Eating Vegan Okay Until… & If You Hit Old Age

Researchers at Loma Linda University School of Public Health have been hard at work trying to figure out how  you can fend off the Grim Reaper.

They have figured out three things.    A variety of vegetarian diets appear to protect against the risk of mortality.  A diet of vegetables and some fish  provides  the most protection against risk of mortality.  But no matter what you eat, you can eliminate the risk of death.

But the news is not all good, for vegans.

Gary Fraser a professor at Loma Linda School of Public Health was the lead researcher for this study, and he reports a higher risk of death for elderly people who are vegetarians, due to their risk of having neurological conditions like dementia, stroke, and Parkinsons Disease.

Eating some fish lowers those risks, but it really bad news for the fish.

Fraser concludes that a vegan diet fends off death for middle age people.  But once you get into your 80’s, if you get into your 80’s, a strict vegan diet loses its advantage.

The study used data from the Adventist Health Study-2, which involved 96,000 people who identify as Seventh-day Adventist and lived in the United States and Canada during the study’s baseline recruitment between 2002 and 2007, with follow-up through 2015. 

Dietary data was broken down into five groups:  non-vegetarian, semi-vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, lacto-ovo-vegetarian, and vegan.

Fraser said his team found that Adventist vegetarians overall had about a 12% less risk of death compared to Adventist non-vegetarians. Study participants with a pesco-vegetarian diet had an 18% less risk of death. Those with a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet (including dairy and eggs) had a 15% less risk of death. Vegans overall had a less than 3% decreased risk of death, but male vegans fared much better than non-vegetarians, in contrast to females.

Photo of vegetables on a table, courtesy of Palm Springs Certified Farmers Market.