Reminder that correlation != causation
The causation studies are in different papers.
But if you can follow all correlations you effectively get the same result anyway. There’s more than just health reasons to be vegetarian or vegan.
But if you can follow all correlations you effectively get the same result anyway.
That’s also wrong.
The specific thing I’m worried about is, younger people are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan. Young people are less likely to be diagnosed with cancer (it’s impossible to measure existence of cancer in a population). I read the abstract and methods, there’s no indication this study accounted for this.
The average age of vegetarians in the study is over 65, and a few years older than the non vegetarians. In the table under Results.
Age would be one of the correlations so it’s not wrong. I never said everyone can follow all the correlations I said if you can, if you hit all the variables you get the result regardless of knowing what variables caused said result.
Exactly. Studies like these are great, but this doesn’t mean veganism reduces cancer risk at all. It could be, for example, that vegans tend to be careful about their intake of macro- and micronutrients, and/or that vegans tend to exercise more, and/or that vegans tend to eat less fast food/processed food, and/or that vegans tend to be more affluent and thus seek/get better medical care, and/or (etc.)
It’s most definitely not as simple as “but consuming any animal products makes you ¼ less likely to get cancer.” It could even be the opposite effect, although that’s unlikely, of course. But this result doesn’t rule out that other lifestyle choices made by vegans have, say, 30% benefits that more than “counteract” the –6% harm that comes from avoiding fish protein/fats or whatever.
As always, it’s important to actually read the source rather than just commenting.
They have a whole list of covariate variables that they examined that have been found in other studies to possible and probable risk factors for cancer. For each of the types of cancer they looked at (they looked at 365 different types) they have specific other variables that they examined that influenced that type of cancer (i.e smoking and exercise for lung).
They are examining seven day adventists only - even the non-vegetarians they were comparing against eat less meat, smoke less, drink less and are more health conscious than most Americans (from the article). This is also the biggest study of plant based diet and cancer.
They also discuss that the strongest effects are those where eating meat is a risk factor for that type of cancer (i.e cancers of the stomach).
This is a big study that suggest a strong link between diet and cancer where both the meat eaters and vegetarians are much more health conscious and eat less meat than average Americans. This method cannot establish causality, but to do that would require randomised participants agreeing to strictly stick to a diet for decades. There are extremely small or no negative impacts to not eating meat (source: article), but the health benefits from this study appear significant. As always, more data is needed - but this is just one of a number of scientific studies that show benefits to not eating meat.
Fair enough! Thanks for correcting me. That does sound like a very well designed study.
@Five and still: vegan is not a diet
vegans and vegetarians, not a diet. and a distinction from one another.
