Is veganism unmanly? Do real men need meat?

The objection

“Eating meat is part of being a man. Men are bigger and need more protein, and in country after country they eat more meat than women do. Cut it out and your testosterone goes with it: plant diets are low in fat, low-fat diets lower testosterone, and soy is full of plant oestrogens. Veganism is for soy boys.”

The answer

Psychologists have measured the link between meat and manliness many times, mostly in Western countries, and it keeps showing up. What the research has not shown is that men need meat for their testosterone or their muscles. In two large British studies, vegan men had no less testosterone than meat-eaters [8][9], and in a 2021 training trial, vegan men whose protein was topped up with soy gained as much leg muscle as omnivores topped up with whey [1].

That trial (Hevia-Larraín et al., 2021) put 19 young men who were habitual vegans and 19 omnivores, all untrained, through 12 weeks of supervised weight training twice a week, with protein topped up to about 1.6 g per kilo of body weight a day using soy protein for the vegans and whey for the omnivores [1]. Both groups gained an average of 1.2 kg of leg lean mass. Leg-press strength rose by 97 kg in the vegans and 117 kg in the omnivores, a difference that was not statistically significant, and none of the measures of muscle size or strength differed significantly between the groups [1]. It was a small, short trial in young men, and because they kept their own diets the groups were not randomised [1]. Across 30 randomised trials, a 2025 meta-analysis found that plant protein built slightly less muscle mass than animal protein, mainly in adults under 60, in trials that included resistance training and in trials of non-soy proteins or whole plant-based diets, while soy matched milk protein, the comparison this trial made (Reid-McCann et al., 2025) [17]. Strength did not differ significantly overall, although animal protein did better for lower-body strength in trials of adults aged 60 and over [17]. The answer on building muscle goes through that evidence, and the athletes who compete on plants are in the answer on vegan athletes.

Why do people link meat with being a man?

In Western cultures at least, people carry a mental link between the muscle meat of mammals and maleness, and in experiments men whose masculinity has been threatened tend to lean harder on meat. Rozin and colleagues (2012) tested the link in six studies with different methods, from word association and imagined scenarios to food choices and the analysis of language, and concluded that a metaphoric link between meat and maleness exists [2]. One of the paper’s four authors, Brian Wansink, was found by Cornell University in 2018 to have committed academic misconduct in his research [3]. This paper has not been retracted, and later work by other teams points the same way.

Rothgerber (2013) found that male undergraduates defended eating meat head-on, endorsing pro-meat attitudes, denying that animals suffer and calling meat-eating human fate, while female students more often dissociated animals from food and avoided thinking about how animals are treated, and that the male strategies were related to masculinity [4]. In two experiments by Nakagawa and Hart (2019), men whose sense of masculinity had been threatened expressed more attachment to eating meat, and a nationally representative US survey in the same paper found men less willing than women to cut down [5]. A 2026 scoping review of masculinity-threat experiments (Breakspear et al.) found 16 on food and drink, 14 of them about meat, and concluded that threatened men consistently leaned towards stereotypically masculine foods, especially meat, although two studies found no clear effect [6]. A scoping review maps studies without pooling their results, so it shows that the pattern is consistent but cannot say how large the effect is.

Do men eat more meat than women everywhere?

Men eat meat more often than women in most countries that have been compared, though not in all of them. In a 2021 survey of 20,802 people in 23 countries on four continents (Hopwood et al., 2024), men ate meat more often than women in 20 of the countries, while in China, India and Indonesia there was no significant difference [7].

Country	Men	Women	Gap, Cohen’s d (95% CI)
Germany	3.76	2.84	0.58 (0.45 to 0.71)
UK	4.14	3.35	0.42 (0.28 to 0.56)
USA	4.76	4.35	0.21 (0.08 to 0.35)
Japan	4.49	4.21	0.18 (0.02 to 0.35)
Indonesia	3.30	3.24	0.04 (-0.08 to 0.17)
China	4.61	4.60	-0.01 (-0.14 to 0.12)
India	1.85	1.92	-0.03 (-0.16 to 0.10)

The scores are average answers on a scale from 1 (never) to 11 (two or more times a day) for beef, pork, chicken and other land animals, from Hopwood et al. (2024), Table 1 [7]. A positive gap means men ate meat more often, and a gap whose interval includes zero is not statistically significant.

