The largest study of vegetarian and vegan retention — Faunalytics’ 2014 survey of 11,399 US adults via Harris Interactive — found that 84% of people who adopted a vegetarian or vegan diet eventually returned to eating meat. That number is the action-side proxy shown above, used directly rather than the previously constructed composite. But lapse rate is not regret rate. Crucially, 37% of the lapsed expressed interest in re-adopting, meaning they do not regret the diet itself — they regret stopping it, or faced barriers they could not overcome. A Faunalytics obstacle analysis found that social isolation (84% were not part of any veg community), food access, and meal prep difficulty — not principled rejection of the diet — drove most lapses.
On the other side, a 2022 Vegan Society survey of 2,000 non-vegan UK adults found that 22% report feeling guilty about eating meat all of the time — a persistent-guilt figure we use as the inaction proxy rather than the combined 71% who report guilt “some” or “all” of the time. Persistent guilt maps more closely to a regret-adjacent construct than intermittent discomfort. Cognitive dissonance research (Bastian et al., 2012) shows that meat-related guilt is often resolved through justification strategies — “the guilt persists but produces no corresponding desire to act.” The Vegan Society, as the commissioning body, has an advocacy interest in high guilt numbers.
What the data establishes is that dietary identity is unstable: most people who try vegetarianism quit (though many want to try again), and roughly one in five meat eaters carries persistent guilt about it. The action-dominates pattern reflects an asymmetry between a very high lapse rate and a modest persistent-guilt rate, but readers should note that lapsing conflates genuine dissatisfaction with situational barriers. Both figures are proxies for different constructs (behavioral abandonment vs affective discomfort), so the large delta should be read with caution.