Why do vegans quit? What former vegetarians and vegans say, and what set them apart

The food, if you ask them, and then their health. Among the difficulties Faunalytics’ 2014 US survey singled out, the widest gap between quitters and the people who stayed was identity. Of former vegetarians and vegans, 58% didn’t see the diet as part of who they were, against 11% of current ones.

Those two answers come from the same survey, and they don’t line up. When Faunalytics asked former vegetarians and vegans for the main reason they stopped, it could code 908 of the answers. Dissatisfaction with the food came up in 32% of them and health in 26%, with social issues and inconvenience at 13% each. None of the main categories it reported is about identity. Yet when the same survey set quitters beside people still eating that way, the two widest gaps it highlighted were about how people held the diet, not what was on the plate. Besides identity, 43% of quitters had come to feel it was too hard to keep the diet pure, against 11% of current vegetarians and vegans. Cravings came next, with 37% of quitters tempted by poultry and 35% by beef or pork, against 9% and 7%. The social items separated them least. Of the quitters, 63% disliked that the diet made them stick out from the crowd, against 41%. How many people quit in the first place, and how much meat they eat afterward, is in our piece on why veganism is so popular.

Who stays, and who they eat with

Some quitters’ own stories turn on the people at home. A third of them, 33%, were living with a partner who wasn’t vegetarian or vegan when they lapsed. In the open answers, some said they stopped because the person who had steered them toward the diet was gone, a vegetarian or vegan family member (often a child) who moved out, or a partner they had split up with. Almost half, 49%, said they’d had too little contact with other vegetarians and vegans, against 25% of current ones. A smaller study of 247 people who limited animal products, from pescatarians to vegans, only 51 of them former, recruited through online message boards and by referral, found a similar shape. The current ones were more likely to have changed gradually and to have joined a vegetarian or vegan group, and they described their way of eating as part of their identity. Support turned up again in a 2018 reanalysis of Faunalytics’ survey data, published in Appetite, which looked at 1,313 current and former vegetarians and vegans and found that more conservative people had greater odds of being former ones. The authors traced that to two things. Those people had gone veg for reasons less centered on justice, such as animal rights, the environment and feeding the poor, and they felt less supported. Differences in meat cravings and inconvenience explained little of that link.

One number from the 2014 survey gets quoted more than it deserves. That 84% of quitters weren’t active in any vegetarian or vegan group sounds damning until you see that 71% of the people still eating that way weren’t either. Mostly it tells you that few people of either kind belong to a vegetarian or vegan group, online or off.

The reason people went veg in the first place shows up too. In interviews with 19 ex-vegetarians and 15 continuing ones, the ex-vegetarians were more likely to have started out of concern for animals’ well-being and the environment rather than for animal rights, which the authors call a value more difficult to compromise. Even people who stay sometimes give way at the table. In a 2019 survey of 243 vegetarians, 51% said they had eaten meat since going vegetarian, most often at family gatherings and special occasions, and often to make a social situation flow more smoothly.

Most of this research is about vegetarians, and this is a vegan site. The 2014 survey counted 1,037 former vegetarians and 129 former vegans. Among people who had ever been vegan, 70% had stopped, against 86% of people who had ever been vegetarian, and Faunalytics found relatively few differences between former vegetarians and former vegans in what they eat now, why they went veg and what they found hard.

The health reason, read closely

Health is the reason I’d least want to wave away, because it’s the one people feel in their own bodies. In the open answers, the most common health complaint was nutrient concerns or deficiencies, perceived or actual, with protein in 37 of those 85 answers and iron in 21. The 2014 survey also asked quitters whether, while on the diet, they had developed any of 14 listed problems, from protein deficiency to depression or anxiety. Of the quitters, 71% reported none of them, and iron deficiency, at 11%, was the only one reported by more than 10%. Among those who did report one, 82% said some or all of their conditions improved after they started eating meat again. Being frequently fatigued or light-headed showed no statistically significant link with whether someone was a current or former vegetarian or vegan.

Faunalytics’ initial 2014 reading was that health did not present a noticeable difficulty for its participants, with one exception, B12 monitoring. Its 2023 re-coding of largely the same people’s answers is less flat, with about 30% of lapsed vegetarians and vegans seeing health issues as a difficulty. Of the quitters in the 2014 survey, 76% had never had their B12 levels checked while on the diet, against 42% of current vegetarians and vegans. That’s the one health finding here I’d act on, and our piece on why vegans need B12 explains what the vitamin does and where vegans get it.

The strongest case against my reading

The quitters’ own account deserves its full weight. They were there and I wasn’t. Someone who says they stopped because they were hungry or unwell is describing their own life, and that same 2023 re-coding found that nearly half had trouble with the food itself, from cravings to feeling hungry, the most common obstacle it found. The identity gap may also run backward. These answers were given after the fact, and Faunalytics warns that former vegetarians and vegans may have exaggerated their difficulties to justify what they eat now, while current ones may have played theirs down. Someone who eats meat again is unlikely to describe veganism as who they are. The report calls its findings early and correlational. On this view, telling people to make veganism part of their identity turns a diet into a club and quietly blames the people who found the food hard for not joining hard enough.

Where I land

I think both answers are true. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the food is what people notice on the day they stop, while who they are and who they eat with decides how many bad weeks they get through before that day comes. Our line is that if you want to stay vegan, you’d do well to give yourself what the people who stayed were more likely to report. One is a reason that reaches past your own plate: 68% of current vegetarians and vegans in the 2014 survey cited animal protection, against 27% of quitters, though the report notes that quitters looking back may have downplayed motives they once had. The other is a diet that feels like yours rather than a test you keep failing, and the purity gap is the one I’d watch. Someone at the table who eats the way you do can’t hurt either, given that partners and family came up in some quitters’ answers. That’s the site’s advice, and nothing here tested it.

The part I’m least sure about is that direction. Whether seeing yourself as vegan keeps you vegan, or whether staying vegan for a few years is what makes it feel like yours, is something none of these surveys could separate. If you’ve been through a lapse and come back, you’d know better than any table in a PDF. And if it’s the food that’s wearing thin, which is what quitters name first, our piece on being vegan when you don’t like vegetables starts with lentils and fruit.