UNITED STATES, October 31, 2006: Almost everybody seems to have a relative or a friend who is vegetarian. Even large corporations have become greatly interested in vegetarian and cruelty-free items. For example, Colgate recently purchased control of Tom’s of Main for $100 million. Silk and its parent company White Wave were bought by Dean Foods, the largest U.S. processor of dairy foods. Though a high number of Americans are interested in natural foods, how many adults are actually vegetarian? To find out, the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) hired Harris Interactive to conduct a national poll. In this year’s poll, 2.3 percent of adults aged 18 years or older say they never eat meat, fish, or fowl and, thus, are vegetarian. Furthermore 6.7 percent of the total say they never eat meat. Nine percent of females say they don’t eat meat, which makes them almost twice as likely as males at 5 percent to abstain from eating meat. However, the percentage of vegetarians is almost evenly split between genders with 3 percent of women and 2 percent of men being vegetarian. Approximately 1.4 percent of the total population is vegan, meaning that their diets do not contain meat, fish, poultry, dairy or eggs. The U.S. 2000 census found that there are approximately 205 million non-institutionalized adults aged 18 years or older in the United States. Based on 2.3 percent being vegetarian, the VRG calculates there are approximately 4.7 million adult vegetarians in the U.S. Since there are more people in 2006, the number of vegetarians would be somewhat higher. For a further breakdown of the poll, see URL above.
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