A study of more than 21,000 adults found an unusual link between psilocybin and diet

A large UK cohort study examined whether psychedelic use, environmental attitudes, and everyday food choices might be connected in ways researchers have rarely tested together.

Study: Lifetime classic psychedelics use is associated with positive environmental attitudes and adopting a vegetarian diet. Image Credit: New Africa / Shutterstock

Want to read later? Download your clean, ad-free, print-friendly PDF copy by clicking here.

A recent study in the journal Scientific Reports examines whether lifetime use of psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is associated with environmental attitudes and dietary behaviors.

Psychedelics, Health, and Environmental Attitudes

Psychedelic drugs are psychoactive compounds, such as psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca/dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and mescaline, which primarily alter perception, mood, and cognition by acting on serotonin receptors. Interest in both the acute and long-term effects of these substances has increased in recent years.

Clinical research suggests that, when psychedelics are administered under professional supervision, they have a favorable safety profile and potential therapeutic applications for several psychiatric conditions and some physical health conditions. Major research gaps remain regarding their broader impacts and mechanisms.

Epidemiological data link lifetime psychedelic use with self-reported better health, lower rates of overweight and obesity, and reduced cardiometabolic risk. Similar trends are observed for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), a synthetic stimulant and empathogen. Most evidence remains correlational, and underlying mechanisms are not well understood.

There are indications that psychedelics may encourage healthier behaviors, such as improved diet, and that psychedelic culture emphasizes environmental awareness and healthy living. Direct empirical evidence linking psychedelic use to sustained health behavior change is limited.

Preliminary evidence associates psychedelic use with increased climate change awareness and pro-environmental behavior, possibly through heightened nature-relatedness. The directionality and causality of these relationships are unclear, and no previous research has directly examined whether associations between psychedelic use and environmental attitudes extend to health behaviors.

How Lifetime Psychedelic Use Relates to Pro-environmental Attitudes and Dietary Behaviors

The researchers hypothesized that psychedelic use is associated with stronger environmental attitudes and healthier diets, with environmental attitudes potentially mediating this relationship, particularly in terms of vegetarianism and red meat consumption.

The study used nationally representative data from the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), focusing on adults in their early 30s and 40s during the 1999-2000 follow-up. The analysis included measures of psychedelic use (psilocybin, LSD), environmental attitudes, and dietary behaviors.

Dietary variables were categorized as healthy (fruit, salads, raw vegetables, wholemeal bread) or unhealthy (red meat, fried foods, sweets, biscuits, chips). The authors noted that this grouping is debatable, so results were reported for each food item rather than combined into composite scores. Environmental attitudes were assessed using three Likert-scale items, and vegetarian status was recorded as a yes/no variable.

Psychedelic use (never used, used previously but not in the past year, or used in the past year) served as the independent variable. Control variables included sex, age at leaving full-time education, lifetime cocaine use, frequency of alcohol consumption, cohort membership, and authoritarian attitudes; models also included the other psychedelic-use variable. Alcohol and cocaine use were controlled to separate psychedelic associations from those related to other common psychoactive substances. Cases with missing values were excluded from analyses.

Associations between psychedelic use, environmental attitudes, and dietary behaviors were examined using multivariate regression models (linear and logistic), controlling for key covariates. Mediation analyses using structural equation modeling evaluated whether environmental attitudes mediated the relationship between psychedelic use and dietary outcomes.

Psychedelic Use Is Associated With Pro-environmental Attitudes and Vegetarian Diets

This study investigated how the use of psilocybin and LSD relates to dietary patterns and environmental attitudes. About 10% of participants reported previous psilocybin use, while 9% reported previous LSD use. About 0.5% reported using each substance within the past year. Because many participants had used both drugs, these percentages cannot be added to estimate the number who had used either substance.

Model-adjusted estimates placed the probability of vegetarianism at 14% for recent psilocybin users, compared with 4% for never-users. Among those who had used psilocybin only in the more distant past, 9% were vegetarian, while 6% of never-users reported following a vegetarian diet. LSD showed a weaker association: 10% of recent users were vegetarian, compared with 6% of never-users, and this difference was not statistically significant.

When comparing the likelihood of being vegetarian, recent psilocybin users were about 3.5 times as likely as never-users, and distant past users were about 1.4 times as likely. Earlier LSD users were also about 1.4 times as likely as never-users to be vegetarian. These ratios were derived from model-adjusted probabilities after accounting for cohort, sex, education, alcohol use, cocaine use, authoritarian attitudes, and the other psychedelic variable.

Looking more closely at other dietary habits, earlier LSD use was linked to slightly less fruit consumption, while past psilocybin use was associated with eating more salads, raw vegetables, and wholemeal bread. Recent psilocybin use was also associated with greater wholemeal bread consumption. Both recent and earlier psilocybin use were associated with lower red meat consumption, while earlier psilocybin use was associated with fewer biscuits and cakes. Earlier LSD use was associated with greater chip consumption. Most of these effects were small, typically less than 0.15 points on the 1-7 dietary frequency scale, which the authors characterized as minor differences in reported eating habits. Larger differences were reported for wholemeal bread and red meat among recent psilocybin users, but the authors described the dietary associations overall as practically modest.

To understand what might explain these dietary differences, further analysis explored the role of environmental attitudes. Mediation models were consistent with full statistical mediation of the association between psilocybin use and vegetarianism by environmental attitudes, and with partial statistical mediation of the association between psilocybin use and reduced red meat consumption. These mediation findings do not establish a causal pathway.

The authors also examined overlap between psilocybin and LSD use. Among participants reporting recent use of either substance, 153 had used only one and 44 had used both; among those reporting earlier use, 1,770 had used only one and 1,190 had used both. These numbers indicated that the separate psilocybin and LSD estimates were not based only on a small group who had used both substances.

Conclusions

The current retrospective observational study found that psychedelic use was linked to modest differences in several reported dietary behaviors. Recent psilocybin use was associated with greater wholemeal bread consumption and lower red meat intake. The mediation analyses linked pro-environmental attitudes to part of the association between psilocybin use and red meat intake and were consistent with full statistical mediation for vegetarianism.

Because the relevant variables were measured in the same 2000 survey wave, the study cannot establish whether psychedelic use preceded or caused the dietary differences. Participants were not asked about psychedelic use frequency or contextual factors such as set and setting, and the authors cautioned that multiple statistical tests increased the chance of false-positive findings for individual foods. Future prospective cohort studies are needed to confirm these associations and clarify the relationships among psychedelic use, environmental attitudes, and dietary patterns.

Journal reference:

• Teixeira, P. J. et al. (2026) Lifetime classic psychedelics use is associated with positive environmental attitudes and adopting a vegetarian diet. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-71275-x, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-71275-x