The Wall Street Journal reports the results of a study first published in the Journal of the American Medical Association-Internal Medicine. No subscription is required to see this WSJ article.
The study done by researchers at Loma Linda University (an SDA institution) finds that vegetarians and nearly-vegetarians live longer than those who eat meat. A group of some 73,000 members of the Seventh Day Adventist church were asked about their diets and categorized into meat-eating and vegetarian groups based on questionnaire responses. During the six year period of the study, vegetarian respondents were 12% less likely to die than meat-eaters.
Do you see the main problem with the study? The SDA church preaches vegetarianism, while "not all of its followers adhere to that teaching." A thought experiment: suppose you asked 73,000 Mormons about their drinking of alcohol practices (the church opposes drinking), would you suppose those who admitted drinking on a survey run by BYU were to some degree deviant in other realms of their behavior? We would. Similarly, SDAs who eat meat and admit it are likely to behave recklessly in other arenas of their life, smoking and drinking, for instance.
In order to have confidence in these findings, we would want the meat-eating subjects to come from parts of society where meat-eating is considered routine, normal behavior. From groups in which vegetarianism is the deviant behavior. We distrust the comparison of people following church teachings with those who do not and are who are willing to admit it to an arm of their church,
At COTTonLINE, we're carnivores who eat plant matter too. Our main-meal planning begins with the meat,
We don't know if vegetarians live longer but we're sure it's so boring it must feel longer. Perhaps that feeling is worthwhile.
