I agree in principle with the core idea here, and I think several of the key challenges are highlighted are very important, but I also think there are areas where this is overstated while missing some of the key considerations, and if we're calling for a more evidence based discussion we need to make sure we are being careful to make sure we ourselves are adhering to that. Honestly I think the best accounting of the genuine challenges are from dietetics bodies such as the British Dietetic association who have clinical expertise: https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/vegetarian-vegan-plant-based-diet.htm/
Generally - I agree that there are a lot of misconceptions around protein and some micronutrients on a vegan diet and those are genuinely misleading to people. Nowhere is this more obvious than at restaurants where a vegetable is treated as a like-for-like replacement for a piece of meat (e.g., cauliflower wings / mushroom instead of a burger). This is not nutritionally sound. Likewise, a lot of people going vegan like the self selected diet in the referenced study do not make nutritionally sound choices all the time because information is often of poor quality.
However, I actually think the conclusion goes too far the other way in saying that vegan diets are neccessarily either a lot of effort or inadequate - it may be that this was once the case but it is no longer and I think limits the scope of the movement pretending it is. In today's environment, many of the challenges are fairly straightforward to mitigate with swaps and alternatives based on fairly simple criteria, and with more consistency in those alternatives that will hopefully increasingly be the case.
I don't think it makes sense to be overly prescriptive on what an optimal diet looks like as it's different for different people, but I do think as more and more people want to be vegan, we need to make sure that it is accessible without needing a lot of knowledge or extra work. We do this with public health all the time such as with the fortification of flours etc and I think there has been for too long exceptionalism in treating vegan diets like they don't need the same support systems that are built into our mainstream food system and this has let people down. We see in the preliminary findings from the follow-up to the Oxford EPIC study however that there have been major improvements in diet quality in vegans in just 10 years https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.09.26357676v1. I agree nutritional epidemiology is a challenging topic (though not neccessarily for the above reasons outlined - the primary challenges in my view are the tiny samples and the non-representative people who are over-represented in vegan cohorts broadly) but as we get more vegans we get better data - especially when we can match it up with the growing number of RCTs and interventional studies.
A pet peeve too, but I have a very strong aversion to non-clinicians giving advice on pregnancy and nutrition at any point, as this is a very sensitive topic with so much scaremongering, which is really unhelpful and and best left to health professionals.
More broadly though, I think the focus on vegans misses maybe the point if we want to have real change towards healthier and more sustainable diets - because the truth is most people aren't going to be going vegan anytime soon. For the average person, increasing the proportion of their diets coming from plants and fungi is going to be beneficial - and plant-based alternatives can also be a really easy and accessible way of cutting down particularly health-damaging foods like processed meat.
Currently, it is clear people are not familiar with plant-based foods, their nutrition or how they can be useful to improve their diets. I work on plant-based alternatives and nutrition and the lack of knowledge from most people - even in sustainable diet spaces - is really striking (and badly skewed by the UPF discourse which as you point out above often misrepresents them). I think there are some really cool foods with some really interesting nutritional properties (like mycoprotein and extruded vegetable protein) which are badly underexplored expressly because people view them as simply an uncanny valley meat replacement for vegans, when they have a lot of really interesting properties when viewed as valuable foods in their own right - and that's what gives them the biggest potential to move the needle on public health, the environment and animal suffering.
Thanks, I really appreciate the thoughtful comment.
On the BDA guidance, I agree that nutrition associations are a valuable source of expertise. However, their primary role is to prevent deficiencies in the general population. Their vegan-specific advice is often rather superficial and leaves out a lot of relevant context. For example, on zinc, the BDA acknowledges that absorption from plant foods is lower, but doesn't explain important practical implications: vegans often have relatively low intakes when taking into account bioavailability, and supplements are typically formulated for both men and women despite men having higher zinc requirements. This is where vegan organisations can add value.
I want to emphasise that I don't argue that vegan diets are inherently "either a lot of effort or inadequate". Many of the challenges I discuss arise from the current food environment, and I think we should work on changing it so that healthy vegan diets require less knowledge and effort. That's also why I strongly agree with your point about fortification. I found the FEED study encouraging for exactly that reason, and I think it supports your point that things have improved at least in some areas. B12 is a good example of where I think the vegan movement has done very well: the need for supplementation is widely communicated, and plant-based alternatives are now commonly fortified with B12. More generally, I think plant-based milk in particular has been quite a success story in terms of fortification. A recent UK study found that in 2024, 71% of non-organic plant-based milk alternatives were fortified with B12, 84% with vitamin D and 88% with calcium. The UK food environment has also specifically incentivised calcium fortification in plant-based drinks. To me, that shows how better information and better product formulation can reduce nutritional challenges.
At the same time, these improvements are not universal. In the UK and EU, organic plant-based products are not fortified, and the food environment has adapted much less comprehensively to several other nutritional issues, such as protein, EPA/DHA, zinc, iodine and vitamin A. The broader FEED data also give a mixed picture, with vegans showing less favourable results across a number of nutrients. It is also worth noting that FEED is a separate contemporary cohort from EPIC-Oxford, recruited in part through organisations including the Vegan Society and Vegetarian Society, rather than a longitudinal follow-up of the EPIC-Oxford participants. I would therefore be cautious about interpreting the FEED findings as showing "major improvements in diet quality in vegans" in general. More research is needed.
On pregnancy, I agree that this is a sensitive topic and that individual advice should come from qualified health professionals. But I think there is an important distinction between giving individual advice and discussing at a general level what the available evidence and different nutrition authorities say, including where there is uncertainty or disagreement. This piece is not intended as a guide for individual advice, but as a commentary on movement communication strategy.
On the broader point that most people are unlikely to go vegan soon, I completely agree. I strongly support focusing on increasing the proportion of plant foods in people's diets and I agree that plant-based alternatives can make that much easier. This post focuses specifically on vegan nutrition because that is where the communication problem I'm examining arises, not because I think veganism is the only or even the main near-term pathway to reducing animal product consumption at the population level.
I also agree with much of what you say about alternatives like mycoprotein and extruded vegetable protein, and I'm actually quite excited about the potential of alternative proteins more generally. My point on UPFs is mainly that there is huge variation in nutritional quality, and most people can't easily distinguish weaker from better products. I therefore think the vegan movement should be more willing to criticise weaker products and highlight better ones based on concrete nutritional dimensions such as protein content, fortification or additives, rather than focusing primarily on countering concerns about UPFs in general.
Given that you raise the importance of clinical expertise in several places, I want to mention that I took that seriously and asked several people with relevant clinical or nutrition backgrounds to review it before publication, including Ginny Messina, who provided extensive feedback. She is a registered dietitian who has co-authored two earlier position papers on vegetarian diets for the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and has long advocated for more evidence-based vegan nutrition communication (for example here). At the same time, I think the discussion ultimately has to focus on the evidence and arguments themselves. Nutrition experts also disagree on many of these questions, so if you think I make any specific factual claims that are incorrect or insufficiently supported, I'd genuinely be interested to hear which ones, and whether you see them as load-bearing for the broader argument.
I also rely on Sunday Natural, and I think it’s a solid brand to recommend :)
The topic of supplement brands brings up an additional complication not mentioned in the post which is the lax regulatory enforcement of the supplement industry and the resulting problems with variable quality that brings. Even when comparatively reputable brands such as Sunday Natural publish third-party analyses of their products, this only tells us that the particular batch fell within the EU commission's tolerance for error which is a very wide ~ +50%/-20% for vitamins and minerals.
