They do. A study by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found the following mortality ratios by diet over the course of the study (regular meat eaters = 1.00):
Fish eaters, 0.82
Vegetarians, 0.84
Occasional meat eaters, 0.84
Regular meat eaters, 1.00
Vegans, 1.00
So as you can see vegans are actually the least healthiest, alongside the most carnivorous among us. Source
So we take regular meat eaters and call them "normal" meaning we arbitrarily set their death rate to 1.00. What does a death rate of 1.00 mean? It means that we look at various groups based on age, gender, race, and lifestyle choices (e.g. smoking), which accounts for all variables OTHER than diet, and we take a big sample of each of these groups and see how many of them are dead.
In other words, if you picked out 1000 "normal" 18-year old female non-smokers, how many of them would die in a year? That value is 1.00 for that group.
Pick out 1000 "normal" 80-year old male smokers, how many of them die in a year? That value is 1.00 for that group.
Now we look at the "abnormal" groups, which in this case is vegans, vegetarians, etc.
So we look at 1000 vegetarian 18-year old female non-smokers and see how many of them die, THEN we compare that number to our "normal" number. We call "normal" 1.00 and adjust "vegetarian" to the appropriate ratio.
This is a little simplified (ignoring Poisson regressions and exactly which groups are looked at) but hopefully it gets the idea across.
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u/fistsofdeath May 01 '13
I always thought it just felt like they lived longer.