Is Vegetarianism Good For You?
Why I am still eating meat
There’s an old saying that I remember my mother telling me when I was just a tiny health nerd. It resonates with me to this day, because not only is it true but it just makes so much sense;
“There are no black-and-whites when it comes to diet, almost every dietary choice comes with pros and cons”
Actually, now that I think about it, that might have been the nutrition professor in my master’s program.
Whoops.
Either way, it’s just as true. There are no easy answers when it comes to evidence-based advice on your diet.
For example, a group of scientists at the Australian CSIRO spent years researching the best possible diet advice and released a brilliantly short, practical summary of the evidence as a diet book that you can buy.
It’s only 624 pages long!
So when I talk about vegetarianism, it’s good to remember that this is not simple.
Plant-Based Diets
There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about vegetarian diets. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume that ‘vegetarian’ is a diet that excludes all meat including fish, but allows you to gorge yourself on cheese and eggs (sorry, vegans!).
A lot of people notice that they lose weight when they move to a vegetarian diet, which comes with all sorts of health benefits. This is not at all surprising, because vegetables are have fewer calories than meat, but contain a lot of fibre making you feel ‘full’ after eating less.
And at a population level, we see benefit after benefit. Vegetarians have lower blood pressure, less heart disease, less cancer, less diabetes, and are generally healthier and happier than people who eat meat.
This jives well with the established problems with eating too much meat, in particular red meat, so it just makes sense that cutting it out of your diet would improve your health.
Here Comes The But
Remember what I said at the start of this article? If there is one thing that you take away from reading this, it should be that there are no simple answers when it comes to what we eat.
The first issue in our meat-free utopia is that vegetables are low in a pretty wide range of important nutrients. Supplementing your intake of, say, protein with eggs is great, but there is still decent evidence that being vegetarian raises your risk of certain cancers, allergies and mental health disorders. Being vegetarian might help prevent diabetes, but missing out on crucial nutrients can still be bad for your health.
there are no simple answers when it comes to what we eat
This is the reason that many public health bodies recommend planning your vegetarian diet so that you don’t miss out on the important bits. It’s a bit more effort, but may get rid of the negative health effects of cutting out meat.
So we know that the average vegetarian diet can cause health problems, but let’s say I’m following a really well-curated plant-based diet. Am I going to be healthier than an omnivore?
Well, not necessarily.
Rich People Continue To Ruin Everything
It turns out that it’s really hard to study vegetarianism, because in the real world it’s not easy to get people to change their diet. The ideal study, in which we randomly assign people into two groups, one which eats only vegetarian foods and one which eats whatever they want, is virtually impossible to conduct. So, we do what is called a pragmatic study; we look at people who are by their own choice either vegetarian or not, and try to tell who is healthier. In this type of study, vegetarians overwhelmingly come out on top.
The problem is that we can’t control for everything. There’s one thing that we know is different between the groups (vegetarianism), but there’s a whole bunch of things that could change the results. If all vegetarians were young people, they’d be much healthier than everyone else even if vegetarianism had no effect on their health at all.
Enter the rich people.
I’ve written before about how socioeconomic status makes a monumental difference in your health. Not satisfied with being able to buy property, rich people have to be healthier than everyone else too!
The bastards.
And it turns out that vegetarians are more likely to be wealthy than non-vegetarians. Most studies have a lot of trouble controlling for socioeconomic status because it’s a really hard variable to quantify. This means that it’s likely that a lot of the health benefits that you see from a vegetarian diet are actually just because it’s easy to eat healthily if you’ve got money to spend.
it’s likely that a lot of the health benefits that you see from a vegetarian diet are actually just because it’s easy to eat healthily if you’ve got money to spend.
Diets Are Hard
Ultimately, I’m not going to tell you to eat vegetarian or not. The best health advice I have ever heard came from Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, who stole it from Michael Pollen; “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”.
There’s plenty of evidence that eating a protein-rich diet can be just as healthy as a vegetarian one. Oily fish in particular has been identified as a great addition to your diet. Add to this the fact that vegetarianism can come with significant health problems, and you can see why there’s no easy answer to the question “Is vegetarianism good for your health?”.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”
If you’re worried about what you are putting in your mouth, see a dietitian. They go through a grueling 4–6 year university course so that you can ask them difficult questions like “Is this burger killing me?” while spraying half-eaten Big Mac all over their desk.
But don’t just lose the meat. Not only is the evidence very mixed, but you’ll miss out on my brilliant coq au vin.
A sad fate if there ever was one.
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Note; it’s important to remember that health is not the only reason for vegetarianism. There is ample evidence that being vegetarian reduces your carbon footprint and is generally easier on the world’s environment, for example.