I therefore wonder whether campaigning for supplements to be regulated not as food products but rather as medicines could be a strategy to pursue in the vegan movement.
As a side note, I think the multivitamin linked is also a useful example of how even brands such as Sunday Natural can contribute to consumer confusion around vegan nutrition. The first line of the product page claims: 'VeganLife Bioactive provides all essential nutrients for those following a vegan diet in an ideal ratio and in a wide variety of forms.' I think a layperson could reasonably interpret this as meaning that supplement alone would cover all their nutritional needs.
Yet calcium, which 76% of vegans fall short of, is only present at 120mg (15% of the RDA). Unless people taking this supplement are consuming large amounts of low-oxalate greens and fortified alt dairy or taking additional calcium supplements (as I do), they will likely fall below the RDA despite taking the multivitamin.
There are similar issues with likely insufficient coverage of choline, iron and zinc (the last two reflect a broader issue with multivitamins which are marketed for all sexes, despite the fact needs differ significantly e.g. due to menstruation). So unfortunately, even companies specialising in nutrition sometimes spread messaging that could lead vegans to unknowingly fall below adequate intakes of key nutrients which I think adds to the case Chris made to invest more in building clear, evidence-based messaging to educate all levels from consumers to companies.
Just to be clear, I’m not meaning this as a criticism of your personal recommendations at all. Just using it as an example to add a few of my own thoughts to expand the broader point of Chris's piece :)
Thanks for adding this, Elizabeth, and no worries, I didn't take it as criticism at all. I just wanted to share this as a starting point, not as a recommendation. When I went vegan I would have appreciated seeing a concrete example like this. Your point about calcium and the regulatory gap is well taken though, definitely something worth flagging for anyone relying on a multivitamin alone.
Good article. I agree with pretty much everything you write in the first part. Many vegans do not take the risk of nutrient deficiencies seriously enough, and that is a big risk to the long-term growth of our movement. I do think it is mostly an issue with verbal advice (''just take some B12 and you'll be fine''), as any well-designed vegan challenge or beginners guide will cover nutrition more in-depth.
A few comments on the nutrition review:
1. You state: ''vegans often fall short of the intakes recommended by nutrition authorities for several nutrients''. This is true, and definitely a problem, but the same thing also applies to omnivores (the data below is from the Netherlands, but it will likely be similar in many other European countries):
''Representative dietary intake data from the Netherlands revealed that a large part of the population has inadequate intakes of calcium, iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E and folate. Population sub-groups especially at risk of inadequate intakes were adolescents and women.'' (Ref: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-023-03219-4).
2. An important nutrient you didn't mention is iron. Iron deficiency is very common in young women due to blood loss from their menstruation, and the risk is even higher in vegans. A lot of women who quit veganism citing health reasons say they had very little energy on a vegan diet, and it improved when they started eating meat again. That is very likely due to iron deficiency, which they could have easily fixed through a supplement.
3. Iodine deficiency is also a risk worth paying attention to. Unless vegans regularly eat seaweed, or use salt with a lot of added iodine, they are likely to be deficient and should consider supplementing. (Note: despite what many people believe, using standard iodized kitchen salt is usually not sufficient to prevent deficiency, as it often contains just 20 - 25mcg of iodine per gram. This means you would need 6 - 7.5g daily to reach the RDA for iodine, which would put you above the tolerable upper limit for sodium intake).
4. You mention EPA/DHA supplements as something every vegan should take. However, there isn't really a scientific consensus on that. According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (2025 position statement):
''EPA and DHA can be obtained through vegan algal supplements if desired or recommended by a nutrition and dietetics practitioner, although this may not be a requirement for health or disease prevention.95,96,99,101,102,108,110 New methodology involving isotope studies suggest that the rate of ALA conversion may be sufficient to maintain adequate DHA levels through plant-sourced ALA consumption alone,90,111-114 although more research is warranted.
Until consistent evidence from intervention trials can establish daily dosages for EPA/DHA in vegetarians and vegans, advice for healthy adults should focus on sufficient and regular intakes of ALA-rich foods, which also provide an array of health-promoting phytonutrients and fiber.110'' (Ref: https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(25)00830-5/fulltext)
Thanks, really appreciate the thoughtful comment. :)
First of all, I don't think this is mainly an issue with informal verbal advice. When I look at the nutrition guidance of major vegan organisations, I see the same broader pattern quite consistently, even though some vegan challenges and beginner guides may be more nuanced. I'd be curious what you think if you compare the specific case studies I discuss with how different organisations communicate about these issues.
On your first point, I agree that inadequate nutrient intakes are not unique to vegans. I added a note in the Nutrition Review for exactly that reason, since standard Western diets have plenty of nutritional problems of their own. At the same time, inadequate intakes are more common among vegans for a substantial number of nutrients. For example, Table 4 in Sobiecki et al. (2016) compares the prevalence of inadequate intakes across different diet groups.
On iron and iodine, I agree that both would have been reasonable additions, and I also considered including them as well as vitamin A, selenium, choline, and several other nutrients. In the end, I decided to keep the selection relatively small because the aim was to illustrate a broader pattern rather than to provide a comprehensive review of every potentially relevant nutrient.
On EPA/DHA, I agree that the evidence does not establish that every healthy vegan needs to supplement it. At the same time, the evidence base is still developing, and there are already several indications of potential long-term health benefits from direct EPA/DHA intake. I therefore think a precautionary approach is reasonable, since we may only find out much later whether relying on ALA alone is sufficient. Given that direct EPA/DHA intake from microalgae is relatively easy, I think there is a strong case for avoiding that risk. I could have made these complexities more explicit, though, so I appreciate you raising it.
I agree that informal verbal advice isn't the only problem. It's just that I've noticed that many vegan advocates tend to casually say that science has proven that you can be perfectly healthy on a vegan diet, without mentioning that those studies don't refer to just any vegan diet, but specifically to a well-planned vegan diet. And most people's diets aren't well planned.
I'm a volunteer on the nutrition team of the Dutch vegan association (NVV), and while I don't know much about the nutrition recommendations of vegan organizations in other countries, I can tell you how we do it. (Though keep in mind that I'm not an official representative of the NVV, so this should be seen as a statement from me personally, not on behalf of the NVV).
One of our principles at the NVV is that we aim to keep our nutrition recommendations as close as possible to the scientific consensus, as reflected in the recommendations of our national health authority. An important reason for that is credibility: deviating from the scientific consensus would make us less credible to both the policymakers we try to influence, as well as the regular people we want to convince to go vegan.
So for protein intake, for instance, the NVV takes the standard advice of 0.8g per kg of bodyweight, multiplied by 1.3 to compensate for the lower digestibility, while acknowledging that athletes and people recovering from illness may benefit from higher intakes. Both the 0.8g and the 1.3x multiplier for vegans are taken directly from the recommendations of the Dutch health authority (Gezondheidsraad), for the reasons stated above.
My issue with some of the things proposed in your narratives is that they deviate from the scientific consensus. While I acknowledge that the scientific consensus can be a bit slow to respond to new insights at times, that same slowness also prevents it from jumping the gun based on limited evidence. It is understandable that you as an individual read a new study and immediately want to make changes to your diet and/or supplements (I've done that multiple times myself), but it is not prudent to do that as a movement.
