Vegan food isn’t ‘manly’ enough, according to men — researchers want to change that

Men have beef with eating vegan.

A new study shows that fewer men are adopting vegan diets because they don’t think the lifestyle is “manly” enough.

Alma Scholz, who worked with the University of Würzburg, in Germany to produce the findings, enlisted 539 people to explore their opinions of plant-based food and its relation to gender.

“Men might be less inclined to consume vegan food due to the need to appear masculine,” explained Scholz, now based at the University of Stockholm in Sweden. 

“Perhaps if we used even more masculine language to describe this food, we could make men more willing to eat it,” she added. 

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Communication on Wednesday, asked participants to rate four vegan meals on how suitable they were for men or women on a scale from one to seven. 

On average, more people in the study found that meals consisting of a vegan burger, salad, carbonara, and goulash were more suitable for women than men. Researchers hypothesize that targeted marketing for women could play a role.

Half of the study’s participants were given more “masculine” language to describe food. Some were told the vegan burger was called a “beast burger” instead of a “wow-factor burger.”

Other traditionally masculine adjectives included words like “smokey” and “hardy” versus neutral words like creamy and delicious. 

When people were given the more masculine terms, they rated the food as slightly less suitable for women — though not entirely. 

But even with more masculine names, men viewed vegan food as more suitable for women overall. 

Researchers employed a 1 to 7 scale for rating foods, with 1 being the most feminine and 7 being the most masculine; a middling 4 was considered neutral, neither manly nor womanly.

When participants were fed non-gendered language, the average rating for the vegan meals was 3.68. When terms like “beast,” “smokey,” and “hardy” were used, the average rating went up to 3.98, meaning it was thought to be equally suitable for both genders.

While male assessments proved to be influenced by language, women were relatively unswayed by the various descriptions, regardless of their gendered associations.

The study authors blamed cultural stereotypes and traditional gender roles for people’s views on diet. 

“In particular, meat consumption is linked to gender stereotypes of masculinity, probably explaining men’s lower willingness to adopt plant-based diets,” the authors wrote. 

“Meat is associated with strength and potency, which makes meat appear more suitable for men: ‘Men are strong, men need to be strong, thus men need meat,’” the study continued. 

The authors also looked at the diets of people in Germany and found that just 5% of the population follows a vegetarian diet and only 1% are vegan. The vegetarian diet is more widespread among women, who account for 6.1% versus just 2.5% of men. And only 19% of all vegans are men. 

Nevertheless, vegetarian and vegan diets “have been shown to be associated with lower risk of chronic diseases,” researchers noted in their report, suggesting that companies reconsider how they advertise plant-based foods to appear to more men.

However, the real reason for a carnivorous dietary preference might be in our genes, according to another study published in the journal Plos One on Wednesday.

Scientists from Northwestern University found that people who identified as mainly vegetarian still ate some meat and fish — and genetics may be to blame.

“It seems there are more people who would like to be vegetarian than actually are, and we think it’s because there is something hard-wired here that people may be missing,” study co-author Nabeel Yaseen said in a news release.

The study authors found three genes linked to vegetarianism and another 31 genes potentially linked to a plant-based diet. 

“My speculation is there may be lipid component(s) present in meat that some people need. And maybe people whose genetics favor vegetarianism are able to synthesize these components endogenously,” Yaseen added. 

Scientists found that the way people metabolize meat varies from person to person and something in meat might actually make people crave it. The scientists used alcohol as an example. They said while people may not like drinking alcoholic beverages at first they get a taste for it over time. 

“I think with meat, there’s something similar. Perhaps you have a certain component – I’m speculating a lipid component – that makes you need it and crave it,” Yaseen said.