PREVALENCE OF VEGANS IN SEOUL
ARE VEGANS COUNTED or ARE "VEGANS" COUNTED?
A new paper by Jeong et al. (2026) reports 59 vegans in a study among adults in Seoul, South Korea.
(The paper is open access.)
I am not sure whether participants were asked: "Are you vegan?" or (more likely) "Do you eat [A, B, C, ...]?" - in the latter case the scientists categorized the participants as "vegans" (maybe incorrectly so).
"The participants were first asked to identify their dietary pattern, and their responses were
categorised into the following 5 types: (1) vegan (no consumption of any animal products),
(2) lacto-ovo vegetarian (consumes dairy and eggs but excludes meat and fish), [...]."
The prevalence of vegans isn't crazily high. But I would suspect that for South Korea this prevalence for "vegans by choice" is still too high - much too high probably (my guess).
"Among the participants, 84.1% were
omnivores, followed by flexitarians (10.9%), pollo-pesco vegetarians (2.4%), lacto-ovo
vegetarians (1.4%), and vegans (1.2%)."
What I find very suprising is that about 55% (weighted percentage) of vegans were food insecure. But this was even higher (about 68%) in omnivores.
This does not seem to be a usual urban South Korean population (?).
In addition, about 48% of the vegans were men. This is a surprisingly high percentage. I would have expected relatively more women to be vegan.
And about 24% of vegans were aged 65 years or older, with only about 14% were in the age group 18 to 34 years. I would have expected the highest percentage in the "young people" age group.
An explanation for the roughly 85% of the vegans being older than 34 years, could be that these were mostly very strict Buddhists. ... However, a very quick internet search suggests that roughly 10–15% of adults iin Seoul dentify as Buddhists [PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG].
HYPOTHETICALLY:
Let's say, 3,600 people --> 15% would be 540 Buddhists at most. The study found 59 vegans. Let's assume 80 to 100% of the vegans were Buddhists. That would be 47 to 59 Buddhist vegans. That would be about 9 to 11% of Buddhists being vegans. This seems very high [PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG]. Even assuming that 5% of Buddhists in Seoul are vegetarian (not semi-vegetarian or pescatarian) seems overly optimistic - from a vegetarian perspective.
Their Table 1:
Their Table 2:
Reference
Minjeong Jeong, Eunjin Jang, Youngmi Lee, Sohyun Park: Factors associated with vegetarian orientation among Seoul citizens: focusing on food literacy and sociodemographic characteristics. Nutr Res Pract . 2026 Apr;20(2):301-316. doi: 10.4162/nrp.2026.20.2.301. Epub 2026 Mar 6.