So overall I think that, at least for our organization, the nutrition recommendations are good. I think the main problem is that a lot of vegans either don't read all of our recommendations, or only read them briefly when they first decide to go vegan and later forget about some of them. Therefore, I think it is important for all vegan organizations to not just educate people about nutrition when they're starting out, but also to remind them periodically about possible gaps in their diets (in a non-condescending way). One way to do that, for example, could be by occasionally posting articles along the lines of ''New study show that over 30% of all vegans are deficient in nutrient X, are you one them?''
A problem that the NVV has though, which probably also applies to some other vegan organizations, is that we have limited resources and our nutrition team relies entirely on volunteers. Therefore, we cannot do as much to educate people on nutrition as we would like. So if anyone reading this happens to speak Dutch and likes to write about nutrition, you're more than welcome to join our team :)
I took a closer look at the NVV nutrition pages, and my impression is actually that the information there is exceptionally evidence-based and detailed compared with most vegan nutrition communication I've seen. It is also helpful that the Dutch dietary recommendations themselves are relatively nuanced in some areas, for example by applying a 1.3 factor to protein recommendations for vegans to account for lower digestibility.
I agree with your point about scientific consensus and definitely don't think vegan organisations should jump on every new study or give advice that contradicts established evidence. At the same time, I don't see a conflict between the approach I'm proposing and following the scientific consensus. On protein specifically, saying that higher intakes may be beneficial does not seem to me to conflict with established recommendations, and I'd be curious whether there are other parts of what I propose that you think depart from the scientific consensus. More generally, I think we can cite established intake recommendations while making clear that they are primarily designed to prevent deficiency, that deficiency is not the same as inadequate or suboptimal intake, and that vegans often fall short on certain nutrients. We can also be transparent where major nutrition authorities do not fully agree, since that often reflects remaining uncertainty in the evidence. On zinc, for example, the NVV follows the Dutch recommendations but does not mention that EFSA recommends substantially higher intakes for high-phytate diets, which vegan diets typically are. On pregnancy, the page highlights supportive nutrition authorities without mentioning more cautious positions from others, while also citing the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' expired 2016 position paper.
These are areas where I still see some room for improvement, but overall, I find the quality and depth of the NVV's nutrition information genuinely impressive, especially if much of the work relies on volunteers. I would probably not have written such a post if this were representative of nutrition communication in the vegan movement more broadly.
I also very much agree with your point about regularly drawing attention to nutritional challenges and to new findings on vegan diets in both directions, rather than only highlighting positive ones.
Saying that a higher protein intake may be beneficial for certain groups of people doesn't deviate from the scientific consensus. But the recommendation in your article that all vegans should aim for 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day does.
Regarding the information on our website, some of the pages haven't been updated for a few years due to a shortage of volunteers, including the one about pregnancy (which I don't feel qualified to comment on here any further, as I'm not a dietician). As for zinc, our national health authority doesn't mention phytates and only says that zinc deficiency is rare in the Netherlands. While our article does mention phytates, I agree with you that we should also mention the EFSA's recommendation more explicitly. I'll discuss that with the team.
I think an important point here is that the primary goal of nutrition authorities is to prevent deficiencies in the general population. I therefore don't think vegan organisations should just reproduce official recommendations. They should of course stay aligned with them, but add context that is relevant specifically for vegans.
The Dutch protein recommendation is actually a good example: it applies a 1.3 factor for vegans because of lower protein digestibility, whereas many other national recommendations don't make such an adjustment. That's of course not because Dutch vegans have higher protein requirements. One plausible explanation for differences like this is that nutrition authorities have limited resources and may not prioritise issues that primarily affect small minorities like vegans. This is where vegan organisations can add value. So if the official recommendations in a country do not include a vegan-specific adjustment, I think it makes sense for vegan organisations to provide that additional guidance themselves. I don't see this as conflicting with official recommendations, because those tell us about the minimum intake for adequacy, not the optimal intake. For example, the interview with Don Layman that I linked at the relevant timestamp in the protein section explains this distinction quite well with regard to the 0.8 g/kg/day protein recommendation.
I agree, though, that it is important to be transparent that there is no consensus on the optimal protein intake. So I think a more precise version of my proposed narrative could be: we don't currently know the optimal protein intake, but based on the available evidence, around 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day is a plausible target range for healthy adults, with particularly strong evidence for higher intakes in groups such as older adults, people losing weight, and those doing resistance training. That's what I had earlier condensed into "vegans should ideally aim for around 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day." There is always a trade-off between nuance and accessibility, and different organisations have to decide where to strike that balance depending on their audience.
Regarding pregnancy and zinc, thanks for taking this back to your team. :)
Building a Stronger Vegan Movement Through Evidence-Based Communication — EA Forum
Building a Stronger Vegan Movement Through Evidence-Based Communication
Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
Often folks hit us up because they are thinking of starting an incubator and want advice.
Typically their motivation is either that (a) they have a list of specific things they want built that no one is building, or (b) they think an ecosystem needs more new projects generally to absorb more talent and deploy more funding effectively.
Here are six questions we often ask prospective teams, to help them figure out what to do. If you're incubator-curious...
A century-old pill, given to the right people, could cost-effectively save many lives.
Summary
* Targeting low-cost prevention toward people at elevated risk may uncover highly cost-effective ways to address noncommunicable diseases. Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy could be a test case for this approach.
* ...
Note: This post is written in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organisation I’m affiliated with. I'm grateful to Aaron Boddy, Elizabeth Crewe, Sebastian Joy, Aidan Kankyoku, Tobias Leenaert, Ginny Messina, and Felix Werdermann for their valuable input and feedback, which does not imply endorsement of the views presented.
In this post, I aim to show that messaging in the vegan movement often understates the challenges and uncertainties of vegan diets and does not fully reflect the available evidence from nutrition science. I make the case that a more evidence-based approach would strengthen the movement's long-term impact by better supporting people in navigating the existing challenges and uncertainties, and accelerating the systemic change and scientific progress needed to reduce them over time.
🧭 How I Got Here
I have been part of the vegan movement for more than a decade and continue to be deeply committed to its goals. When I became vegan, it was purely for ethical reasons. Through my professional work as well as my activism, I repeatedly encountered questions about vegan nutrition that I did not feel well equipped to answer. As a result, I came to see learning more about nutrition science as a way to become a better vegan advocate. I have since spent years studying the field, and it has become one of my biggest passions. The more I learned, the more I began to question some of the ways nutrition science is communicated within the vegan movement, which ultimately led me to the perspective I present here.
💡 The Case for a More Evidence-Based Narrative
The Current Narrative
The current narrative in the vegan movement tends to present vegan diets as easy to follow and healthy without much effort or notable risk.[1] This often involves suggesting that eating a varied diet and supplementing vitamin B12 is enough, without clearly communicating the importance of additional supplementation or attention to specific nutrients, while presenting the science around vegan diets as largely settled.
This framing may well lower the perceived barriers to adopting vegan diets. However, it understates the practical and nutritional challenges, as well as the remaining scientific uncertainties, and is not well-supported by the available evidence, which I discuss in the Nutrition Review.
While individual organisations and advocates differ in their messaging, the broader pattern is visible throughout the movement: across different philosophical orientations and strategic approaches, and in contexts ranging from personal outreach and public communication to institutional engagement. I assume only the best of intentions among everyone involved and am not looking to judge or blame anyone for decisions that were made in good faith.
The Role of Compassion
I want to take a moment to appreciate where the current narrative about vegan diets comes from. Many vegan advocates are deeply motivated by compassion for animals and want to reduce their suffering as much as possible, recognising that animals have their own inner worlds and that their lives matter to them just as ours matter to us. This naturally creates an instinct to present vegan diets in the most appealing way possible. After all, anything that makes veganism seem challenging could discourage people from going vegan and therefore be counterproductive to the goal of helping animals.
