How does eating a plant based diet over a traditional diet decrease your risk of heart disease and other health related risks?
In: Biology
Honestly, we don’t know and it might not be healthier at all. Dietary science gets reversed *a lot*, for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. This is why you hear so much conflicting information about dietary health; the quality of the studies are so low that they can’t produce consistent advice.
The biggest issue for vegan diets is that vegans care about their health, a lot. This means that they’re far more likely to work out, manage their stress, not smoke, and generally pay attention to their health. When you compare them against the general population, it’s very hard to tell which of these factors is causing what changes. Maybe it’s the food, or maybe it’s all the other health related behaviors that are completely unrelated to veganism. Teasing out the difference is very, very hard.
Secondarily, most food studies depend on self reporting. This is awful. To get an idea of how bad this is, please think about what you had for lunch last Tuesday. I’ll wait.
Finally, there’s a lot of corruption and ego in food science. Obviously there’s a lot of money to be made, but there has been some unbelievably baffling stuff over the years. The source of the cholesterol theory of heart disease comes from one flawed study that cherry picked convenient data, and whose author proceeded to bully everyone else into following along for almost 30 years. It’s entirely possible that that theory is just utterly wrong, and well eventually have to redo *everything* in that area.
Latest Answers