In May, the Vegetarian Resource Group released the results of their Harris poll estimating the number of U.S. adult vegetarians and vegans (1). Rather than asking individuals to self-define their eating behavior, they classified vegetarians and vegans by asking people to identify foods they never eat.
The poll found that 4% of U.S. adults are vegetarian (including vegans) and 2% are vegan. Applying their results to the U.S. adult population shows that 5.1 million adults consider themselves to be vegan (2). This is up from VRG’s 2016 poll which estimated 3.7 million U.S. adults to be vegan (3). Between polls, the adult U.S. population increased by about 3.5% while the U.S. adult vegan population increased by about 37%.