The same motivation can also make it harder to find the truth. If we strongly believe that people should avoid animal products for ethical reasons and make this part of our identity, evidence suggesting that doing so could also have downsides can create cognitive dissonance. This can make us more susceptible to confirmation bias, where we give greater weight to evidence that supports what we already believe, and motivated reasoning, where we interpret evidence in ways that support our desired conclusions. As a result, we may for example be more likely to attribute findings that raise concerns about vegan diets to researcher bias or industry influence, while scrutinising favourable findings less critically. These dynamics can affect all of us, and recognising them can help us engage more openly with the evidence and develop a more accurate understanding of the challenges and uncertainties associated with vegan diets.
The Strategic Risks
While the current narrative is motivated by a genuine desire to do good, it poses various strategic risks for the vegan movement:
More People Abandoning Vegan Diets: Understating the practical and nutritional challenges of vegan diets may create unrealistic expectations and inaccurate assumptions. This may leave people inadequately prepared to cope with and address these challenges, potentially resulting in poor health outcomes or disappointment and making them more likely to abandon the diet.[2]
Avoidable Harm to People: Health problems matter in their own right and can be particularly serious for vulnerable groups like children, pregnant people, and older adults.[3] Some nutritional deficiencies can stay hidden until their effects are difficult to reverse.[4] Taking this harm into account is especially relevant for a movement rooted in compassion and focused on reducing suffering.
Reduced Effectiveness of Vegan Advocates: Health problems can also affect people in the movement, who may feel pressure to remain vegan nonetheless, and can reduce their energy levels, cognitive performance, and overall well-being, making it harder to contribute effectively and sustainably. At scale, even small effects could meaningfully reduce the movement’s impact.
A Weakened Case for Vegan Diets: Vegans with health problems contribute to negative perceptions of vegan diets and may not only quit the diet but also speak out against it.[5] As the vegan population grows, so will the number of unhealthy vegans and vocal ex-vegans. Poor health among vegans can also weaken the case for vegan diets when reflected in study results.[6]
Alienation of Potential Allies: Understating the challenges of vegan diets can create pressure for individual diet change, make vegan advocacy more confrontational, and fuel hostility towards ex-vegans.[7] Those who struggle with a vegan diet may feel discouraged or judged, potentially leading to defensiveness and disengagement from a movement they might otherwise support.
Loss of Trust in the Vegan Movement: People who realise that the nutritional challenges and uncertainties of vegan diets have been understated may feel misled, especially if they have experienced health problems on a vegan diet. This may erode trust not only in the movement's nutrition communication, but also in its broader messaging and in the movement as a whole.
Loss of Credibility with Key Stakeholders: Actors such as policymakers, food industry leaders, funders, nutrition and public health experts, and leaders of adjacent movements can play crucial roles as partners in driving systemic change. If they perceive the vegan movement as scientifically careless or ideologically driven, they may lose trust and become less willing to collaborate.
A Missed Opportunity to Improve Food Options: The vegan movement influences which plant-based options are available in retail and food service through industry engagement, political advocacy, and public messaging. If we fail to communicate where today’s options still fall short nutritionally, we reduce incentives to prioritise nutrition alongside price, taste, and convenience.[8]
Failure to Prepare for AI-Enabled Transparency: As AI becomes more capable and widely used, consumers gain easier access to nutritional information and expertise, which could give nutritional quality greater weight in consumer choices. If plant-based food options fail to meet expectations, consumers may increasingly reject them and lose trust in vegan diets more broadly.[9]
Reduced Responsiveness to Health Trends: Treating nutrition as peripheral reduces incentives to build expertise within the movement needed to anticipate and adapt to developments like those around protein, ultra-processed foods, novel weight-loss drugs, and longevity. This will matter increasingly as rising living standards and ageing populations make health a greater priority.
A Weakened Case for Support: Many organisations in the vegan movement focus on making attractive alternatives to animal products more widely accessible. Suggesting that vegan diets do not involve meaningful challenges can make the current food environment seem more adequate than it is, reducing the perceived need for this work and weakening the case for supporting it.
Slower Progress in Nutrition Research: Understating remaining uncertainties around vegan nutrition may make further research seem less necessary and reduce support for addressing unresolved questions. This could prolong gaps in our understanding and delay improvements in nutritional guidance and plant-based food options that better enable healthy vegan diets.
Taken together, these strategic risks reveal a fundamental trade-off: presenting vegan diets as already easy to follow and healthy without much effort or notable risk may encourage more people to adopt them in the short term, but it can also undermine the impact of the vegan movement in the long term, which depends not only on how many people adopt vegan diets, but also on how many sustain them, as well as on the overall reduction in animal product consumption. Notably, people for whom a vegan diet is not a sustainable choice could still substantially reduce their animal product consumption. This would increase demand for plant-based food options, which in turn would help change the food environment in ways that make it easier for others to reduce their animal product consumption, thereby creating a self-reinforcing dynamic. Overall, many people eating fewer animal products can have a bigger impact than fewer people giving up animal products entirely.
The Proposed Narrative
Addressing the strategic risks outlined above requires a more evidence-based narrative: one that retains the moral ambition at the heart of the vegan movement, while better supporting people in navigating the existing challenges and uncertainties of vegan diets today and accelerating the systemic and scientific progress needed to reduce them over time. I propose a narrative based on three guiding principles:
Aspirational: Vegan diets are worth pursuing to help animals and reduce many of the other harms associated with animal agriculture. More broadly, they can also contribute to building a societal value system that matters far beyond how we treat animals.
Realistic: Vegan diets are viable and can be healthy, but they are often more demanding in everyday life and require knowledge of how to obtain key nutrients, attention to food choices, and a commitment to supplementation. In addition, some uncertainties remain.[10]
Forward-Looking: The current challenges and uncertainties of vegan diets are closely linked to the food environment and the state of nutrition science. Both can be reduced over time to bring us closer to a future in which vegan diets are truly easy to follow and healthy for everyone.
In essence, the proposed narrative represents a strategic shift for the vegan movement: from optimising for short-term gains to optimising for long-term growth. Rather than trying to make vegan diets appear as appealing as possible, it focuses on actually making them as appealing as possible. The case studies in the Nutrition Review illustrate how this proposed narrative could translate into practice.
Conclusion
I understand the instinct to present vegan diets in the most appealing way possible, and I have often had it myself. The scale of suffering caused by animal agriculture is almost impossible to comprehend. However, I have come to believe that acting on this instinct does more harm than good. Looking at the bigger picture, vegans are still only a small minority despite decades of advocacy and substantial improvements in both the availability of plant-based food options and the social acceptance of veganism,[11] while global animal product consumption has continually risen.[12] This may point to underlying issues that existing strategies have overlooked. In light of this, I believe that the most promising path to meaningful and lasting change is to ensure that people who adopt vegan diets also thrive on them. This requires giving people the information they need to navigate the challenges and uncertainties that exist today, while gradually reducing them over time. Neither is possible without acknowledging that these challenges and uncertainties are real. But seeing the world as it is does not mean accepting it as it is. If anything, it should make us more determined to change it.
🔍 Nutrition Review
Introduction
This review examines some of the nutritional claims underlying the current narrative and how well they are supported by the available evidence.
