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  • 2017-12-12 (xsd:date)
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  • Do Vegetarians Live Longer Than Meat Eaters? (en)
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  • A popular topic of debate on Facebook timelines (and around family dinner tables) is whether or not it is healthy to eschew eating meat. Well-informed advocates of the practice will likely eventually point to scientific research demonstrating that vegans or vegetarians live longer lives than their omnivorous counterparts; most likely, the results they cite have their origins in a long-term study of Seventh Day Adventists. The survey, a well known epidemiology project undertaken by Loma Linda University, compares the health metrics and life outcomes of a large population of Seventh Day Adventists, a religious group noted for promoting a strict and healthy lifestyle, to the general population. The first Adventist Health Study utilized data collected from 1976 and 1988, and a second study — Adventist Health Study 2 — is underway as of December 2017: A 2001 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) based on data from the first Adventists Health Study provides the basis for most vegetarian longevity claims. The study provides a comparison between Adventists’ and non-Adventists’ longevity by diet type: The average of those two numbers — 6.1 years and 9.5 years — is 7.8 years, the length of time referenced by a popular, if not quite accurate or precise, meme (the numbers refer to vegetarians, not vegans): Researchers at Loma Linda published a follow-up paper in 2013, but their earlier figure is still frequently cited, in part because its findings offer the perception of being unambiguous. The 2013 study, which includes more recent data, found a similar association, but was more muted in its treatment of a potential direct causation between vegetarianism and longevity. The authors of the study suggested its results, presented here as a chance of death over a given study period, may not be directly applicable to other populations: Seventh Day Adventists are not the only people scientists have used in an effort to investigate this question. A study in 2015 of more than 60,000 people in the United Kingdom, part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition–Oxford (EPIC-Oxford) survey, found that vegetarianism provided no overall reduction in risk of early death, though it found that some low-meat diets reduced the risk of death from specific ailments: A 2017 paper that analyzed similar health metrics for over 240,000 Australians, part of the 45 and Up Study, similarly found no increased longevity from avoiding meat: In a piece discussing the results of the Australian survey at The Conversation, co-author Melody Ding explained why this question is, from a methodological standpoint, difficult to study: While an increasing number of studies are skeptical of a direct correlation between vegetarianism and longevity, the question remains controversial in epidemiological research. Therefore, we rank claims that vegetarians live longer than meat eaters as unproven. (en)
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