Downside: oesophageal cancer 😕
I thought it was a pretty well established fact, that more vegetables and less meat help generally help prevent cancer.
But going full vegan also has health issues, that requires supplements to avoid, otherwise a vegan diet can cause anemia, bone loss and fatigue.
A vegan diet can easily lack 5 major nutrients like: B12, Omega 3, iron, calcium and zinc.
And a vegan diet increases risk of Colorectal Cancer, but this can be helped with calcium supplements. 1 of the 5 mentioned above.That’s an oversimplification of the evidence. The strongest associations in nutritional research are usually with ultra-processed foods, excess caloric intake, obesity, alcohol, smoking, low fiber intake, and poor cardiometabolic health overall, not simply “meat bad.”
There’s also an important distinction between processed meat and unprocessed meat. The evidence linking processed meats like hot dogs and deli meats to colorectal cancer is much stronger than the evidence against unprocessed meat, like steak or fish fillets.
Nutrition science also struggles with confounding variables. People who eat large amounts of vegetables often differ in many other ways too: lower smoking rates, more exercise, lower alcohol intake, higher income, better healthcare access, etc. Untangling those effects is difficult.
Even “plant-based” processed foods are not automatically healthy. Many modern substitutes are highly refined products with isolated proteins, emulsifiers, seed oils, sugars, and micronutrient fortification used to imitate the nutrient profile of animal foods. And those are the good ones! The bad ones just slap oat milk on a box put a bunch of water and sugar in it and that’s about all it is.
Matching nutrient labels is not necessarily the same thing as matching bioavailability, digestion kinetics, or long-term physiological effects.
A more scientifically defensible generalization would simply be: diets centered around minimally processed whole foods tend to correlate with better long-term health outcomes than diets dominated by ultra-processed foods, regardless of whether those foods are animal- or plant-derived.
This is a great comment, really excellent.
One point - the vast majority of the current evidence is from a population centered around a carbohydrate dominated metabolic context - which can be another confounding variable
To clarify, it’s specifically squamous-cell carcinoma, not all esophaheal cancers. SCC is, however, the most common form of head/neck cancer by a mile.
As the study notes, though:
As discussed above, the higher risks we observed for squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus in vegetarians, and for colorectal cancer in vegans [“although the number of cases among vegans was small”], might be due to a higher prevalence of inadequate intakes of some nutrients in these groups within the populations studied.
If so, that’s a highly preventable problem. Vegan/vegetarian diets have higher risks of certain nutritional deficiencies (and lower of others), but it’s not especially hard to have a balanced diet.
That is: if you’re doing it for health, the “fix” should already be baked-in.
Edit: Forgot to mention for anyone looking for resources about vegetarian/plant-based dieting for health, “whole foods plant-based” (WFPBD) is what you’ll want to be looking into. That’s where the major health benefits are.
Edit 2: Reading the methodology more thoroughly now, it seems like a plant-based diet was underrepresented in the data and that “no difference in cancer risk in vegans except elevated colorectal cancer” is suspect (which the authors disclaim for colorectal). a) Within the study itself, you’d think the doubled SCC rate wouldn’t just stop at vegetarians somehow (a plant-based diet is less acidic than an animal-based one, but still??), and b) it directly contradicts several meta-analyses finding an overall lowered risk of cancer in vegetarians (as this study seems to) and then another marked lowering from that in vegans. Linked above, for example, from 2018:
This comprehensive meta-analysis reports a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet versus the incidence and/or mortality from ischemic heart disease (-25%) and incidence from total cancer (-8%). Vegan diet conferred a significant reduced risk (-15%) of incidence from total cancer.
To add to that: A majority of head and neck cancers are caused by HPV.
The authors note possible additional factors to diet. I wonder whether HPV vaccination may be loosely inversely correlated with vegetarianism (geographical/socio-economic/healthcare system differences etc.).
One thing I would’ve initially speculated but apparently had wrong was dietary acid, which is actually lower in plant-based diets. The other would be possibly volume of food (lower caloric density), but overall, I’m willing to take the authors’ speculation as-is, as I’m sure they tried to find any relevant data when speculating about causality – much more thoroughly and knowledgeably than I could hope to.
Last time I took some dietary acid, I was laying in bed for the next 16 hours.
Vegetarians probably ingest more pesticides. God only knows what that’s doing to us.
As a vegetarian, I will also admit I still eat a lot of processed and crap food. 😢
What do you think the meat is fed? In some cases, literal trash.
Curious how much might have to do with industrialized farming. I wonder if they got a group and only fed them a balanced diet of vegetables and naturally raised prominently fish and chicken based diet what cancer rates would be.
In other words I’m curious if its the meat or how we raise our meat. We’ve already determined beef isnt great health wise.
Fake. I get cancer every time I have to talk to a brainlet meat eater
Vegetarian on their death bed “Damn you sixth cancer!” 🤣