The following selection of case studies is not exhaustive and instead focuses on issues that are particularly relevant to public and scientific discourse around vegan diets. The aim is not to single out isolated inaccuracies, but to illustrate a broader pattern. Overall, the case studies highlight substantial nutritional challenges of vegan diets and show that vegans often fall short of the intakes recommended by nutrition authorities for several nutrients. Notably, these intake recommendations are primarily designed to prevent deficiencies, not to optimise health.[13] This means that intakes above these recommendations can in some cases provide meaningful benefits and contribute to a more positive experience with vegan diets.
In each case study, I present the current narrative as a synthesis of common claims across the movement, analyse the evidence, and propose an alternative narrative that better aligns with the evidence while also supporting the strategic shift outlined earlier. I then discuss the limits of epidemiological evidence on vegan diets and remaining uncertainties about their long-term health effects.
Case Studies
Protein
Current Narrative: Vegans can meet their protein requirements without difficulty by eating a varied diet, as protein deficiency is extremely rare in high-income countries. An intake of 0.8 g/kg of body weight per day is an appropriate target, while higher intakes are unnecessary and potentially even harmful.
Analysis: The 0.8 g/kg/day corresponds to the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for healthy adults established by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.[14] The RDA for protein is based on nitrogen balance studies designed to estimate minimum adequate intake rather than optimal intake,[15] as explained by protein researcher Don Layman[16] or noted by Harvard Medical School[17]. While there is no consensus on the exact optimal intake, leading protein researchers suggest that 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day is a reasonable target, depending on factors such as age and activity level.[18] This may be particularly important for vegans due to the lower digestibility of plant proteins, with some recommendations suggesting ~20% higher intakes to compensate.[19] In practice, data from the EPIC-Oxford cohort show average protein intakes of 0.91–0.99 g/kg/day among vegans compared to 1.14–1.32 g/kg/day among omnivores, with 16.5% of vegan men and 8.1% of vegan women not even meeting the estimated average requirement (EAR) of 0.66 g/kg/day, which is the intake expected to meet the requirements of 50% of people.[20] Similarly, a systematic review found that 27–41% of vegans fall below the RDA, depending on the cohort.[21] In one recent randomised controlled trial, participants who were asked to follow a self-selected vegan diet saw their protein intake decline and after 12 weeks, lost more skeletal muscle mass and had lower rates of muscle protein synthesis than those who continued their habitual omnivorous diet.[22] Overall, while clinical protein deficiency is extremely rare in high-income countries, inadequate and suboptimal protein intake is considerably more common, especially among vegans.
Proposed Narrative: Protein requires particular attention on vegan diets. Plant-based alternatives and meals often provide less protein than the animal-based options they replace. Moreover, because plant proteins are generally less digestible, vegans may have higher protein requirements than omnivores and should ideally aim for around 1.2–1.6 g/kg/day. As a general rule, each meal should contain a substantial protein source, taking into account that legumes are not a one-to-one substitute for meat in terms of protein. Practical ways to increase protein intake include choosing meat alternatives with a high protein-to-calorie ratio, favouring soy or pea over oat milk, replacing conventional pasta with legume-based pasta, and using protein powder when needed. Producers and food service providers should ensure that plant-based products and meals provide meaningful amounts of protein, particularly where they replace animal-based equivalents.
Omega-3
Current Narrative: Vegans can meet their omega-3 requirements without difficulty by regularly eating plant sources such as walnuts, flax seeds, chia seeds, and hemp seeds.
Analysis: Omega-3 fatty acids occur in plants as alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), and in marine sources such as microalgae and fish as eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). EPA and DHA are linked to many of the health benefits associated with omega-3 and are one of the main reasons health authorities recommend consuming oily fish. The body can convert ALA into EPA and DHA, but this conversion is limited.[23] Direct intake of EPA and DHA is therefore a much more reliable way to ensure an adequate supply, as explained by omega-3 researcher Bill Harris[24]. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recommends an intake of 250 mg/day of combined EPA and DHA for healthy adults.[25]A systematic review found consistently lower EPA and DHA intakes among vegans than omnivores.[26] For example, data from the EPIC-Oxford cohort show average EPA and DHA intakes of 27 mg/day and 4 mg/day among vegans, compared with 94 mg/day and 172 mg/day among omnivores. Omega-3 intake does not necessarily reflect omega-3 status, so it is also useful to look at blood levels. The Omega-3 Index measures EPA and DHA levels in red blood cells, with levels below 4% considered high-risk and levels above 8% proposed as an optimal target.[27]Data from the Adventist Health Study 2 show an average Omega-3 Index of 3.7% among vegans, compared with 5.0% among omnivores and 5.7% among pescatarians.[28] Taken together, this suggests that relying on ALA from plant foods is unlikely to reliably achieve optimal omega-3 status.
Proposed Narrative: Many of the health benefits associated with omega-3 are linked specifically to EPA and DHA. Vegans should supplement EPA and DHA directly from microalgae rather than relying on the conversion of ALA alone. At the same time, plant-based products that are marketed or commonly expected to provide omega-3, such as plant-based fish alternatives, should provide meaningful amounts of EPA and DHA instead of using ALA as their primary omega-3 source.
Calcium
Current Narrative: Vegans can meet their calcium requirements without difficulty by regularly eating plant sources such as dark leafy greens, legumes, nuts, seeds and their butters, particularly tahini, as well as calcium-fortified foods.
Analysis: Many plant foods contain meaningful amounts of calcium, but generally provide much less per serving than dairy products. In addition, calcium absorption can be substantially reduced by compounds such as oxalates and phytates. For example, sesame seeds are rich in calcium, but also high in oxalates, both of which are concentrated in the hull. As a result, neither light tahini (made from hulled seeds) nor dark tahini (made from unhulled seeds) provides much bioavailable calcium per calorie or in typical serving sizes. While calcium from low-oxalate vegetables such as broccoli and kale is highly bioavailable, relying on these foods as major calcium sources requires consuming relatively large quantities on a consistent basis. For healthy adults, EFSA recommends a calcium intake of 1000 mg/day for those aged 18–24 and 950 mg/day for those aged 25 and older.[29]A systematic review found lower calcium intake among vegans across numerous studies, with approximately 76% of vegans consuming less than the recommended intake.[30]Data from the EPIC-Oxford cohort show average calcium intakes of 839–862 mg/day among vegans compared to 1078–1120 mg/day among omnivores,[31] further indicating that inadequate calcium intake is common among vegans. Lower calcium intake may contribute to the significantly increased risk of fractures associated with vegan diets, alongside other factors such as lower protein intake.[32]
Proposed Narrative: Vegans need to take deliberate steps to ensure adequate calcium intake. In practice, this generally means either consuming substantial amounts of low-oxalate dark leafy greens on a daily basis, which can be difficult in the current food environment, or relying on a well-planned combination of fortified foods and supplements. Producers of plant-based alternatives to dairy products should ensure that these products are fortified with calcium, while restaurants, canteens, and other food service providers should ensure that low-oxalate dark leafy greens are a regular part of plant-based meal options.
Zinc
Current Narrative: Vegans can meet their zinc requirements without difficulty by regularly eating plant sources such as legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds.
