![]() ![]() In a meta-study from 2018, Benatar & Stewart looked at these risk factors among vegans. High body mass index, high blood fat, high blood pressure and diabetes all increase the risk of heart problems, stroke and so on. But Heart Problem would be the ruler of them all, which is probably why there are so many studies on veganism/vegetarianism and cardiovascular disease. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Christian tradition were Death, Famine, War and Conquest, today they would have had to have been named Heart Problem, Cancer, Respiratory Disease and Diabetes. That said, I’ll do my best to be fair-minded and to let the evidence speak for itself. So it would be good for me if vegan diets were healthy, or at least risk-free. I am myself a vegetarian leaning vegan, my wife is vegan and I believe that eating vegan is morally right, at least for the vast majority of humans. Instead, wherever possible, I will be citing randomised controlled trials (RCTs), where the variable being studied (in this case, a particular diet) is isolated so that causality can be inferred. What that means is that we must look at observational studies with a critical eye. It could just be that vegans exercise more or smoke less, for example, and that it is the exercise or the lack of smoking, not the diet, that makes them healthier. If we find that vegans are on average healthier than non-vegans, we can’t infer that it is the vegan diet that makes them healthier, because correlation is not causation. That means there are a lot of possible confounds here. The other thing I’ll note before we get underway is that vegans and vegetarians are strongly self-selected groups that differ significantly from the general population. I’ll make these distinctions, too, where relevant. Why? Because I think it’s likely (though not guaranteed) that any positive or negative effects in vegetarian diets are also present in vegan diets (though there might be positive or negative effects from vegan diets that aren’t produced by vegetarian diets). Since there aren’t that many studies on vegan diets specifically, I’ll also be looking at studies of vegetarian diets. ![]() There are many varieties of vegetarian and even vegan diets. ![]() They also differ in which non-carnivorous diets they are looking at. The first question is: healthy compared to what? To a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet? or to a standard Western diet? or to the mean world diet, if that is even a coherent concept? The papers I will cover in this post don’t all answer the same question, so I’ll try to be clear in pointing out what they are comparing to. ![]() The skins crawled, and the meat that was stuck on the spits bellowed,īoth roast and raw, and the noise was like the lowing of cattle. For more information on how to do a vegan diet, see for example Vegan Health. As the post points out, for example, many vegans are deficient in vitamin D and/or vitamin B12 fortunately those are easy to supplement, but you need to actually do that. Addendum : Although this post concludes – rightly, I think – that a vegan diet can likely be healthy if you make sure to get all the nutrients that you need, I want to emphasise up front that you really do need to make sure that you get all the nutrients you need, and this does not happen by default. ![]()
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