broader implications of our study.

For more information on the project, visit the VEGANScreener’s website.