Faunalytics has published our most comprehensive synthesis of vegetarian and vegan dietary trends to date — drawing on 837 nationally representative sources across 58 countries from 2015 to 2025. The findings reveal a meaningful gap between how many people identify as vegan or vegetarian and how many actually follow these diets, uneven growth across regions, and significant data voids in the Global South that limit what the movement can reliably claim to know.

Background

How many vegans does it take to tip the scales? Well, it depends on which scales you’re using.

Despite growing cultural visibility of plant-based diets, the true global prevalence and growth rates of vegetarianism and veganism (veg*nism) remain unclear. To make sense of the state of veg*nism, advocates are currently navigating two avenues of conflicting data: who people say they are (self-identification) and what people actually eat (intake). And the difference between these two measures is no small thing. An analysis by Animal Charity Evaluators found that only about 1% of U.S. adults consistently abstain from animal products, despite as much as 6% of the public self-identifying as vegan (Šimčikas, 2018).

This gap between identity and behavior is a well-documented methodological challenge. Self-identity measures — polls asking “What diet do you follow?” — tend to overestimate adherence due to aspirational reporting and social desirability bias (Hebert et al., 1995). Dietary recall approaches that ask people what they actually eat, such as 24-hour food logs, are more conservative and behaviorally accurate, but are conducted less frequently and often limited by smaller sample sizes (Gibson et al., 2017). Faunalytics first flagged this problem in our foundational analysis of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data, which revealed a stark discrepancy between the number of U.S. adults who identify as vegetarian and those whose diets actually reflect that label (Millum, 2018).

Compounding this is a fragmented research landscape. There is currently no single, standardized resource that synthesizes veg*nism data on a global scale, which makes it difficult to pinpoint whether rates are actually rising, falling, or plateauing in different parts of the world. It also creates strategic risks for advocates who rely on these metrics to plan campaigns and evaluate interventions. Studies also vary considerably in how they define “vegetarian,” “vegan,” and “flexitarian,” making cross-study comparisons difficult. Furthermore, geographical coverage is deeply uneven: research has disproportionately concentrated in Europe and North America, while large portions of the global population — particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — remain essentially unstudied.

This report addresses these gaps through a systematic review of 837 nationally representative sources across 58 countries, capturing dietary rates over the past decade (2015 to 2025) and spanning both academic and gray literature. Specifically, we aimed to synthesize regional-level prevalence estimates; track longitudinal trends in vegetarianism, veganism, and flexitarianism; quantify the gap between dietary self-identification and measured dietary intake; document variation in how diets are defined across studies; and map where data is most scarce. In other words, we’ve conducted a methodological audit of what the field actually knows — and what it doesn’t.

Key Findings

1. Veganism rates have risen significantly over the past 10 years, though this increase is more akin to a crawl than a sprint. Global growth appears to be driven by Europe, where veganism has increased about 0.1% per year. Other regions showed either a plateau over time or could not be estimated at all due to a lack of data.
2. People are significantly more likely to self-identify as vegan or vegetarian than to actually follow an animal-free diet. In practice, this means that while 1.65% of Europeans on average claim to be vegan, only 1.01% actually follow a vegan diet. Turning to vegetarianism, only 0.75% of North Americans fully abstain from meat, while many more (3.24%) claim to follow a vegetarian diet — meaning over four times more North Americans consider themselves vegetarian than their diet actually reveals.
3. The vast majority (87%) of our nationally representative data on veganism came from Europe (69%) and North America (18%), despite the fact that these regions combined only make up about 16% of the global population. In fact, nationally representative veganism data was entirely absent for multiple global regions (Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) and extremely limited in others; our literature search only turned up a single nationally representative study for Latin America / the Caribbean as well as for the Middle East / North Africa.

Conclusions

A Crawl, Not A Sprint

The data reveals that the current state of the movement is neither a plant-based boom nor a funeral knell. While veganism has experienced a statistically significant rise since 2015, this growth has been slow, increasing at a rate of approximately 0.1% per year. This “global” rise is primarily driven by Europe. In contrast, other major regions such as North America and East Asia demonstrate non-significant growth or stagnation, and various global regions are something of a black box due to a lack of data. Meanwhile, global vegetarianism rates have remained effectively flat. Furthermore, despite the term’s popularity, flexitarianism has not seen a significant increase on a global scale, with Europe being the only region to show a clear upward trend of +1.2% per year.

Who Do You Think You Are?

An “identity-behavior gap” was unmistakable in our findings. People are significantly more likely to self-identify with a dietary label than they are to strictly adhere to it. This discrepancy is substantial; for example, in North America, over four times more people identify as vegetarian (3.24%) than actually abstain from meat (0.75%). This gap implies that self-reported polls likely overestimate veg*n adherence, which could be due to social desirability bias, aspirational reporting, or simply a misunderstanding of the questions posed. Of course, the movement would be made stronger if all self-professed vegans put their money where their mouth is. However, people “over-identifying” as vegan could still be viewed as a positive for the movement, as aspirational reporting suggests that veganism is seen as a lifestyle worth aspiring to.

Navigating Data Deserts

A significant issue highlighted by the research is the severe geographical bias in available data, leading to a highly Western-centric view. Europe is overrepresented in the data by a factor of 4.37 relative to its population. Conversely, entire regions, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are considered “research wastelands” due to a lack of sufficient nationally representative data. Based on the data at hand, we simply have no idea about the state of veg*nism among large swaths of the global population, and any “global” rates we estimate are skewed toward the available — mostly European — data.

Methodological Consistency

Finally, this review highlights a lack of standardization in how diets are defined across different studies. This lack of consistency suggests that comparisons between studies might be akin to comparing apples and oranges, particularly regarding flexitarianism. For instance, depending on the study, flexitarians might be defined as those who “have an awareness” of their meat consumption, those who eat meat “occasionally,” “semi-vegetarians,” or those who have “at least one vegetarian day a week.” Observing these variable definitions, it is unclear whether flexitarianism rates themselves are changing or different studies are simply carving out different slices of the population and labeling them flexitarians. Notably, we are not the first to raise the alarm about the methodological issues inherent in “flexitarianism” studies and the resulting challenges for both empirical research and advocacy. We recommend reading Wendler et al. (2026) for a deeper dive into this topic.