Time to read:
TLDR
- Only 70% of vegans quit, the 84% is for vegetarians and vegans
- Of the vegans and ex-vegans, only 6% reported health issues at all and if you eliminate vague reasons like “sick”, the figure is closer to 3%.
People often cite “84% of vegans quit” as evidence that the diet is nutritionally incomplete or incompatible with good health. There is a logic error in this conclusion but let’s tackle the empirics first. Is it even true that 84% of vegans quit? The claim relates to this survey by Faunalytics. One of the first bullet points says “84% of vegetarians/vegans abandon their diet.” and that seems to be as far as people who cite this claim make it into this blog (assuming they are even aware of what they are referncing, most just heard it on tiktok and couldn’t give you the reference if you asked.)
So the first mistake here is that 84% of vegetarians and vegans quitting does not mean 84% of vegans, and when you open the full report you see that 70% of vegans quit not 84%.
The second mistake in this claim is assuming that all quitters quit due to health reasons when you’d also know this is not true if you open the full report which states that for the majority of quitters, health was not a main difficulty.
In the full report in page 7 they also give some more details about people that quit, noting that 71% of former vegetarians and vegans reported no health issues. And of those that did report health issues, 18% reported no improvement with reintroduction of meat and 20% reported improvement in less than a week, which can almost certainly be attributed to placebo as no nutrient deficiency severe enough to cause subjective symptoms will reverse this fast.
We can plot these numbers on a Sankey chart, with this in mind you find that of people that decide to go vegetarian or vegan
- About 60% quit but for reasons besides health
- 16% stick to it
- 8.38% quit but their issues are not fixed by meat/dairy/eggs or they are fixed too quickly to be taken seriously.
But these numbers are for both vegetarians and vegans combined, when you look at 54 current and 129 ex-vegans alone the claim starts to become even sillier.
You find that of the 129 ex-vegans, 123 gave reasons and of those, 104 had no health issues. So even if we take the reported health issues seriously, 13.7% of current and former vegans report health issues, a far shot from the original claim insinuating that most people get health issues and quit. But it gets better, the cited “health issues” are mostly based on worries and feelings and vague complaints not actual tested nor diagnosed issues. Here are a few:
- “sick”
- “seriously doubted any of the benefits and feel that a human is meant to consume animal protein and dairy”
- “I flet I need better sources of protein.”
- “was not getting enough protein to keep up with how active i am.”
- “Wanted a little more protein”
- “health issues”
You get the idea. In addition some responses are just confusing, indicating they weren’t even vegan but somehow picked the option that they are, or that they didn’t even quit but somehow ended up lumped with the quitters, some also were never intending on it being a permanent change so of course they quit.
- “experimenting”
- “Just wanted to”
- “was for religious reasons and the fast was over, however, i have incorporated some of the principles, like cutting out dairy into my regular diet”
- “was only trying it – couldn’t handle it. I love ravioli…”
- “I was experimenting.”
- “Done trying it out.”
When you go through all the reasons and filter the ones that could reasonably be called “health issues” you end up with 11 people, 6 of whom report vague health issues like “sick”, “lightheaded”, “not healthy”, and “health issues” that require a heavy serving of salt.
So at the end of the day, you end up with 3.3% of people who try a vegan diet reporting some specific enough health issues that could reasonably be attributed to something besides nocebo, and 6% that report any health issues at all including the vague ones.