If ‘veg*n’ isn’t a word that everyone uses yet, I think there should be a different one. It’s hard to not read it as a misspelling of ‘vegan.’
It seems kind of weird that things recede after seven years. Like, if it were a willpower thing I’d expect it to be shorter. I’m not just going to decide after a few years that my eating habits are too hard to keep up.
Did you see anything about people saying why they started eating animal stuff again?
“Like, if it were a willpower thing I’d expect it to be shorter. I’m not just going to decide after a few years that my eating habits are too hard to keep up.”
This seems reasonable, but the reasons given were health issues followed by hassles, and only then uncontrollable cravings. Health issues would probably take a while to develop and then a while more to respond to by switching back.
Re. hassles, I can imagine someone switching to a vegan diet when it is relatively more convenient and then switching back when it stops being so because your environment changes, e.g you switch when you’re near stores that stock a good selection of vegan products, and then stop when you move to a different area.
I use a harm-minimisation strategy when I’m in food deserts or traveling, but I suspect I’m very rare. For many vegans I know, not eating any animal products at all is part of their identity, so being forced to consume them because of a lack of availability would be incredibly emotionally stressful for them and create a lot of cognitive dissonance.
I suspect that veganism is also done at the same time as organic/local/raw and other things that drain willpower and might be unhealthy and expensive and more socially awkward. You would need to tease out the different types of veganism to see the respective growth and recidivism rates.
An average of seven years is consistent with the hypothesis that the problem is vitamin B12 deficiency. Our bodies store enough B12 that it takes anywhere from months to decades for symptoms of a severely deficient diet to become clear.
This is a pretty poor explanation for people stopping eating vegan. You could apply the same argument if the average time someone remained vegan were anywhere from 2 months to an entire lifetime.
Interesting point. Should there be a greater focus on advertising and promoting how to eat a healthy vegan diet? While I’m not sure how effective this would be, I’d like to see more people pressuring government health departments to advertise the health benefits of being vegan, as my brief reading on the topic indicates that, for the government at least, it would save them money in the long run as the public health burden would be lower.
I think that would be a good idea. Would it make sense to have Facebook ads and Google Video ads to promote NutritionFacts.org? We might want to link to a page that distills the information on the videos into a single video or webpage, as the site has a lot of videos!
Another idea could be to translate the videos or make transcriptions and translate those.
If ‘veg*n’ isn’t a word that everyone uses yet, I think there should be a different one. It’s hard to not read it as a misspelling of ‘vegan.’
It seems kind of weird that things recede after seven years. Like, if it were a willpower thing I’d expect it to be shorter. I’m not just going to decide after a few years that my eating habits are too hard to keep up.
Did you see anything about people saying why they started eating animal stuff again?
“Like, if it were a willpower thing I’d expect it to be shorter. I’m not just going to decide after a few years that my eating habits are too hard to keep up.”
This seems reasonable, but the reasons given were health issues followed by hassles, and only then uncontrollable cravings. Health issues would probably take a while to develop and then a while more to respond to by switching back.
Re. hassles, I can imagine someone switching to a vegan diet when it is relatively more convenient and then switching back when it stops being so because your environment changes, e.g you switch when you’re near stores that stock a good selection of vegan products, and then stop when you move to a different area.
I use a harm-minimisation strategy when I’m in food deserts or traveling, but I suspect I’m very rare. For many vegans I know, not eating any animal products at all is part of their identity, so being forced to consume them because of a lack of availability would be incredibly emotionally stressful for them and create a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Seven years is an average; the distribution seems pretty skewed.
Yes, see the text right under the “Why is veg*n recidivism so high” heading.
I suspect that veganism is also done at the same time as organic/local/raw and other things that drain willpower and might be unhealthy and expensive and more socially awkward. You would need to tease out the different types of veganism to see the respective growth and recidivism rates.
An average of seven years is consistent with the hypothesis that the problem is vitamin B12 deficiency. Our bodies store enough B12 that it takes anywhere from months to decades for symptoms of a severely deficient diet to become clear.
This is a pretty poor explanation for people stopping eating vegan. You could apply the same argument if the average time someone remained vegan were anywhere from 2 months to an entire lifetime.
Interesting point. Should there be a greater focus on advertising and promoting how to eat a healthy vegan diet? While I’m not sure how effective this would be, I’d like to see more people pressuring government health departments to advertise the health benefits of being vegan, as my brief reading on the topic indicates that, for the government at least, it would save them money in the long run as the public health burden would be lower.
I think that would be a good idea. Would it make sense to have Facebook ads and Google Video ads to promote NutritionFacts.org? We might want to link to a page that distills the information on the videos into a single video or webpage, as the site has a lot of videos!
Another idea could be to translate the videos or make transcriptions and translate those.
Agree with that. Far too many vegans ignore B12.