I wrote a more comprehensive article about how many people in the world were vegan. You can read about it here if you’d like. But today we’ll just focus on how many people in America are vegan.
In that article where I write about how many vegans there are in the world, I give a link to a recent study conducted by the Vegetarian Resource Group. You can read it in the previous link.
Anyway, to cut a long story short they have determined that about 3% of the population is vegan and about double that number is vegetarian. However, that study was conducted only on adults and it only included 1,010 adults.
Interestingly, there are more men who are vegan than there are women. According to the poll conducted by VRG, 3% of the adult men identified as vegan and only 2% of the women identified as vegan.
But the real answer is how many Americans are vegan as a number. According to this article on Wikipedia, there are 228 million odd adults in the US. I’m not sure what percentage of those adults are made up women compared to men, but let’s assume a 50/50 split.
So with 3% of American men being vegan then that would mean that roughly 3.42 million American male adults are vegan. This is obtained by multiplying the number of American adult males (half of 228 million adults) by 3%.
When doing the same calculation for American adult women, we find that there are roughly 2.28 million adult women in the United States of America who are vegan. This number is lower because only 2% of female adults in the USA identify as vegan compared to 3% of male adults who identify as vegan.
It’s hard to determine how many children in the US are vegan or vegetarian for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I don’t imagine you can poll children legally, and secondly children are vulnerable more often to the dictates of their parents and the food prepared for them.
Nevertheless, children are also more sensitive to the suffering and cruelty put upon animals by humans, and likely to respond to that cruelty by becoming vegan or vegetarian. However, they also have certain rules imposed upon them by their parents, and some parents are probably unwilling to allow their children to change their diets. This could be due to ignorance, or any other various reasons.
Though if I were to guess how many American children are vegan, I’d have to suggest that the percentage would be similar to that found in adults. Perhaps higher, if you can allow me a certain optimism.
So assuming that 3% of all Americans both young and old are vegan, then I’d suggest that close to, or around 9.5 million Americans identify as vegan. This might be generous, and it is certainly my guesstimate. The number is arrived at by multiplying the total American population by 3%.
The total American population estimated at this link is just over 315 million. If double that number are vegetarian as the VRG poll suggests then you can do the math yourself, though I’ll do it for you here.
The number of vegetarian adult males in the United States would be: 6.84 million (based upon 6% of adult men in America being vegetarian)
The number of vegetarian adult females in America would be: 4.56 million (based upon 4% of adult women in the US being vegetarian)
And the total number of all Americans who identify as vegetarian would be: 19 million if that number is 6% of the population or 15.75 million if that number is based off of 5% of the total population.
There you have it. That’s the answer to how many Americans are vegan. It is a rough estimate and the number of total Americans who identify as vegan is purely my guesstimate. It is accurate within 99% points… probably, maybe 😛