Analysis: Many plant foods contain meaningful amounts of zinc, but they are also often rich in phytate, which substantially reduces zinc absorption. Accordingly, zinc requirements depend strongly on phytate intake: for healthy adults, EFSA recommends an intake of 7.5 mg/day for women and 9.4 mg/day for men on low-phytate diets, and 12.7 mg/day for women and 16.3 mg/day for men on high-phytate diets. As vegan diets are typically high in phytates, the higher requirements generally apply. A systematic review found that while average zinc intake is similar across dietary patterns, lower zinc bioavailability in vegan diets means that requirements are often not met, with zinc deficiency found in 30% of vegans compared with 13% of omnivores.[33] For example, data from the EPIC-Oxford cohort show average zinc intakes of 9.4 mg/day for vegan men and 8.4 mg/day for vegan women, compared with 10.9 mg/day for omnivorous men and 10.4 mg/day for omnivorous women, with 73.6% of vegan men and 55.8% of vegan women having intakes below the bioavailability-adjusted EAR of 11.0 mg/day for men and 8.3 mg/day for women.[34] The EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet provides an interesting case in point. An analysis of its micronutrient adequacy found that zinc intake was insufficient once the lower zinc bioavailability resulting from its high phytate content was taken into account.[35] This shortfall is particularly notable given that the Planetary Health Diet was developed by an international commission of experts, illustrating the challenge of meeting zinc requirements even in a carefully designed plant-rich diet.
Proposed Narrative: Zinc requires particular attention on vegan diets because it is generally less abundant and its absorption is reduced by the high phytate content of many plant-foods. Vegans should aim for around 13 mg/day for women and 16 mg/day for men. Possible ways to increase zinc intake include choosing whole grains over refined grains, adding nuts or seeds to meals, and choosing zinc-fortified foods where available, while zinc absorption can be improved by soaking and sprouting beans and grains, or choosing yeast- or sourdough-leavened breads. Overall, however, supplementation provides a much more reliable way to ensure sufficient zinc intake. Plant-based food producers should also help address this challenge through appropriate zinc fortification that accounts for bioavailability.
Pregnancy
Current Narrative: Appropriately planned vegan diets can safely provide adequate nutrition during pregnancy, as supported by the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), the world’s largest organisation of nutrition and dietetics practitioners.
Analysis: The widely cited statement by the AND that vegan diets are adequate during all stages of life, including pregnancy, comes from its 2016 position paper[36] that expired in 2021 and has since been replaced by a new position paper that no longer covers pregnancy. The authors also had various unreported potential ideological and financial conflicts of interest,[37] and importantly, the AND’s position does not reflect an international scientific consensus, with several nutrition authorities considering the available evidence insufficient to establish the suitability of vegan diets during pregnancy. For example, while the UK National Health Service (NHS) considers well-planned vegan diets capable of meeting nutritional needs during pregnancy,[38] the German Nutrition Society (DGE) does not recommend either for or against them and warns of increased risk of nutrient deficiencies with potentially irreversible consequences,[39] and the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) finds the evidence on vegan pregnancy outcomes too limited to assess.[40]A systematic review examining vegan pregnancies found lower intakes of protein and several critical micronutrients among vegan compared with omnivorous pregnant women and indications of lower birth weight among their children.[41] At the same time, only a few studies met the inclusion criteria, leading the authors to conclude that the evidence is insufficient to assess the effects of a vegan diet during pregnancy for both mother and child.
Proposed Narrative: Given the high stakes and remaining scientific uncertainty, vegan diets during pregnancy should be approached with a high degree of caution. There is no consensus among international nutrition authorities that vegan diets are nutritionally adequate during pregnancy, and inadequate nutrient intake may pose risks to both mother and child. Anyone following a vegan diet during pregnancy should carefully plan their diet and use appropriate supplementation in consultation with a qualified nutrition professional. More research is needed to confidently establish the safety of vegan diets during pregnancy.
Ultra-Processed Foods
Current Narrative: Concerns about ultra-processed foods are often overstated. What matters is the nutritional composition of a food, particularly its levels of fat, sugar, and salt, rather than its degree of processing. Additives used in ultra-processed foods undergo rigorous safety assessments and provide important benefits, such as improved food safety and longer shelf life.
Analysis: Processing can provide important nutritional benefits. In particular, plant-based meat alternatives can provide convenient sources of protein and, when appropriately fortified, nutrients that can be more challenging to obtain on vegan diets.[42] However, apart from high levels of fat, sugar, and salt, there are several other health concerns associated with processed foods.[43] These include overconsumption promoted by hyper-palatable formulations, changes to the food matrix that may affect digestion, nutrient absorption, and satiety, and potential harms linked to additives, for which safety assessments can change as new evidence emerges[44]. Another concern is limited transparency. Compared with whole foods, the quality of processed foods is more difficult to assess, as lower-quality ingredients can be masked with flavourings, sweeteners, or salt. In addition, labels rarely disclose ingredient proportions, micronutrient content, or the specific forms of nutrients. This is particularly relevant given the potentially diverging interests of producers and consumers. For example, oat milk producers often use enzymes to break down starches into sugars, allowing products to be labelled “no added sugar” despite containing significant amounts of maltose, which raises blood sugar more than twice as much as lactose from dairy. Labels on iron-fortified plant-based meat alternatives show the total iron content without indicating that it is non-heme iron, which is considerably less bioavailable than the heme iron found in meat.[45] Similarly, fish alternatives mostly use low-cost omega-3 sources such as ALA from rapeseed oil, without the product information distinguishing these from the more valuable EPA and DHA from marine sources. Such issues may contribute to a broader sense of scepticism towards ultra-processed foods and plant-based alternatives to animal products in particular.
Proposed Narrative: The degree of processing should not be treated as a reliable indicator of the healthfulness of individual foods. Ultra-processed foods can not only be part of a healthy diet but also play an important nutritional role, such as plant-based meat alternatives for meeting protein requirements on vegan diets. At the same time, concerns about their health effects should be taken seriously. Ultra-processed foods vary substantially in their nutritional quality, and limiting their consumption can be a reasonable heuristic when assessing individual products is impractical. Plant-based products should therefore be held to high standards of nutritional quality and transparency. Where they are marketed as substitutes for specific animal products, they should provide comparable levels of key nutrients. Shortcomings should be called out to create stronger incentives for product improvements.
Limits of Epidemiology
At first glance, the nutritional challenges highlighted by the case studies may seem difficult to reconcile with many epidemiological findings suggesting that vegans have similar or better health outcomes than omnivores. However, there are several plausible explanations for this apparent discrepancy:
Confounding: Many of the health benefits associated with vegan diets may result from factors such as eating more whole plant foods and less processed meat rather than from eliminating animal products altogether. Vegans also tend to be more health-conscious than the general population and differ in socioeconomic and other factors that influence long-term health, which cannot be fully accounted for statistically.[46]
Dietary Misclassification: Diet is typically assessed only periodically during a study, making it difficult to account for dietary changes that happen in between. This matters particularly for vegan diets, as many people do not maintain them over the long term.[47] If participants are classified as vegans based on their diet at the beginning of a study, that classification becomes inaccurate if they later start eating animal products. Excluding these participants from the analysis avoids this problem, but can create selection bias if some of them stop being vegan because of adverse health effects. Reassessing diet at follow-ups can help, but participants who start eating animal products between assessments will be misclassified as vegans until the next follow-up.
Effects of Dietary History: Vegans may have eaten animal products for much of their lives, which is particularly relevant because nutrition during critical periods of development, especially pregnancy and early childhood, can substantially influence health later in life.[48] Adult vegans who consumed animal products during these periods therefore cannot provide evidence about the health effects of vegan diets followed from birth or over multiple generations.
