A month of eating mostly plant based meals changed how I think about food. It also put me one search away from a statistic that could have talked me out of continuing entirely: 84 percent of vegetarians and vegans go back to eating meat. I looked it up expecting to feel discouraged. What I found instead was a genuinely contested number, and the argument over it turned out to matter more than the number itself.
The figure comes from a 2014 study by Faunalytics, a research nonprofit focused on animal advocacy, based on a survey of over 11,000 North Americans. The finding was real: there are more than five times as many former vegetarians and vegans as current ones, meaning roughly 84 percent of people who ever identified that way eventually stopped. It’s a legitimate study, and it’s been cited constantly since.
It’s also been criticized just as consistently, including by researchers in the same field. The study counted anyone who had ever tried a vegetarian or vegan diet for any length of time, including people who lasted a matter of weeks. Within the Faunalytics data itself, about a third of former vegetarians and vegans maintained the diet for three months or less, and just over half quit within a year. That’s not really measuring long term commitment failing. It’s measuring how many people briefly experimented and moved on, folded into the same number as people who tried for years.
Larger, longer running research complicates the picture further. The EPIC-Oxford Study, involving more than half a million participants tracked over a much longer period, has found substantially lower rates of people abandoning vegetarian or vegan diets than the 2014 Faunalytics snapshot suggests. Dr. Bob McKay, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield who studies representations of veganism, has raised a more specific objection to how the finding gets talked about: he argues the framing borrows language from religious conversion, lapsing, abandonment, in a way that implies moral failure rather than just describing an ordinary behavior change.
What actually predicted whether someone stuck with it, according to Faunalytics’ own follow up analysis, wasn’t willpower. It was social context. People who stayed involved in a vegetarian or vegan community, a potluck group, an online forum, any kind of ongoing social connection to others doing the same thing, were far more likely to maintain the diet. Eighty four percent of people who lapsed reported no active involvement in any such group at all. Living with a non-vegetarian partner also showed up repeatedly as a factor in people reverting, in about a third of lapses specifically.
That reframes the whole statistic for me. The number was never really measuring whether plant based eating works as a personal choice. It was measuring whether people had support structures around them to sustain a choice that runs against the default habits of almost everyone they eat with. My own month worked, in part, because I had a specific challenge, a community of other people doing it alongside me, and a public commitment that made backing out feel different than quietly going back to old habits alone.
So the honest version of what I’m carrying forward isn’t a diet. It’s a recognition that the diet was never going to be the hard part. The hard part, according to every piece of research I could find, is staying connected to people still doing it with you after the structured month ends and nobody’s watching anymore.