Do 84% of Vegans Really Quit Their Diets?

The Manosphere's favourite stat.

Joe Rogan is a man of many talents. He could kick the head off a moose, his bear impression is on point, and perhaps most exceptionally, he can believe just about anything you tell him as long as it’s what he wants to hear. I’m starting to think the only reason he has a producer google things on the show is because he’s physically incapable of typing words into the search bar himself.

One of the topics that fires up his bullshit engine is diet. He’s a strong believer that vegan diets are unfit for human consumption, and are always destined to fail - despite the fact that that was debunked on his own show. One statistic he’s fond of bringing up is that 84% of vegans go back on their diet. Is this true? Well, kind of - but the truth, unsurprisingly, is not what he makes it out to be.

The first thing to point out is that the study cited includes vegetarians as well, so anyone attaching this number to veganism has already made a misstep (albeit, a pretty small one). There’s also the fact that the first study in this series was conducted in 2014 when it was significantly harder to be vegan.

The main mistake, however, is to act as though the people abandoning their diets are hardcore animal lovers, who’re forced to quit veganism because their frail bodies are turning to dust.

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When your friend orders a cauliflower steak.

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Why did people go vegan?

People included in the study were allowed to select more than one motivation for changing their diets. Only 27% of the former vegan/vegetarians cited Animal protection as an original motivation. What was the most popular reason? Health, at 58%. Other motivations included environmental, spiritual, and financial.

Now, I don’t know how familiar you guys are with dieting, but it’s notoriously difficult. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a high recidivism rate when most of the people included in this study were motivated by losing a few pounds and opening up their arteries. People who try healthy omnivorous diets for those reasons also recede at very high rates.

This is why there’s something problematic about extrapolating from this study that veganism is intrinsically unhealthy. Every January my gym is flooded with people trying keep a New Year’s Resolution, and every March it’s empty again. Is this because resistance training is bad for us? No, we’re just bad at keeping up healthy habits because our ape brains want us to wank and eat skittles until we die.

The reasons we have for taking up a vegan diet obviously play a role with how likely we are to maintain it - I’ve even seen this first hand. I first went vegan for environmental reasons in 2018 and I only kept it up for a few months. I also lost a lot of weight (This is by far the most common health complaint of former vegans, and it betrays that they just weren’t eating enough). I decided to start eating meat again out of laziness, feeling defeated about climate change, and because I thought I needed it to gain mass.

Fast forward a few years and I go vegan again for ethical reasons. After 3 years there hasn’t been one moment where I’ve considered going back, and I make sure I eat enough to stay healthy. Why? Because when you change for ethical reasons, animal products stop looking like food to you, and you’re no more tempted to buy a hotdog than you are to stick your cat in the oven.

By contrast, if someone goes vegan for health reasons, not only are animal products still food to them, but they’re also tempting food. They’re the sort of thing that take a lot of willpower to resist, and willpower almost always fails in the long run.

Why do people quit veganism?

People who abandoned their diet gave their primary reason for doing so:

Unsatisfied with food: 32%
Health: 26%
Social Issues: 13%
Inconvenience: 13%
Lack of Motication: 6%
Other: 25%

So, while Health is still the second most popular primary reason, notice how it’s still only 1/4 of people. This is a far cry from what’s implied by Rogan and Rogan-esque people when they quote the 84% stat. Their treatment of this data is misleading, to say the least.

Of those 26%, more detailed answers were given.

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You’ll notice that some of these show that while they technically abandoned their diets for health reasons, it’s not because they were becoming unhealthy. Pregnancy, No weight loss/health benefit, and Began to doubt health benefits all don’t imply that they were becoming unwell. Doctor Recommended, Nutrient concerns, Athletic Concerns, and Other are ambiguous. The remaining people are the only ones we know complained of ailing health, and they only add up to 81 - which is just 9% of the total people who abandoned their vegan diet. Let’s say, for sake of fairness, that half of the ambiguous ones also complained of ailing health. That bumps it up to 15%.

So, of the people that abandoned their diet, an estimated 15% of people did it because they believed they had ailing health. The abandoners made up 84%, so that means that 12.5% of the total people in the study quit because of ailing health. This is way smaller than the roided up podcasters make it out to be!

I also think we have some reason to doubt the number is actually this high. We are great rationalizers, and ailing health is by far the reason to quit that is most gentle to the ego. I know because I went with it when I first quit! I made it out as if there was something special in meat, and quietly ignored that I had eaten nothing but hash browns and dark chocolate for 6 months.

So, whenever you hear this number thrown around, remember these:

• The number of people reporting ailing health as a reason is probably more like 12.5%.

• People like to rationalize and it’s likely at least some of those 12.5% are lying.

• People often don’t eat enough calories (rapid weight loss/fatigue).

• The data comes from a long time ago when veganism was less normal, and less easy.

These studies are certainly an imperfect way of assessing the health merits of plant based diets. We’re probably better off looking directly at health outcomes, or listening to trusted institutions. Maybe one day we can get Joe to stop throwing these figures around - you never know, it’s entirely possible.