It's a long-held stereotype that vegetarianism is just a phase. When you tell your parents and other relatives, who love to serve roast chicken and pot roast and baked ham at large family gatherings, that you've become a vegetarian or a vegan, they may panic at first but then adopt the ideology that it's something you'll eventually grow out of, much to your chagrin.
No matter how hard you try to prove them wrong, unfortunately their views are not unfounded. A new study from the Humane Research Council has found that most vegetarians and vegans actually do return to eating meat.
In the study, the animal advocacy group found that 84 percent of vegetarians and vegans actually return to eating meat. What's more, it doesn't even take very long for many of them to do so. The study found that 53 percent of vegetarians and vegans go back to eating meat within a year and more than 30 percent within three months of making their lifestyle change.
The Humane Research Council polled 11,000 participants in the United States for the study. Of that sample, only 2 percent were currently vegetarians or vegans, 10 percent had once tried vegetarianism or veganism, while 88 percent had been meat eaters all of their lives.
So what's the cause of this dramatic drop-off in a plant-based eating lifestyle? It turns out you are who you eat with. The researchers found that social pressures, like being the only vegetarian or vegan among friends, caused people to revert back to eating meat. As The Huffington Post points out, past research has shown that your friends do in fact influence what you eat. People also found it difficult to give up something completely, cold turkey, if you will. Craving meat was also a major factor.
Some other research published earlier this year also found that being a vegetarian or a vegan isn't as easy as it looks. Researchers at the Medical University of Graz in Austria found vegetarians were more likely to feel unhealthy and have a poorer quality of life physically, socially and environmentally.
Obviously, the Humane Research Council wasn't hoping for these results. In fact, the group notes in the study that the findings are "disappointing."
"It's obviously a negative for animals," Che Green, the executive director of the Humane Research Council, told The New York Daily News.
However, all hope is not lost for the vegetarian and vegan contingents of the U.S. The study found that 37 percent of former vegetarians and vegans would be interested in giving a meatless lifestyle another go in the future. So that's something.
