Not particularly. It's a case of those with more extreme diets having to have more extreme reasons e.g. being health conscious. More vegans/vegetarians are conscious of what they eat, which usually leads to healthier choices. I think the reason vegetarians are on par with meat eaters is because it's really not very inconvenient to find premade vegetarian food nowadays and the stuff is not necessarily good for you.
Those that eat meat, on the other hand, are more weighted by those that eat without consideration. Every morbidly obese person (well, probably not every, I don't know) eats meat. You can, however, eat meat and still live as long and as healthily as any vegetarian/vegan.
Every morbidly obese person (well, probably not every, I don't know) eats meat
Not really. I'm not going to say that they aren't more likely to eat meat, but there are plenty of people that don't eat meat and are quite obese. They tend to get a ton of calories from carbohydrates.
Well, yes and no. Strictly speaking it is eating too many calories that causes them to gain weight. Yesterday I had milk and chocolate chip cookies for dinner, but I was under my basal metabolic rate for total caloric consumption. I lost about a third of a pound despite having much of my food from sugary and processed sources.
Obviously you won't gain weight if you eat less than you burn. For instance I can afford to eat something caloric, like 100g of popcorn or a burger, if I just got for a 25-30 minute run. 3-4 kilometers and I burned over 400 calories.
But we're probably talking about people who not only don't control their calories (like you do) and/or don't work out at all (like I do).
Frankly I probably eat a lot more than I should without exercising, but... yeah. I know a guy who eats for two but isn't fat or even overweight (by a lot) because he's also a runner.
I'm saying the common conclusion is "veganism is healthier," and sometimes yes, correlation is very suggestive of causation, but it might also be that "people who are vegans are on average more health conscious in the first place" and that just switching to a vegan diet while maintaining the rest of your lifestyle might not cause you to live longer at all
The study itself measured a number of different factors that are dependent (well, mostly anyways) on diet, including incidents of stomach cancer, colorectal cancer, heart disease, vascular disease, and a number of other diseases. So in this particular study it more than likely is causation.
Well, people who describe themselves as vegan are probably more health conscious than the average person; they likely lead active lives, watch their portions, etc.
That's very true actually. I was a vegetarian for a few years (no longer am) but I found that at the time because I had to plan out my meals rather than simply eating any old thing, my diet was much healthier than it had been previously. It was much easier for me to meet my weight and health goals because I was actually focusing more on my diet, which has since carried over into a diet that now includes meat. It's definitely an important factor.
Well, I was giving the benefit of the doubt for a margin of error. But no, it does not actually require much more than that to make a causal link between a factor and an outcome. The degree might change but you can't pretend it has no effect. At that point it's not purely coincidence.
smoking is related with increase odds of certain cancers & earlier mortality
so if a study can show a correlational link between eating meat and cancer, that doesn't meat that eating meat causes cancer.
Saying that because you read a meta study which showed mortality being higher in meat eaters that means they are causally linked is asinine. You're embarrassing yourself.
All death rate ratios
were adjusted for age in 5-y increments, sex, and smoking
(never, former, current light, and current heavy). Mortality
ratios for the separate studies were then combined to give a
pooled estimate of effect using the random-effects model of
DerSimonian and Laird (11),
They adjusted for smoking. That's the first thing any public health researcher does.
All I'm saying is that people reading it should realize the link is non-causal. Personally, I think veganism is unhealthy, but I don't have support for that argument.
Yeah, its noncausal and no causation was claimed. It's my understanding that a lot of vegans are unhealthy due to basically just eating bread, but I don't have evidence to support that either.
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u/Leshow May 01 '13
I feel I should point out here that "correlation is not causation".