Long live vegetarians

Vegetarianism is not the only viable way to eat but it has lots going for it. It is a style of eating that draws less on the planets resources, offers the potential for you to grow a large portion of your own food, and it can be healthy. I say “can” be healthy because there are lots of unhealthy vegetarian foods as well and it really comes down to the foods that you choose whether you are vegetarian or not. Nevertheless, a new study has found that if you follow a vegetarian way of living then you are likely to live longer.

If you are vegetarian, or have ever followed a vegetarian lifestyle at any point, then you will have had those moments in restaurants where you asked the waiter for any vegetarian options on the menu and after a slight, almost undetectable, pause laced with a hint of derision the answer comes, “There’s the fish?” For these service-folk “vegetarian” means, “I don’t eat steak”. So for this new study of more than 73,000 people the researchers made clear their definitions of what their subjects ate.

They divided the participants into five groups. Group one was non-vegetarian, group two was semi-vegetarian (occasionally ate meat), group three was pesco-vegetarian (includes seafood), lacto-ovo-vegetarian (includes dairy and egg products), and vegan (excludes all animal products).

Over the six years follow up death rates among all of the four combined “vegetarian” groups were 12 per cent lower than among the non-vegetarian group.

So it does seem as though vegetarian diets are healthier and previous studies have shown that vegetarian eating leads to less weight gain and to lower cancer rates. However, this study also showed that vegetarians were inclined to be older, more highly educated, more likely to be married (marriage is associated with better health outcomes), drink less alcohol, smoke less, exercise more, and be thinner. Additionally, men seemed to benefit more from a vegetarian diet than women.

Maybe then, it is that people who actually make conscious food choices live a longer life. Perhaps those people also then live more consciously and make better life choices. If that is the case then maybe vegetarianism is a symptom of conscious living that leads to longer life as opposed to being a cause of longer life. Either way, it’s worth thinking about the food you choose to eat.