Now, of course, being vegan won’t kill you, right away or ever. But the same goes for eating a diet of purely McDonald’s or essentially just potatoes (like many peasants did). The human body is remarkably resilient and can survive on a wide variety of diets. However, we don’t thrive on all diets.
Vegans often show up as healthier in studies than other groups, but correlation is not causation. For example, famously Adventists are vegetarians and live longer than the average population. However, vegetarian is importantly different from vegan. Also, Adventists don’t drink or smoke either, which might explain the difference.
Wouldn’t it be great if we had a similar population that didn’t smoke or drink but did eat meat to compare?
We do! The Mormons. And they live longer than the Adventists.
The Seventh-Day Adventist studies primarily looked at differences *between* different Seventh-Day Adventists, not just a correlational case of Seventh-Day Adventists against other members of the public. This helps control for a number of issues with looking across religious groups, which would be a pretty silly way to determine causation from diet to health. I believe the results also stand after a large number of demographic adjustments [2].
Finally, Mormons are predominantly white. Only 3% of Mormons are black. 32% of Seventh-Day Adventists are black. In the US, black people have a substantially lower life expectancy than white people [3]. Thus, it’d be unreasonable to look at naive life expectancies across two different religious groups and assume that lifestyle makes the biggest difference, when there are clearly other things going on.
[3] Interestingly enough, this is not true across the rest of the developed world. For example, UK black people have a higher life expectancy than white people. I’ve never dived in into this discrepancy before so I’m not sure what the reason is.
Not relevant to the main text here, but based on this I suspect at least part of the reason white folks in the UK have lower life expectancy is rates of alcohol consumption. See figure 1, for example. I haven’t dug into the report methodology so my confidence is low, but it at least tracks with my experience living there. These data on cause of death are interesting as well.
x-posted from Substack
The Seventh-Day Adventist studies primarily looked at differences *between* different Seventh-Day Adventists, not just a correlational case of Seventh-Day Adventists against other members of the public. This helps control for a number of issues with looking across religious groups, which would be a pretty silly way to determine causation from diet to health. I believe the results also stand after a large number of demographic adjustments [2].
Finally, Mormons are predominantly white. Only 3% of Mormons are black. 32% of Seventh-Day Adventists are black. In the US, black people have a substantially lower life expectancy than white people [3]. Thus, it’d be unreasonable to look at naive life expectancies across two different religious groups and assume that lifestyle makes the biggest difference, when there are clearly other things going on.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4191896/
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4191896/table/T4/
[3] Interestingly enough, this is not true across the rest of the developed world. For example, UK black people have a higher life expectancy than white people. I’ve never dived in into this discrepancy before so I’m not sure what the reason is.
Not relevant to the main text here, but based on this I suspect at least part of the reason white folks in the UK have lower life expectancy is rates of alcohol consumption. See figure 1, for example. I haven’t dug into the report methodology so my confidence is low, but it at least tracks with my experience living there. These data on cause of death are interesting as well.