It's dangerously unhealthy, overpriced - and often ultra-processed: Seven years after Britain went crazy for vegan sausage rolls...why the fad for veganism is dead already

Lauren Daws was just an 'impressionable 16-year-old' when she decided, against her parents' wishes, to become vegan.

'When you're young you think you know everything. I was being presented with studies saying meat blocks your arteries, and watching documentaries that positioned veganism as both healthier and morally better,' she tells the Daily Mail.

'The evidence felt compelling.'

For over four years, Lauren kept to a strict plant-based diet, shunning all animal products including everything from chicken and beef to milk and honey. However, in the background, something was going horribly wrong.

'I was bloated all the time and in pain after eating,' Lauren continues. 'I had permanent fatigue. My hair started falling out and I developed acne. Then I had terrible brain fog.

'I couldn't put a sentence together and even felt unsafe driving. I also contracted Covid around four or five times, so my immune system was clearly not strong.'

With doctors at a loss, Lauren underwent hair tissue mineral analysis and found that copper levels in her body were five times the normal amount – a potentially fatal quantity that can cause liver failure.

The likely cause, it emerged, was her vegan diet restricting zinc intake, which can spike copper levels (the two minerals compete against each other to be absorbed through the intestines, so less of one means more of the other).

Furthermore, she was told her diet was compromising her body's ability to fight infections, exacerbating the problem and explaining her issues with Covid.

A decade after Lauren first went vegan, the now 26-year-old eats a healthy, balanced diet including animal products.

The change in her health has been miraculous and Lauren believes diet played a major part in her recovery, which now allows her to work as a women's health coach.

However, not all such stories have a happy ending.

Last month, an inquest found that 21-year-old university student Georgina Owen – who had followed a vegan diet since 2016 – took her own life in September 2019 after 'suffering delusional beliefs brought about by a vitamin B12 deficiency developed as a direct result of her vegan diet'.

Such shocking stories have made plain the real dangers an exclusively plant-based diet can pose.

However, for the first time since it went mainstream in 2014, it appears veganism is on the wane.

With vegan restaurants closing at a remarkable rate, meat-free alternatives being pulled from supermarket shelves and horror stories of ill health piling up, today the Daily Mail asks: is veganism dead?

A vegan diet is more extreme than vegetarianism as vegans do not eat foods derived from animals, such as dairy products or sweets made with gelatine.

Moreover, vegans should avoid animal cruelty in all aspects of their lives such as not wearing fur, boycotting horse racing and shunning cosmetics tested on animals.

In other words, veganism is not just a diet, it is a lifestyle that has always been closely aligned with Left-wing, progressive politics.

Indeed, veganism surged in popularity following the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn (admittedly a vegetarian only) to the Labour Party leadership in 2015. The 'veganuary' campaign had also begun the previous year.

Popular veganism did not emerge from a vacuum, but on a cultural tide.

Between 2014 and 2019 the movement thrived. The meat-free market grew by 40 per cent to be worth an estimated £816million, according to agriculture market analysts HRA Global, driven in large part by widespread celebrity support from the likes of Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton and pop star Miley Cyrus.

Vegan-mania arguably peaked in 2019 with the launch of the vegan sausage roll at high-street bakery Greggs, a landmark cultural moment that boosted sales by over 14 per cent.

But that was then and this is now. Although the Vegan Society claims some 2million people currently follow a plant-based diet or identify as vegan, over the past three years something has changed.

Google searches for the word 'vegan' rose year-on-year from 2010 but have since dropped off post-2020.

Miley Cyrus is no longer among their number for a start. She admitted in 2020 she began eating fish again because, as she told the Joe Rogan podcast, 'my brain wasn't functioning properly'.

Vegan restaurants are feeling the pinch. Lewis Hamilton's plant-based joint Neat Burger, once valued at £100million with secured investment from Leonardo DiCaprio, fell into liquidation just two years later, closing all 11 of its UK stores.

Likewise, Pret a Manger closed its final two Veggie Pret outlets, while the same trend has been seen across the country, with celebrated vegan restaurants from Liverpool's Veggie Republic to Rudy's Vegan Diner in London shuttering their doors.

At the same time, analytics outfit Lumina Intelligence found that meat-free options were 'explicitly shrinking' in pubs and bars across the country, and established outlets including McDonald's, Wagamama and Domino's have all reduced the meat-free offerings on their menus.

Sales of plant-based foods in supermarkets fell 4.5 per cent in the year to January 2025, according to the Good Food Institute Europe.

Meanwhile market leader Beyond Meat have seen falling sales and their share price has fallen 98.8 per cent since 2019. The question is, why?

Not only can a plant-based diet lead to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, meat-free substitutes have been exposed as highly dangerous in their own right.

Vegan sausages, burgers and steaks are classified as 'ultra-processed foods,' typically made up of soy meat substitutes alongside a litany of stabilisers and artificial flavourings.

In recent years, UPFs have been identified as a contributing factor to many major illnesses including cancer.

As scientist and writer Chris van Tulleken explains, ultra-processed food is 'not food. It's an industrially produced edible substance' – which has been designed to be as addictive as possible.

'The ultra-processed food debate highlighted the poor nutrition of some heavily processed vegan products,' Alex Hayes of Harris and Hayes food industry consultancy told the Daily Mail.

