Health Study Outcomes Of Meat Eaters Versus Plant Based Eaters

Intro

the Adventist Health Study is is not just one study it’s multiple hundreds of studies the first Adventist it was called the Adventist mortality study which actually compared seventh-day adventists with the general population in California and what they found is the Adventist Health Study Adventists lived longer and had less disease so then they did the Adventist Health Study one which looked at the possible reasons why the Adventists actually had less disease smoking less exercising more eating healthier plant more plant-based diets and all of that and then the Adventist Health Study too came along and it began in 2002 and it followed about ninety it is still following its following about ninety six thousand individuals from North America the United States and Canada and they look at meat-eaters semi vegetarians pesco vegetarians lacto-ovo vegetarians and vegans and they end of course it’s you know it’s a study where they’re looking at health outcomes over time and what they found is they found a lot so there have been a lot of reports so where heart disease is concerned it was very very interesting because cardiovascular disease was about forty two percent lower among health-conscious vegans versus health-conscious omnivores controlled for smoking and drinking and exercise and all of that it for lacto-ovo vegetarians it was about twenty three percent lower however female vegans didn’t enjoy any advantage over the female omnivores and that to me was a bit of a mystery dr. Michael Orlick was the lead author on this study and I asked him if there was an explanation for that and I had a theory my my theory is that – I don’t know if it’s it’s correct or not but I I think that there’s much less of a difference between and maybe you could chime in on this Milton between the female vegetarians vegans and omnivores then there may be between the males because from my experience in the Adventist world I see even the omnivorous women not eating very much meat where the men may eat quite a lot more and so they would enjoy an even greater advantage going vegan then would the WIMP woman the women and michael Orlok he’s there there number number of possible explanations and he said basically we really don’t know but that did you want to chime in on that III

Other Studies

would say that I think that your impressions are probably certainly correct to an extent and moving in the right direction I also just want to throw out one other little tidbit that when you look when they looked at at least in the Adventist Health Study one cancer risk the Adventists had lower risk for all cancers except prostate cancer and one of the reasons is because most of them most of them are lacto-ovo and the primary risk factor for Quran say cancer is dairy consumption at least that’s my theory yep and in the fantasy Health Study – I they they they factored they looked compared vegans and lacto-ovo vegetarians and vegans were at an advantage as far as I can recall where cancer is concerned the vegans had about 16% lower rates and the lacto-ovo vegetarians I think it was 8 percent compared to similar health-conscious omnivores they looked at diabetes vegans had 62 percent less diabetes and the lacto-ovo vegetarians I think it was 34 percent or so less they looked at kidney disease and it was about half 52% less kidney disease um lacto-ovo vegetarian and vegans combined they looked at longevity and the vegans had a 15% advantage over the that 15% lower mortality the lacto-ovo vegetarians had about 9% so so these studies are are very to me I I like the study because we’re seeing long-term outcomes in health that are favorable for for people eating plant-based so I like that but we we I mean if you look at epoch Oxford and I didn’t mention yesterday and I should have mentioned the latest 2019 study that has looked at cardiovascular disease they found aid about 22 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease for for vegetarians but the vegetarians had about a 20 percent increased risk of hemorrhagic of strokes which were mostly hemorrhagic strokes and so I think we need to do more investigation and and you may have an explanation for that but at this point I think we need a little bit more search to look at that well so a couple quick comments first when you

Comments

hear about and rended by the way is remarkable and and you could play the let’s see of Brenda’s right game with all these statistics that she throws out you trust me she’s always right so she actually knows all these numbers it’s crazy but she’s a lot of these numbers are relative risk so if you have a 23 percent increase in the risk of X and the 22 percent reduction the risk of why you’re still obligated to ask well what was the baseline risk of X what was the baseline risk of Y right so you could increase the risk of something you could double the risk that could mean that you know it goes from one in two to two and three you know it could be a very high risk but if your risk at baseline is one in a million and you double it it’s two in a million it’s still very unlikely to happen the hemorrhagic strokes that that Brenda just referenced are very uncommon relative to ischemic strokes so there was a slight increase in risk and vegans but at a very low baseline the absolute risk there was really very tiny the other thing I just want to leave you with what I hope is a bit of pithy wisdom from the world of statistics and logic absence of evidence is not evidence of absence so what Brenda cited for the Advanta study was that the vegan women did not seem to have an advantage relative to omnivorous or vegetarian locked over vegetarian women in the same population that may simply be a lack of statistical power because if you match for smoking and you match for sleep and you match for stress and you match for spirituality and you match for lifestyle and everybody’s diet is a pretty high quality and everybody’s taking very good care of themselves then the difference attributable to just the differences in their diet in terms of health outcomes is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller as each other important element in the health equation becomes standardized across the group doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference but as the difference you’re looking for it gets smaller you need an ever larger cohort and more time to find it and the fact that you didn’t find it may simply mean group wasn’t big enough you didn’t have enough time for that because they were matched on so many parameters that the outcome differences were that what was left that you know sort of the residual of all that and it may be fairly small it may still be quite meaningful keep in mind that you know if something only affects one in in a hundred thousand people you know there’d be many thousands of cases in the u.s. each year in a population of 300 million so even small risks may translate into a lot of very unhappy families at the end of a given year but those risks may be very hard to spot even if you have a thousand people in your study even if you have five thousand you might need a hundred thousand people in your study for a long time to find those small differences I

Thoughts

just want to throw out a couple of thoughts I agree with you David that the the way Brenda has these statistics memorized is it’s actually encouraging because it suggests that yeah your brain is gonna be cool on a plant-based diet but another reason I think that they may not have seen differences in the women in particulars because as you know when it comes to plant-based Adventists there’s the number of vegans is much smaller than the number of lacto-ovo vegetarians and given that women are already at lower risk for heart disease that would mean that you would need a lot more women to actually power the study well enough to see the differences that were there so that’s probably an artifact of just kind of study design and population but the question that I want to ask both of you briefly is when that Oxford data came out suggesting there may be a small increase in hemorrhagic stroke there was a lot of discussion about the statistical analysis and the suggestion that the analysis was flawed and that that’s why they got those incongruous results suggesting that vegans were more likely to have a hemorrhagic stroke what do you guys think of that do you think that the way the data was analyzed was suspect you know I should be able to

Conclusions

answer based on my training but I don’t remember the statistical method my recollection though is that it was a relative risk of an extremely small baseline and the error bars were wide so I remember looking at it and shrugging my shoulders thinking 22% variants in a very low baseline risk this is going to get distorted in the media because there’s a massive reduction in something that’s common and a slightly lesser increase in something that’s rare and the error bars are wide meaning we’re not even really sure that it’s happening I’m it’s just barely significant so you know it was sort of borderline fluke I didn’t notice any problem with the methods per se other than the methods were translated by the media into a false equivalence this gets better this gets worse but we were talking about massively different levels of baseline risk something common got a lot better and something very rare may have gotten a little worse that that’s that’s not an equivalence and and I have no idea all I can say is I trust Paul Appleby the statistician for epic Oxford he has a tremendous amount of experience and I highly doubt that he would make that kind of error