For example, famously Adventists are vegetarians and live longer than the average population. However, vegetarian is importantly different from vegan. Also, Adventists don’t drink or smoke either, which might explain the difference.
Nit: we actually do have a study that looks at the mortality rate of vegan Adventists in particular. They fare well, having a nearly significantly lower mortality rate than omnivores after adjustments for drinking, smoking and other things:
As you can see, groups that restrict meat intake in some form all trend towards having a lower mortality rate than the “nonvegetarian” group. The pescatarian mortality rate appears slightly lower than the vegan one, but in practice the difference is too small and the confidence intervals are too wide to tease out which one is actually lower. When broken down by sex, nearly all of the effect is concentrated in men, while all diets are pretty similar to each other in women.
Make of that what you will; I am not claiming there’s a causal effect, though note that the study does control for a lot of confounders, such as smoking, drinking, age, race, income, education, marital status, etc.
You will get different results when examining this question worldwide (as in this study) vs in a developed country. Worldwide, meat is expensive, especially red meat, and so its consumption correlates with wealth. There have been several observational studies examining the relationship between vegetarianism and mortality or chronic diseases, you can find a non-cherrypicked list of systematic reviews here. Most find favorable outcomes for vegetarians. Though again, make of that what you will, I am not claiming it’s causal. In developed countries, of course, vegetarianism likely correlates with conscientiousness, which affects health in other ways. But these studies arguably should be mentioned in any overview of the health effects of vegetarianism that aims to be representative and balanced.
Beef, especially pasture-raised (different from grass-fed). Factory farming of cows is far less bad than other animals. They often have access to the outdoors for a large percentage of their lives. They are cuter so we treat them better. Also, since they’re massive, even if their lives are quite bad, if you ate exclusively cow for a year, you most likely wouldn’t finish a single cow. Compare that to a chicken, which might last you a day. The same logic applies to dairy.
I think there should be a bit more research on this; it’s not obvious to everyone that eating beef causes less suffering than eating chicken, or if it’s actually the other way around. This depends a lot on your moral intuitions, so the answer won’t be the same for everyone. From what I’ve seen, EAs tend to ascribe more moral worth to smaller animals than most other people would, leading to the conclusion that eating larger animals causes less suffering.
However, my impression is that ~everyone who’s looked into it typically does agree that consuming dairy, bivalves, and non-farmable[1] species of fish like sardines causes very little suffering, with bivalves often being considered vegan.
Your own screenshot shows that pescatarians do better than vegans (not statistically significant, but neither is the difference between vegans and omnivores). And if you break it down by sex (and continue to ignore statistical significance), veganism is the worst choice for women after unconstrained omnivorism
Your own screenshot shows that pescatarians do better than vegans (not statistically significant, but neither is the difference between vegans and omnivores). And if you break it down by sex (and continue to ignore statistical significance), veganism is the worst choice for women after unconstrained omnivorism
I addressed both of those points in my comment above. From my comment:
The pescatarian mortality rate appears slightly lower than the vegan one, but in practice the difference is too small and the confidence intervals are too wide to tease out which one is actually lower. When broken down by sex, nearly all of the effect is concentrated in men, while all diets are pretty similar to each other in women.
To explain this more in-depth, you cannot conclude from this table that “veganism is the worst choice for women after unconstrained omnivorism.” The confidence intervals of the adjusted hazard ratios for the “vegetarian” diets for women are essentially identical. It’s not just about failing to meet an arbitrary threshold of statistical significance—the difference between those diets has a very high p-value, not a p-value that almost approaches significance but falls just short of it.
Meanwhile, the adjusted hazard ratio of veganism is significant in men, compared to omnivorism. Quoting from my old comment:
The 95% confidence intervals of the adjusted hazard ratios for overall mortality, for men, were [0.56, 0.92] and [0.57, 0.93] for vegan and pescatarian diets, respectively, and for women the CIs are [0.72, 1.07] and [0.78, 1.20], respectively. For women, the confidence intervals for all diets are [0.78, 1.2], [0.83, 1.07], [0.72, 1.07] and [0.7, 1.22].
