Celebrities Who Gave Up Veganism and Went Back to Eating Meat

Veganism gets talked about in Hollywood like a finish line, something a star crosses once and never looks back from. The reality is a lot less tidy.

Several famous names who spent years as the public face of plant-based living have quietly reversed course, and the reasons behind those decisions rarely make it into the same headlines that celebrated the switch in the first place.

Some blame their bodies, some blame a single dinner they never planned on eating, and a few just got tired of feeling worse instead of better.

Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus followed one of the strictest vegan diets in Hollywood from 2013 to 2019, a stretch she has described as the most disciplined version of the lifestyle she could imagine. She adopted it after the death of her dog and quickly became one of the most recognizable vegan faces in music, even earning recognition from PETA along the way.

The break came during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where she explained that her brain wasn’t functioning properly and that fish and omega-3s had to go back on her plate. She also pointed to ongoing hip pain and a growing sense that she’d been malnourished for years, and said her ex-husband Liam Hemsworth grilled her first non-vegan meal.

Cyrus has stuck with a pescatarian approach since then, eating fish while skipping meat entirely. She’s said the shift left her sharper on stage, though she’s also acknowledged that plenty of former fans were unhappy with the change.

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway went plant-based around 2011 to slim down for Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, then kept the diet going through the physically brutal shoot for Les Misérables. By the time she reached Interstellar a few years later, she was still holding on, even while filming scenes suspended in harnesses and submerged in freezing water.

The diet ended at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Iceland, where her Interstellar co-star Matt Damon let the chef choose his meal. Hathaway has since opened up about asking whether the fish was local, only to be pointed toward the fjord outside the window and served a piece of salmon.

She has said the meal left her feeling like her brain was rebooting, and that she simply hadn’t felt strong or healthy while sticking to plants alone. Hathaway has framed the whole thing as a personal experiment rather than a moral stance, one she was willing to abandon the moment it stopped working for her.

Ellen DeGeneres

Ellen DeGeneres spent eight years as one of daytime television’s most outspoken vegans, crediting the diet with more energy and real weight loss during a 2009 interview. She built a chunk of her show’s identity around plant-based cooking segments and eventually invested in vegan food brands alongside her wife, Portia de Rossi.

During her 2018 Netflix special Relatable, DeGeneres quit being vegan almost as a throwaway joke, admitting she’d started eating fish once in a while and the occasional egg from chickens she personally knew. Unlike most celebrities on this list, she didn’t point to a health scare or a single dramatic dinner.

DeGeneres has said she felt healthier than ever while vegan and still speaks positively about the lifestyle. She just found herself drifting from it gradually, without ever framing the shift as a rejection of the diet itself.

Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson went vegan while promoting Captain America: The Winter Soldier, telling reporters at the time that he was simply trying to live forever. The diet left him visibly leaner, and he stuck with it for months while continuing his run through the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That changed abruptly when a role threatened his job. According to plantbasednews.org, his agent warned him he’d be recast unless he gained back roughly twenty pounds for the part, since producers wanted him to look more physically imposing on screen.

Jackson has said he left the meeting, bought a large burger that same night, and stopped being vegan almost immediately afterward. It remains one of the more abrupt exits on this list, driven entirely by a casting requirement rather than a slow loss of interest.

Zac Efron

Zac Efron went vegan for roughly two years, crediting the diet in a 2018 interview with completely changing how his body processed food and how well he slept. His Down to Earth co-host Darin Olien had first pulled him toward the lifestyle, and Efron spoke about it enthusiastically for years afterward.

He later told Men’s Health he had ditched a vegan diet because his body had stopped processing vegetables the way it used to. He turned to intermittent fasting and food-sensitivity testing before settling on a protein-heavy routine built around two meals a day.

Efron now eats meat regularly, including organ meats like liver, and has said the switch left him feeling far more sustained throughout long shooting days. He’s been careful to note that morally he still wishes he could have stayed vegan, even though his body clearly disagreed.

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton adopted a strict vegan diet after a second heart procedure in 2010, working with Dr. Dean Ornish to reverse the arterial damage that had already required quadruple bypass surgery years earlier. He cut out meat, dairy, eggs, and nearly all oils, crediting the change with real weight loss and better energy.

His longtime physician, Dr. Mark Hyman, eventually pushed back on the strictness of that approach, describing it as a diet that made it genuinely hard to get enough quality protein without overloading on starch. Hyman began advising Clinton to occasionally eat fish and lean protein instead of staying purely plant-based.

Clinton still calls himself a fan of the vegan lifestyle and eats that way most of the time, but he’s openly admitted to weekly salmon, the occasional bite of turkey at Thanksgiving, and a general willingness to bend the rules when his doctor asks him to.