The gap was widest in the more developed and more gender-equal countries, largely because men there ate meat more often, while women’s meat-eating did not rise in the same way [7]. The authors say their data cannot tell whether biology or social norms drive the difference, but that its absence in three of the world’s largest countries suggests that culture and context play a part [7]. The survey asked how often people ate meat and did not record portion sizes, it included no African countries, and it was funded by Mercy For Animals, which the paper describes as a non-profit dedicated to ending animal agriculture and which employs two of the authors [7]. Even a gap found in every country would show what men tend to choose, which is a separate question from what their bodies need.

Do vegan men have lower testosterone?

Vegan men did not have lower testosterone in two large British studies that measured it. The UK Biobank, which recruited half a million people aged 40 to 69 in 2006 to 2010, reported adjusted average testosterone of 11.7 nmol/l in its 166 white British vegan men with a result and 11.3 nmol/l in the 117,763 regular meat-eaters, who ate red or processed meat more than three times a week, a difference that was not statistically significant (Tong et al., 2021) [8]. The averages allow for age, body mass index, fasting time, alcohol and smoking [8]. The study did not report free testosterone, and among its white British participants every other diet group, vegans included, had higher sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), the protein that binds testosterone in the blood, than the regular meat-eaters, while vegetarians and vegans had lower IGF-I, a growth factor [8]. Its authors point out that earlier prospective studies linked higher SHBG and lower IGF-I with lower risks of breast and prostate cancer [8].

An older Oxford study looked at the fraction of testosterone the body can use. In EPIC-Oxford (Allen et al., 2000), blood from 696 British men recruited from 1994 to 1997 showed that the 233 vegans had 13% more total testosterone than the 226 meat-eaters, offset by 16% more SHBG [9]. Free testosterone, the unbound fraction, did not differ between vegans, vegetarians and meat-eaters, and once body mass index was taken into account the vegans’ higher total testosterone was no longer significantly different from the meat-eaters’ [9]. The vegans also had 9% lower IGF-I than the meat-eaters, the finding in the paper’s title [9]. Both studies were cross-sectional snapshots, which describe vegan men’s blood but cannot show what happens to one man who changes his diet.

The low-fat argument is the strongest part of the objection, though it is about fat rather than meat. Among 3,128 US men in the NHANES surveys of 1999 to 2000, 2003 to 2004 and 2011 to 2012, the 457 whose diets met the researchers’ low-fat definition had lower average testosterone than men on unrestricted diets (410.8 against 443.5 ng/dl), and the gap remained after allowing for age, body mass index, activity, diabetes, prostate cancer and other illnesses (Fantus et al., 2020) [10]. The authors called the differences between diets modest, and a cross-sectional survey of this kind cannot show that the diet caused them [10].

The two meta-analyses of intervention studies disagree. One from 2021, of six studies with 206 men, found lower total and free testosterone on low-fat than on high-fat diets, with a stronger effect on total testosterone in European and North American men, though its authors said randomised trials were needed to confirm it (Whittaker and Wu, 2021) [16]. The other, from 2025, pooled 11 randomised trials with 888 adults and found no significant effect of low-fat diets on testosterone or other sex hormones, and its authors rated the certainty of the evidence as low (Soltani et al., 2025) [11]. Whatever fat does in a feeding study, it did not show up in vegan men’s blood: the Oxford vegans got 29.9% of their energy from fat, against 34.0% for the meat-eaters, just inside the 30% cut-off the 2025 meta-analysis used for a low-fat diet, yet their free testosterone was no different [9][11].

Soy, the source of the “soy boy” jibe, has been tested directly. A 2021 meta-analysis of 41 clinical studies, with total testosterone measured in 1,753 men, found no significant effect of soy protein or isoflavones on testosterone, free testosterone or oestrogens, whatever the dose or the length of the study (Reed et al., 2021) [12]. It was funded by the United Soybean Board, which directs checkoff money on behalf of US soybean farmers [12][13], and the answer on soy has the detail.

If you have symptoms such as low energy, mood swings or loss of muscle mass, the NHS advises seeing a GP, who may order a blood test to measure your testosterone, and it notes that in many cases these symptoms have nothing to do with hormones [14]. Any man going vegan also needs a reliable source of vitamin B12: the NHS lists breakfast cereals, unsweetened soya drinks and yeast extracts that are fortified with B12, and says a supplement may be needed [15].