Understudied Outcomes and Populations: Existing studies focus largely on clinical endpoints like mortality and disease incidence, potentially missing nutritional disadvantages that may be more apparent in functional outcomes such as subjective well-being, physical performance, and cognitive function, or that develop gradually without being captured by commonly measured biomarkers. Evidence is also more limited for certain populations: most studies concern healthy adults, with less research on critical life stages where nutritional deficiencies pose greater risks. Furthermore, vegan sample sizes are generally relatively small.
Accordingly, favourable epidemiological findings do not rule out adverse health effects from excluding animal products. It is also worth noting that epidemiological findings do not universally support advantages of vegan diets, including evidence suggesting disadvantages for bone health and colorectal cancer risk.[49][50][51]
Remaining Uncertainties
In principle, the risks associated with the nutritional challenges discussed above can be substantially reduced through appropriate food choices and supplementation. However, there is also considerable uncertainty about other potential long-term health effects of completely eliminating animal-source foods, which have formed part of human diets over millions of years and have therefore played an important role in the evolution of human physiology.[52][53] Randomised controlled trials examining the long-term health outcomes of different dietary patterns are generally not feasible.[54] As a result, our understanding of vegan diets relies largely on observational studies, making it inherently difficult to distinguish correlation from causation and to draw robust causal conclusions.
Therefore, meeting currently established nutritional requirements does not eliminate the possibility of health risks that are not yet fully understood. Further research is needed to reduce these uncertainties over time and identify ways of addressing any additional risks that emerge.
Implications
The nutritional challenges and uncertainties discussed in the Nutrition Review do not mean that vegan diets cannot be healthy or are not worth pursuing. Nor do they imply that standard Western diets are free from significant health challenges and uncertainties. Rather, they reinforce the case for a more evidence-based narrative around vegan diets that helps people navigate the nutritional challenges we already understand, remains honest about the uncertainties that remain, and creates stronger incentives to reduce both over time. Ultimately, a vegan movement that takes the challenges and uncertainties of vegan diets seriously will be better equipped to overcome them.
Throughout, “vegan diet” refers to a diet that excludes all animal-source foods, without implying adherence to the broader ethical philosophy of veganism. I use this term rather than “plant-based diet” to avoid ambiguity.
In the 2014 Faunalytics Study of Current and Former Vegetarians and Vegans, the largest study of veg*n dietary lapse to date, health was the second most commonly stated reason for abandoning the diet (26%), after dissatisfaction with the food (32%). In the 2022 Faunalytics study Going Vegan or Vegetarian: Barriers and Strategies on the Path to Success, new veg*ns who felt unhealthy on their diet were more than three times as likely to abandon it within six months (30% vs 8%), regardless of initial motivation. Once people felt unhealthy, providing health information did not seem to prevent them from abandoning their diets, highlighting the importance of reaching people with accurate information before problems arise. Notably, there appears to be little quantitative research examining why people abandon vegan diets specifically, which represents a significant evidence gap.
This does not necessarily mean that these groups are most likely to have nutritionally inadequate diets. For example, young adults with busy lifestyles may face greater practical barriers to careful dietary planning and may therefore also be at meaningful risk, even if the potential consequences of nutritional inadequacies are generally less severe for them.
Das, J. K., & Padhani, Z. A. (2022). Alleviating hidden hunger: an infallible bridge to improved health and nutrition. The Lancet Global Health, 10(11), e1539–e1540. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00421-1
For example, several high-profile celebrities have stopped being vegan and publicly cited health problems as a reason, including Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Liam Hemsworth, Miley Cyrus, and Zac Efron. Such cases can attract considerable attention and contribute to negative perceptions of vegan diets.
Fairly or not, poor health outcomes among vegans are generally seen as a problem with veganism itself, whereas poor health outcomes among omnivores are commonly attributed to the particular implementation of the diet, not to eating animal products per se. For example, several cases of malnourished vegan children in Italy received widespread media attention and prompted a broad public backlash against veganism in 2016.
For example, philosopher and YouTuber Alex O'Connor, who had publicly advocated veganism for several years, began eating animal products again after finding that his specific circumstances made it difficult to maintain a healthy vegan diet. Despite continuing to strongly support animal advocacy and the end of factory farming, he described receiving "a great deal of hatred and vitriol" from parts of the vegan community and worried that such reactions could alienate people considering veganism.
The widely used food-scanning app Yuka provides an early example of this dynamic. Its relatively simple health scores already have an impact on consumer expectations and product development: in a 2025 survey of 200 French food industry professionals, 78% said that Yuka scores influence the formulation of their products.
This does not mean that all of the challenges and uncertainties should be communicated in every context. The appropriate emphasis and level of detail may vary depending on the audience and communication goal. However, messaging should always remain consistent with the overall narrative.
For example, Gallup polling found 2% of US adults identifying as vegan in 2012, 3% in 2018, and 1% in 2023, and YouGov's British tracker similarly shows vegan identification fluctuating between 2% and 3% from 2019 to 2026.
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Harris, W., Pawlak, R., Ryder, N., Miles, F., & Fraser, G. (2025). Dietary and erythrocyte PUFAs in vegan, lacto-ovo vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, and non-vegetarian participants of the Adventist Health Study-2. Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, 207, 102709. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plefa.2025.102709
Bakaloudi, D. R., Halloran, A., Rippin, H. L., Oikonomidou, A. C., Dardavesis, T. I., Williams, J., Wickramasinghe, K., Breda, J., & Chourdakis, M. (2021). Intake and adequacy of the vegan diet: A systematic review of the evidence. Clinical Nutrition, 40(5), 3503–3521. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2020.11.035
Sobiecki, J. G., Appleby, P. N., Bradbury, K. E., & Key, T. J. (2016). High compliance with dietary recommendations in a cohort of meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians, and vegans: Results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition–Oxford study. Nutrition Research, 36(5), 464–477. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2015.12.016
Tong, T. Y. N., Appleby, P. N., Armstrong, M. E. G., Fensom, G. K., Knuppel, A., Papier, K., Perez-Cornago, A., Travis, R. C., & Key, T. J. (2020). Vegetarian and vegan diets and risks of total and site-specific fractures: Results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study. BMC Medicine, 18, 353. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-020-01815-3
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Sobiecki, J. G., Appleby, P. N., Bradbury, K. E., & Key, T. J. (2016). High compliance with dietary recommendations in a cohort of meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians, and vegans: Results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition–Oxford study. Nutrition Research, 36(5), 464–477. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2015.12.016
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The AND's position paper on vegan diets was authored by Susan Levin, Vesanto Melina, and Winston Craig. Susan Levin worked at the time for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an organisation whose stated mission includes saving animal lives through plant-based diets. Vesanto Melina earned part of her livelihood by publishing books and teaching courses on vegan nutrition and repeatedly cited her own book, "Becoming Vegan", as a source in the position paper. Finally, Winston Craig was a Seventh-day Adventist and professor at Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist institution that explicitly promotes the church's longstanding emphasis on vegetarian nutrition.
Klug, A., Barbaresko, J., Alexy, U., Kühn, T., Kroke, A., Lotze-Campen, H., Nöthlings, U., Richter, M., Schader, C., Schlesinger, S., Virmani, K., Conrad, J., & Watzl, B. (2024). Update of the DGE position on vegan diet – Position statement of the German Nutrition Society (DGE). Ernährungs Umschau, 71(7), 60–84. https://doi.org/10.4455/eu.2024.22
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The 2014 Faunalytics Study of Current and Former Vegetarians and Vegans found that 84% of people who had ever followed a vegetarian or vegan diet had abandoned it. More recently, a 2025 US YouGov survey found that 1.37% of respondents had followed a vegan diet for at least three years but were now neither vegetarian nor vegan, compared with 2% who were currently vegan. The percentage of ex-vegans would naturally have been higher if the survey had also included those who had followed a vegan diet for shorter periods.