What these CIs indicate is that there was likely no difference between pescatarian and vegan diets for men, both of which are better than omnivorism, and likely no difference between any of the diets for women.
The CIs for women specifically look so similar that you could pretend that all of those CIs came from different studies examining the exact same diet, and write a meta-analysis with them, and readers of the meta-analysis would think, “oh, cool, there’s no heterogeneity among the studies!”
In fact, we can go ahead and run a meta-analysis of those aHRs (the ones for women), pretending they’re all for the same diet, and quantitatively check the heterogeneity we get. Doing so, with a random-effects meta-analysis, we find that the I2 is exactly 0%, as is the τ2. The p-value for heterogeneity is 0.92. Whereas this study should update us a little bit on pescatarian diets being better than vegan diets for women, these differences are almost certainly due to chance. No one would suspect that these are actually different diets if you had a meta-analysis with those numbers.
Since the total meta-analytic aHR is also very close to 1, it also looks like none of the diets are meaningfully associated with increased or decreased mortality for women, though there was a slight trend towards lower mortality compared to the nonvegetarian reference diet (p-value: 0.11).
Nit: we actually do have a study that looks at the mortality rate of vegan Adventists in particular. They fare well, having a nearly significantly lower mortality rate than omnivores after adjustments for drinking, smoking and other things:
As you can see, groups that restrict meat intake in some form all trend towards having a lower mortality rate than the “nonvegetarian” group. The pescatarian mortality rate appears slightly lower than the vegan one, but in practice the difference is too small and the confidence intervals are too wide to tease out which one is actually lower. When broken down by sex, nearly all of the effect is concentrated in men, while all diets are pretty similar to each other in women.
Make of that what you will; I am not claiming there’s a causal effect, though note that the study does control for a lot of confounders, such as smoking, drinking, age, race, income, education, marital status, etc.
You will get different results when examining this question worldwide (as in this study) vs in a developed country. Worldwide, meat is expensive, especially red meat, and so its consumption correlates with wealth. There have been several observational studies examining the relationship between vegetarianism and mortality or chronic diseases, you can find a non-cherrypicked list of systematic reviews here. Most find favorable outcomes for vegetarians. Though again, make of that what you will, I am not claiming it’s causal. In developed countries, of course, vegetarianism likely correlates with conscientiousness, which affects health in other ways. But these studies arguably should be mentioned in any overview of the health effects of vegetarianism that aims to be representative and balanced.
I think there should be a bit more research on this; it’s not obvious to everyone that eating beef causes less suffering than eating chicken, or if it’s actually the other way around. This depends a lot on your moral intuitions, so the answer won’t be the same for everyone. From what I’ve seen, EAs tend to ascribe more moral worth to smaller animals than most other people would, leading to the conclusion that eating larger animals causes less suffering.
However, my impression is that ~everyone who’s looked into it typically does agree that consuming dairy, bivalves, and non-farmable[1] species of fish like sardines causes very little suffering, with bivalves often being considered vegan.
See this comment for the relevant difference between wild-caught and non-farmable species of fish
Your own screenshot shows that pescatarians do better than vegans (not statistically significant, but neither is the difference between vegans and omnivores). And if you break it down by sex (and continue to ignore statistical significance), veganism is the worst choice for women after unconstrained omnivorism
More of my opinion of this study here.
I addressed both of those points in my comment above. From my comment:
To explain this more in-depth, you cannot conclude from this table that “veganism is the worst choice for women after unconstrained omnivorism.” The confidence intervals of the adjusted hazard ratios for the “vegetarian” diets for women are essentially identical. It’s not just about failing to meet an arbitrary threshold of statistical significance—the difference between those diets has a very high p-value, not a p-value that almost approaches significance but falls just short of it.
Meanwhile, the adjusted hazard ratio of veganism is significant in men, compared to omnivorism. Quoting from my old comment: