Drugs to shift food preferences

TL;DR

The animal movement works hard on two fronts: changing minds (e.g., outreach, investigations, campaigns) and changing supply (e.g., alternative proteins, vegan labeling). There is a third front that seems much less explored: changing the craving itself. The desire for meat is not only a belief. It is partly or mainly, I assume mainly, biological, and biology and humans already change what we feel like eating: weight loss shots that reduce food cravings, appetite drugs that can shift food preferences, pregnancy aversions for specific foods, or a taste aversion due to some bad eating experience. I argue that voluntary, consent-based aids for people who already want to eat fewer animals are a neglected intervention space, and I suggest cheap first steps. I have not found a dedicated program developing such aids specifically to reduce animal product consumption, though relevant appetite and food-preference research already exists.

I call this space voluntary desire modification. It could contain interventions to temporarily or permanently change craving for animal products or create an aversion to animal products, or create craving for vegan products at the expense of animal products, or any other intervention that very generally and grossly changes our body's response to animal products.

More broadly, interventions beyond the conscious mind & emotions could include working on the subconscious mind (e.g., hypnosis), meat rehab workshop, or desire modification, which is the focus of this post.

Thanks to Nir Zut and Maya Bujakowsky - this post is a development of their idea, and thanks to @EdoArad🔸 for comments, and @Aidan Kankyoku - reading his substack was an inspiration to writing this (all claims are mine).

Epistemic Status

Exploratory. I am not a biologist and not a physician; I come from animal rights activism and thinking about movement strategy. The framing of this post grew out of mapping the conditions that keep factory farming alive and the interventions relating to them. I am maybe 70% confident this direction deserves serious research attention, and much less confident about any specific mechanism. 

Beyond Rationality & Emotions, into Desires

Much of the animal advocacy has been mostly a conversation with the rational mind: here are the facts, here is a video, here is the argument, now choose differently. A meta-analysis discussed on the EA Forum examined 41 randomized studies involving roughly 87,000 people. The studies tested ways to reduce meat consumption, mostly through persuasive messages, but also through changes to menus and psychological approaches. The average effect on what people ate was small. The review raises a serious challenge for individual behavior-change interventions. In Faunalytics' 2014 US survey, 84% of people who had ever been vegetarian or vegan were former rather than current adherents. This was a snapshot, not a study following new vegans until they quit. People reported difficulties with food, health, social life, convenience, and cost. Craving for animal products may be part of this challenge, but it is not the whole explanation.

Many people are already trying to change. In a nationally representative US survey conducted in 2015, two thirds reported cutting back on at least one kind of meat, but it is hard. Psychologists have begun asking seriously whether cutting back on meat is harder than quitting smoking. Humans would never run the anti-smoking fight via working on the rational mind, smoking could kill you, alone. For smokers who already want to quit there are patches, gums, and pills, and nicotine replacement therapy increases the chances of quitting by about 50% to 60%, relative to no nicotine replacement therapy or placebo. For meat, we have alternative proteins, recipes, communities, but no help with the very basic mechanism: physical sensations of craving that drive people towards animal products and meat. Instead of offering a wide variety of ways to reach the goal of reduction or elimination of animal products from the menu, we are mostly offering only one, which is hard: go vegan. No work on the deeper mechanisms that drive people. 

We keep arguing with the mind while the craving lives in the body. Many people do not only want to stop eating meat, they want to stop wanting it. Philosophers call the deeper wish a second-order desire: what I want to want. It restores the person's own chosen direction. If we're technically able to solve the desired problem, we could be in a situation where we don't need to convince people to change their food choices but just to agree to change their desires. In this world, it will be less about what you do and more about what you want because the first will follow the latter. 

Biology Already Changes What We Want to Eat

We can call it desire modification: deliberately, with full consent, helping a person's body want what that person has already decided to want. This is body-mind alignment, and it could be potentially achieved by different interventions such as safely reducing craving, creating an aversion, and making consumption unpleasant. A research program could explore several possibilities:

• Reducing craving
  • GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic and its family, the weight loss shots) already show that medicine can change appetite. In KFF's November 2025 poll, 18% of US adults said they had used these drugs and 12% were currently using them. Millions of people are already choosing medicines that change how much they feel like eating.
  • Semaglutide, one of these drugs, gives us a concrete example of desire modification. In a 2017 randomized trial with 30 adults with obesity, 12 weeks of treatment reduced liking and wanting for fatty, savory foods compared with placebo. In a 2021 trial with 72 adults with obesity, participants reported fewer cravings for dairy and less desire for sweet and savory foods after 20 weeks.
  • What does this mean for what people actually eat? A 2025 consumer survey found lower reported beef consumption among GLP-1 users, but it cannot establish that the drugs caused the difference. The trials show changes in food preferences and cravings, but do not establish a selective reduction in desire for animal products. Could these drugs already be reducing meat consumption at a scale comparable to alternative proteins? Or maybe they shift consumption into smaller animals like fish?
  • The open question for desire modification is whether we can make these changes selective for meat or animal products rather than food in general. Even a partial effect, a pill that makes meat less appealing while a person takes it, could be the "nicotine patch" of this fight, if it proved safe and its effects wore off as intended. On the flip side, could making plant-based food more desirable also make it easier to stop eating meat?
  • Could there be nicotine patches analogous to meat addiction? 
• Making consumption unpleasant
  • Medicine: disulfiram can deter drinking by causing a very unpleasant reaction to alcohol, which can be dangerous in severe cases. Its effects can persist for up to 14 days after stopping. Giving people who choose it a commitment device their body enforces. 
  • Is it possible to create a chewing gum that leaves specific chemical compounds on the tongue, which then interact with meat proteins to produce a mildly unpleasant aftertaste?
  • A tick bite can make mammalian meat unsafe to eat. When she bites, she can trigger alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy to a sugar molecule found in mammalian meat. The CDC identified more than 110,000 suspected cases between 2010 and 2022 and estimates that as many as 450,000 Americans may be affected. The tick changes what people can safely eat. That does not mean she removes their desire for it. Alpha-gal does not cover chickens or fishes. It belongs here as an example of how the immune system can force dietary change, but it does not establish that a mild, controllable, reversible version is possible.
• Creating an aversion
  • Pregnancy can bring strong food aversions, including to meat. Protection against food-borne pathogens is one proposed evolutionary explanation. 
  • Conditioned taste aversion: I have not eaten a tomato since childhood. Maybe some unpleasant event I no longer remember paired tomatoes with nausea, once, and my body signed a contract my mind was never consulted about. Psychologists call learning to dislike a food after it is associated with sickness conditioned taste aversion. It can happen after a single pairing.
  • We may learn something from the history of aversion therapy.
• Further out. Microbiome interventions, and one day perhaps gene therapies. I flag them for completeness and hold them loosely.