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I agree in principle with the core idea here, and I think several of the key challenges are highlighted are very important, but I also think there are areas where this is overstated while missing some of the key considerations, and if we're calling for a more evidence based discussion we need to make sure we are being careful to make sure we ourselves are adhering to that. Honestly I think the best accounting of the genuine challenges are from dietetics bodies such as the British Dietetic association who have clinical expertise: https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/vegetarian-vegan-plant-based-diet.htm/
Generally - I agree that there are a lot of misconceptions around protein and some micronutrients on a vegan diet and those are genuinely misleading to people. Nowhere is this more obvious than at restaurants where a vegetable is treated as a like-for-like replacement for a piece of meat (e.g., cauliflower wings / mushroom instead of a burger). This is not nutritionally sound. Likewise, a lot of people going vegan like the self selected diet in the referenced study do not make nutritionally sound choices all the time because information is often of poor quality.
However, I actually think the conclusion goes too far the other way in saying that vegan diets are neccessarily either a lot of effort or inadequate - it may be that this was once the case but it is no longer and I think limits the scope of the movement pretending it is. In today's environment, many of the challenges are fairly straightforward to mitigate with swaps and alternatives based on fairly simple criteria, and with more consistency in those alternatives that will hopefully increasingly be the case.
I don't think it makes sense to be overly prescriptive on what an optimal diet looks like as it's different for different people, but I do think as more and more people want to be vegan, we need to make sure that it is accessible without needing a lot of knowledge or extra work. We do this with public health all the time such as with the fortification of flours etc and I think there has been for too long exceptionalism in treating vegan diets like they don't need the same support systems that are built into our mainstream food system and this has let people down. We see in the preliminary findings from the follow-up to the Oxford EPIC study however that there have been major improvements in diet quality in vegans in just 10 years https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.09.26357676v1. I agree nutritional epidemiology is a challenging topic (though not neccessarily for the above reasons outlined - the primary challenges in my view are the tiny samples and the non-representative people who are over-represented in vegan cohorts broadly) but as we get more vegans we get better data - especially when we can match it up with the growing number of RCTs and interventional studies.
A pet peeve too, but I have a very strong aversion to non-clinicians giving advice on pregnancy and nutrition at any point, as this is a very sensitive topic with so much scaremongering, which is really unhelpful and and best left to health professionals.
More broadly though, I think the focus on vegans misses maybe the point if we want to have real change towards healthier and more sustainable diets - because the truth is most people aren't going to be going vegan anytime soon. For the average person, increasing the proportion of their diets coming from plants and fungi is going to be beneficial - and plant-based alternatives can also be a really easy and accessible way of cutting down particularly health-damaging foods like processed meat.
Currently, it is clear people are not familiar with plant-based foods, their nutrition or how they can be useful to improve their diets. I work on plant-based alternatives and nutrition and the lack of knowledge from most people - even in sustainable diet spaces - is really striking (and badly skewed by the UPF discourse which as you point out above often misrepresents them). I think there are some really cool foods with some really interesting nutritional properties (like mycoprotein and extruded vegetable protein) which are badly underexplored expressly because people view them as simply an uncanny valley meat replacement for vegans, when they have a lot of really interesting properties when viewed as valuable foods in their own right - and that's what gives them the biggest potential to move the needle on public health, the environment and animal suffering.
Thanks, I really appreciate the thoughtful comment.
On the BDA guidance, I agree that nutrition associations are a valuable source of expertise. However, their primary role is to prevent deficiencies in the general population. Their vegan-specific advice is often rather superficial and leaves out a lot of relevant context. For example, on zinc, the BDA acknowledges that absorption from plant foods is lower, but doesn't explain important practical implications: vegans often have relatively low intakes when taking into account bioavailability, and supplements are typically formulated for both men and women despite men having higher zinc requirements. This is where vegan organisations can add value.
I want to emphasise that I don't argue that vegan diets are inherently "either a lot of effort or inadequate". Many of the challenges I discuss arise from the current food environment, and I think we should work on changing it so that healthy vegan diets require less knowledge and effort. That's also why I strongly agree with your point about fortification. I found the FEED study encouraging for exactly that reason, and I think it supports your point that things have improved at least in some areas. B12 is a good example of where I think the vegan movement has done very well: the need for supplementation is widely communicated, and plant-based alternatives are now commonly fortified with B12. More generally, I think plant-based milk in particular has been quite a success story in terms of fortification. A recent UK study found that in 2024, 71% of non-organic plant-based milk alternatives were fortified with B12, 84% with vitamin D and 88% with calcium. The UK food environment has also specifically incentivised calcium fortification in plant-based drinks. To me, that shows how better information and better product formulation can reduce nutritional challenges.
At the same time, these improvements are not universal. In the UK and EU, organic plant-based products are not fortified, and the food environment has adapted much less comprehensively to several other nutritional issues, such as protein, EPA/DHA, zinc, iodine and vitamin A. The broader FEED data also give a mixed picture, with vegans showing less favourable results across a number of nutrients. It is also worth noting that FEED is a separate contemporary cohort from EPIC-Oxford, recruited in part through organisations including the Vegan Society and Vegetarian Society, rather than a longitudinal follow-up of the EPIC-Oxford participants. I would therefore be cautious about interpreting the FEED findings as showing "major improvements in diet quality in vegans" in general. More research is needed.
On pregnancy, I agree that this is a sensitive topic and that individual advice should come from qualified health professionals. But I think there is an important distinction between giving individual advice and discussing at a general level what the available evidence and different nutrition authorities say, including where there is uncertainty or disagreement. This piece is not intended as a guide for individual advice, but as a commentary on movement communication strategy.
On the broader point that most people are unlikely to go vegan soon, I completely agree. I strongly support focusing on increasing the proportion of plant foods in people's diets and I agree that plant-based alternatives can make that much easier. This post focuses specifically on vegan nutrition because that is where the communication problem I'm examining arises, not because I think veganism is the only or even the main near-term pathway to reducing animal product consumption at the population level.
I also agree with much of what you say about alternatives like mycoprotein and extruded vegetable protein, and I'm actually quite excited about the potential of alternative proteins more generally. My point on UPFs is mainly that there is huge variation in nutritional quality, and most people can't easily distinguish weaker from better products. I therefore think the vegan movement should be more willing to criticise weaker products and highlight better ones based on concrete nutritional dimensions such as protein content, fortification or additives, rather than focusing primarily on countering concerns about UPFs in general.
Given that you raise the importance of clinical expertise in several places, I want to mention that I took that seriously and asked several people with relevant clinical or nutrition backgrounds to review it before publication, including Ginny Messina, who provided extensive feedback. She is a registered dietitian who has co-authored two earlier position papers on vegetarian diets for the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and has long advocated for more evidence-based vegan nutrition communication (for example here). At the same time, I think the discussion ultimately has to focus on the evidence and arguments themselves. Nutrition experts also disagree on many of these questions, so if you think I make any specific factual claims that are incorrect or insufficiently supported, I'd genuinely be interested to hear which ones, and whether you see them as load-bearing for the broader argument.
Thanks again for engaging so thoughtfully!