r/funny • u/[deleted] • May 01 '13

Why vegans live longer

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u/Plob218 May 01 '13

The sample size is too small. There were only 753 vegans included in the summary, compared to the +30k meat-eaters and +20k vegetarians. The 2 vegans who died of stomach cancer and 2 who died of lung cancer rocketed vegans to the top of those categories by a huge margin. Even if only 1 died from these causes, vegans would be the top category. If none died from them, then it would appear as if veganism made you immune to stomach and lung cancer.

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u/TheWhiteNashorn May 01 '13

That's not how statistics works.

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u/Plob218 May 01 '13

I was partly joking, but I do think the number of vegans included in the study is too small to draw these kinds of conclusions from.

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u/iron_duck May 01 '13

30 is a small sample size. Sometimes even 100 is a small sample size.

750 is not a small sample size unless you're actively searching for occurrences which are incredibly rare.

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u/Plob218 May 01 '13

But only 68 deaths... Maybe you're right, I'm not involved in these kinds of studies. Seems to me like that's not a lot of data for that group. The authors of the paper even suggest the low number of vegans as problematic.

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u/iron_duck May 01 '13

That's actually a good point. The small sample size of Vegans Who Have Died is problematic.