I am not claiming any specific approach works, but I think the overall idea deserves attention. I don't know how technically challenging this would be. Meat or animal products are a category of food, not a single taste or molecule. 

Consent is the Whole Foundation

Let me say the uncomfortable part plainly. "Changing what people want" has a dark history, most infamously in attempts to "cure" gay men. So I emphasize voluntary and informed choice, with the ability to stop treatment. I hope that we can create drugs that will help people stop eating animal products, some of them completely reversible. We could prioritize effects that wear off predictably. 

Humanity celebrate treatments that help people drink less, smoke less, eat less. In many ways, this will not be so different than what is already done. 

Nobody Working on This?

Neglectedness may be the strongest part of this case. In 2012, Liao, Sandberg, and Roache proposed meat intolerance as human engineering against climate change. They explicitly described their proposal as voluntary and even suggested hypothetical ‘meat patches’, akin to nicotine patches.

The 2025 paper "Beneficial Bloodsucking" took a different route, arguing for a strong moral obligation, other things equal, to promote tickborne alpha-gal syndrome (causing allergy to red meat). A published response challenges that argument. 

In my preliminary search, I have not found a dedicated organization or funded program developing voluntary biological meat-reduction aids specifically to reduce animal suffering. If you know of one, please correct me in the comments. 

First Steps for Assessing this Intervention Space

Questions that can be investigated to assess the feasibility of this space:

• Measure demand. Run the survey: "If a safe, reversible, affordable treatment made you crave meat less, would you take it?" This survey can also specifically ask vegans who lapsed, reducers who struggle, and meat eaters who say they wish they could stop. Then vary the price, side effects, size of the effects, and time until the effect wears off (mild temporary aversion vs permanent severe one).
• A scoping review. Map evidence on biological pathways that affect appetite for meat, food preferences, and aversion, separating findings in humans from findings in other animals. Identify what is actually known about safety, selectivity, and reversibility.
• Assess feasibility before a pilot. Ask clinicians and researchers which, if any, existing approaches seem best for testing for this purpose.

Talk to the people who develop and evaluate treatments for a living. Regulatory requirements may play a big role in understanding the best intervention to explore.

Reasons This Could Backfire or not work

• It may take an enormous amount of money and time (including for regulatory approval), depending on the specific intervention. But it may be that AI will make scientific discoveries much easier and faster, and our job could be only to start the seeds of such a research endeavor (like some animal advocates have done with alternative proteins a little more than a decade ago). 
• Safety risks. A treatment would need evidence that its benefits justify its risks in the people using it (every treatment has some risks, even if they are very mild). An acceptable tradeoff when treating a serious medical condition may not be acceptable for someone seeking help with a food desires for ethical reasons. Effects on nutrition and enjoyment of food will matter to people too.
• Small animal replacement. A treatment that only touches red meat could push people toward chickens, fishes, and shrimps and increase suffering. In a 2015 US survey, 37% of people reducing red or processed meat reported eating more poultry or seafood. 
• Backlash and weirdness tax. This could be mitigated by being clear about consent. The appeal could include health or environmental motives, emphasizing the human-freedom to choose what they really want. I think the AI age will bring much more openness to humans changing themselves from the inside, not only for medical reasons but also for enhancement, playfulness, lifestyle, ethics, and welfare. This could bring a whole new, much bigger space of human ethical engineering and modification for moral alignment, drugs to shift food preferences being just one example.
• Medicalizing a moral question. If the solution to an ethical problem becomes a pill, do we weaken the moral muscle we ultimately need, for animals and for everything else? One counterargument to this argument is that behavior can improve moral values, not only the other way around. In this interview of Tobias Leenaert with professor Cor van der Weele (2016), she says: “In some cases, people adopt attitudes that accompany the behavior that they are already demonstrating”. In this experiment, eating meat reduced the perceived obligation to show moral concern for animals. Now you might say, "but these people that want to stop eating meat are already convinced", yet I think they are somewhere on a spectrum, and giving up meat can move their commitment and values forward. 

Open Questions

• Can preference modulation be made selective enough to reduce animal-product consumption while preserving appetite for a nourishing diet?
• What does the demand curve for such a treatment actually look like, at what price, for which populations?
• Who should develop this at the very first stages: academia, a nonprofit, a company?
• What attempts have been made to reduce craving for specific foods and why were some of these attempts abandoned? You could theoretically think there is a big incentive to try to modify humans' desire for food to crave healthy food and have an aversion to unhealthy food but as far as I'm aware no such treatments exist. 

Epilogue

We have spent decades asking people to change what they eat. We need to continue with that, but simultaneously develop treatments to help people change what they are involuntarily longing for.

Any feedback is very welcome.