Vegan and vegetarian are not the same thing. Both diets eliminate meat, fish, and shellfish, but vegetarians typically still eat dairy products and eggs, while vegans exclude all animal-derived foods. The distinction goes further than food for many vegans, extending into clothing, cosmetics, and other lifestyle choices.
What Each Diet Includes and Excludes
Vegetarians avoid meat, fish, shellfish, and animal by-products like gelatin and rennet. Most vegetarians continue eating dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt) and eggs. A vegan diet goes further by removing every food that comes from an animal, including dairy, eggs, and often honey.
Both diets share a common foundation: grains, beans, pulses, pasta, rice, potatoes, nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables. The practical difference shows up most clearly at the breakfast table or in a bakery. A vegetarian can eat an omelet, a cheese pizza, or a slice of cake made with butter and eggs. A vegan cannot.
Types of Vegetarian Diets
“Vegetarian” is actually an umbrella term covering several variations:
- Lacto-ovo vegetarian: Eats both dairy and eggs. This is the most common type.
- Lacto-vegetarian: Eats dairy but not eggs.
- Ovo-vegetarian: Eats eggs but not dairy.
A vegan diet is sometimes described as the strictest form of vegetarianism, where all animal-sourced foods are off the table.
Why Vegans Don’t Eat Honey
Honey is one of the foods that most clearly separates the two diets. Most vegetarians eat honey without a second thought. Many vegans do not, because they view beekeeping as a form of animal exploitation.
The reasoning: honey is the primary energy source bees produce for their own survival. When beekeepers harvest it, they typically replace it with a sugar substitute that lacks the micronutrients bees need. Commercial beekeeping also involves practices like clipping queen bees’ wings to prevent them from leaving the hive and selectively breeding colonies in ways that narrow the gene pool. For vegans who define their diet around avoiding exploitation, not just cruelty, honey doesn’t make the cut.
Veganism as a Lifestyle, Not Just a Diet
This is where the two diverge most sharply. Vegetarianism is a dietary choice. Veganism, for many people, extends well beyond food. Ethical vegans avoid wearing leather, wool, and silk. They choose cosmetics and household products that haven’t been tested on animals. They skip items containing beeswax or lanolin.
Not every vegan follows all of these practices, but the underlying philosophy is broader than what’s on the plate. The Vegan Society’s definition explicitly seeks to exclude all forms of animal exploitation, not just in food production.
Hidden Animal Ingredients to Watch For
Both vegetarians and vegans need to watch for animal-derived ingredients that aren’t immediately obvious. Gelatin shows up in gummy candies, marshmallows, and some yogurts. Rennet, an enzyme from animal stomachs, is used in many cheeses. Carmine, a red dye made from crushed insects, appears in some candies and cosmetics.
Some surprises are harder to spot. Fruit juice and wine are sometimes clarified using gelatin or fish bladders, but these processing aids don’t appear on the label because they’re filtered out of the final product. Certain breads use an amino acid derived from feathers and bristles to make dough easier to work with. Even bananas can be sprayed with a pesticide made from crustacean shells to slow ripening during shipping. Additives like lactic acid, lecithin, and generic “flavoring” can come from either animal or plant sources, with no easy way to tell from the packaging.
Nutritional Differences Between the Two Diets
Because vegetarians still eat dairy and eggs, they have an easier time getting certain nutrients that vegans need to plan around more carefully. The main nutrients of concern for both groups are vitamin B12, vitamin D, iron, calcium, iodine, and selenium, but the risk of deficiency tends to increase the more animal foods you remove.
Vitamin B12 is the biggest gap. It’s found naturally almost exclusively in animal foods. Vegetarians get some from dairy and eggs, but vegans average an intake of less than 1 microgram per day, well below the recommended 2.4 micrograms. B12 deficiency rates in vegans are consistently higher than in other vegetarians. Both groups benefit from supplementation, but for vegans it’s essentially non-negotiable.
Vitamin D levels also track with how many animal foods a person eats. In one British study, vegans had the lowest blood levels of vitamin D across all diet groups and were four times more likely to be insufficient and sixteen times more likely to be deficient compared to meat eaters. Vegetarians fell somewhere in the middle. Iron tells a similar story: the body absorbs about 10% of iron from a vegetarian diet compared to 18% from a diet containing meat, and vegetarians as a group have lower iron stores than meat eaters.
How Common Is Each Diet?
Globally, vegetarianism is more common than veganism. In a 2018 poll across 28 countries, 5% of respondents identified as vegetarian and 3% as vegan. In the United States specifically, 5% of adults called themselves vegetarian and 2% vegan. India is an outlier, with one in five people identifying as vegetarian, largely for cultural and religious reasons.
“Plant-Based” Is a Separate Term
You’ll often see “plant-based” used alongside or instead of vegan and vegetarian, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as either. The term has no strict legal definition. The FDA has issued draft guidance on labeling plant-based alternatives to animal-derived foods, but these are recommendations, not enforceable rules. In practice, “plant-based” can describe anything from a fully vegan product to one that simply emphasizes plants while still containing some animal ingredients. If avoiding animal products matters to you, checking the actual ingredient list is more reliable than trusting front-of-package labels.