'Just because they're labelled "vegan," it doesn't mean they're healthy.'

Consumers, Hayes says, are now looking towards 'cleaner ingredients' and nutrient-dense meals.

This shift in healthy eating habits has also been observed by celebrity food influencer and nutritionist Natalia Rudin, who previously practiced veganism for three years.

'Obviously there was a huge boom in the vegan world and all these processed meats came out,' she explains. 'But, as with anything that's ultra-processed, it's just not particularly good for you.

'So there's definitely been a swing towards whole foods; ingredients like beans and pulses. What's important is balance, variety, diversity, protein and fibre. But if you focus [on diet] too deeply, it breeds obsession and it becomes unhealthy.'

And while Natalia supports veganism as an environmental and ethical choice, she knows the dangers of the extreme diet better than most.

'Unfortunately, I had an eating disorder,' she says. 'That was one of the main reasons I decided to go vegan, it was a form of restriction that could go undetected.'

Thankfully, Natalia is in recovery and now eats widely, warning others of the dangers of extreme diets. 'While I think vegan food is great,' she explains, 'I think maybe the vegan community can be a little intense and unforgiving.'

'Vegans are very good at making you feel guilty,' agrees fellow food influencer Ben Rebuck, who has over 400,000 followers on social media and quit veganism after noticing he was 'more tired than normal, more grouchy'.

For Ben, it was a 'long, arduous process' deciding to 'come out' to his followers that he was no longer vegan, due to concerns over potential backlash.

'Veganism was not designed as a healthy diet,' he says, 'but as an environmentally conscious one.'

He points out another perverse effect of veganism: weight gain. 'I did put on a lot of weight at one point. You can have a jam and peanut butter sandwich with a Coke, and that's a vegan lunch.'

Make-up artist Helen Ainsworth, in her forties, learnt the hard way just how unhealthy the vegan diet can be.

Having been plant-based for a decade, Helen went into hospital with a separate issue only to learn, via a blood test, what the diet had done to her body.

'I was so low in calcium that they had to put me on a drip,' she revealed. 'My hair was dry, my skin was dry, my bones were getting brittle, but more to the point, I had this massive calcium deficiency that was so dangerous, and I was low in iron and potassium, too. There are so few plants that you can get calcium from.'

'It is so important if you are going to be a vegan that you are getting all of the right nutrients,' Helen added with hindsight. 'And not only from supplements either, because they're full of fillers and a lot of rubbish.

'But it's no surprise people are stopping [being vegan] because they find they're feeling ill. That was certainly my experience.'

Without doubt, stories such as these have dampened the national appetite for veganism.

Consumers understand that it is not the silver bullet for health that they perhaps first believed.

Price has also played a part. A study by the Good Food Institute in 2022 found plant-based meat to be 67 per cent more expensive than the real thing and plant-based milk 87 per cent dearer.

While the price difference is narrowing, in the Co-operative supermarket today, a packet of 12 Richmond pork sausages costs £2.90. A pack of eight meat-free sausages on the other hand, costs £3.20.

Similarly, while plant-based food typically has a considerably smaller carbon footprint to meat, especially beef, even the environmental benefits of veganism have come under scrutiny.

'Air-transported fruit and veg can create more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram than poultry meat, for example,' explains Oxford University researcher Joseph Poore.

This not only accounts for air travel but for the environmental cost of artificial pesticides, water use and packaging.

Almond milk has its environmental trade-offs, too. Almond trees require vast amounts of water, which can strain resources in drought-prone areas like California.

So where does what one former adherent described as the 'cult of veganism' go next?

Intriguingly, it has become a battleground of the ongoing culture war between Left and Right.

In 2010, 'ethical veganism' was made a protected philosophical belief under the UK's Equality Act 2010. While this was seen as a victory for vegans and animal rights campaigners, it also politicised veganism and left it open to greater criticism.

Between 2015 and 2020, there were 173 reported hate crimes against vegans. And the strength of feeling has only grown since then, particularly online.

A 2022 academic study on the 'ideology of anti-vegans' found that 'these communities have become intertwined with alt-Right ideology' and slang insults for vegans, such as 'soy boy', are now used to demean those who 'lack traditionally masculine qualities'.

Anti-vegan groups have amassed large followings online, such as the Anti-Vegan Club on Facebook and the Anti-Vegan League on image-sharing platform Flickr.

Alex Scab, for example, has amassed over 30,000 followers on Instagram posting videos for 96 consecutive days of himself cooking meat alongside the caption: 'Eating steak every day so vegans don't make a difference.'

Another post, by an account promoting healthy motherhood, even goes so far as to equate veganism with 'child abuse'.

Such vitriol, of course, is not only the preserve of the anti-vegans. In 2018, trainee farmer Alison Waugh made national news after being called a 'murderer' and 'rapist' by militant animal activist vegans, reported to have been wearing T-shirts with slogans such as 'If you wear fur, I hope you die screaming too'.

But as the beef between vegans and anti-vegans grows ever more venomous, the lifestyle itself becomes increasingly fringe.

Sadly, as the case of Georgina Owen shows, the true cost of veganism on those who didn't fully understand its implications, will be counted for many years to come.