The first-ever study of stroke incidence in vegetarians and vegans suggests they may be at higher risk.
“When classified In order of importance, among the interventions available to prevent stroke, the three most important are probably diet, quitting smoking, and controlling blood pressure. Most of us these days are doing pretty well at not smoking, but less than half of us get enough exercise. And, according to the American Heart Association, only 1 in 1,000 Americans eats a healthy diet, and fewer than 1 in 10 eats even a sufficient number of calories. moderately healthy diet, as you can see in the graph below and at minute 0:41 of my video Do vegetarians really have a higher risk of stroke?Why is it important? affairs because “diet is an important part of stroke prevention. Reduce sodium intake, avoid egg yolks, limit animal meat (particularly red meat) and increase intake of whole grains, fruits, vegetables and lentils… Like the sugar industry, the meat and egg industries spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, unfortunately with great success.”
The article goes on to say, “Box 1 provides links to information on the topic.” I was thrilled to click on the hyperlink in “Box 1” and was very honored to see four links to my videos on egg industry propaganda, as you can see below and at 1:08 of my video. video.
The strongest evidence for protection against stroke lies on increasing fruit and vegetable intake, with more uncertainty about “the role of whole grains, animal products and dietary patterns” such as vegetarian diets. Meat-free diets would be expected to have good results. Meta-analyses have found that vegetarian diets reduce cholesterol and blood pressure, as well as improve weight loss and blood sugar control, and vegan diets can work Better yet. All the key biomarkers are going in the right direction. Given this, you might be surprised to learn that there was no state So far, there have been no studies on the incidence of stroke in vegetarians and vegans. And if you find this surprising, just wait until you hear the results.
“Risks of ischemic heart disease and stroke in meat-, fish-, and vegetarian eaters over 18 years of follow-up: results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study”: There was less heart disease among vegetarians (by which the researchers meant vegetarians and vegans combined). No wonder. We’ve been there. But there were more strokes, as you can see below, and at 2:14 in my video, video.
An understandable knee-jerk reaction might be: Wait a second, who conducted this study? Was there a conflict of interest? This is EPIC-Oxford, world-class researchers whose conflicts of interest may be more likely to… read:“I am a member of the Vegan Society.”
And what about overfitting? When the figures were analyzed over ten years, crunchResearchers found 15 strokes per 1,000 meat eaters, compared to just 9 strokes per 1,000 vegetarians and vegans, as you can see below and at 2:41 in my videoIn that case, how? can They say there were more strokes in vegetarians? This was after adjusting for a variety of factors. Vegetarians were less likely to smoke, for example, so you’d want to cancel that out by adjusting for smoking to effectively compare the stroke risk of non-smoking vegetarians to non-smoking meat eaters. If you want to know how a vegetarian diet itself affects stroke rates, you want to cancel out these non-diet factors. However, sometimes you can overfit.
The sugar industry does this all the time. Here’s how it works: Imagine You just received a grant from the soda industry to study the effect of soda on the childhood obesity epidemic. What could you do after you put all the studies together to conclude that there was “almost zero” effect of drinking sugary drinks on body weight? Well, since you know that drinking liquid sweets can lead to excess calories that can lead to obesity, if you control for calories — if you control for one factor that’s in the causal chain, effectively comparing only soda drinkers who take in the same number of calories as non-soda drinkers — then you could undermine the effect of soda on obesity, and that’s exactly what they say. did. That introduce “overfitting bias.” Instead of simply controlling for some unrelated factor, a intermediate variable in the cause-effect pathway between exposure and outcome.
Overfitting is the way that researchers funded by the meat and dairy industry have been… accused of “hiding the true associations” between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease. We know that saturated fats raise cholesterol, which in turn increases the risk of heart disease. So if you control for cholesterol, really just comparing saturated fat eaters with the same cholesterol levels as unsaturated fat eaters, that could undermine the effect of saturated fats on heart disease.
Let’s go back to the EPIC-Oxford study. Since a vegetarian diet low If higher blood pressure and lower blood pressure leads to fewer strokes, controlling for blood pressure would be overadjustment, which would really just compare vegetarians to meat eaters with the same low blood pressure. That’s not fair, since lower blood pressure is one of the benefits of vegetarian eating, not an unrelated factor like smoking. So that would undermine the protection provided. Did the researchers do that? No. They only adjusted for unrelated factors, such as education, socioeconomic class, smoking, exercise, and alcohol. That’s what you want. You want to find out the effects of a vegetarian diet on stroke risk. You want to try to equal everything else to find out the effects of just dietary choice. And, since the meat eaters in the study were an average of ten years older than the vegetarians, you can see how the vegetarians might come out worse after adjusting for that. Since stroke risk can be lowered by 10 years, the risk of stroke can be lowered by 10 years. increase As age increases exponentially, you can see how 9 strokes among 1,000 40-year-old vegetarians could be worse than 15 strokes among 1,000 50-year-old meat-eaters.
The fact that vegetarians had a higher risk of stroke despite having lower blood pressure suggests that there’s something about meatless diets that increases stroke risk so much that it’s enough to negate the blood pressure benefits. But even if that were true, you’d still want to eat that way. As you can see in the graph below and at 6:16 in my videostroke is our fifth leading cause of death, while heart disease is number one.
So yes, there were more cases of stroke in vegetarians in the study, but there was no… were Fewer cases of heart disease, as can be seen below and at minute 6:29. If there is something that increases the risk of stroke in vegetarians, it would be good to know what it is in the hopes of figuring out how to get the best of both worlds. This is the question we will address next.
I called him 21 years ago. There is an old man video On YouTube, where I voice my concerns about stroke risk in vegetarians and vegans (you can tell it’s 2003 by my cutting-edge use of whiteboard technology and the fact that I still had hair). The good news is that I think there’s an easy solution.
This is the third in a series of 12 videos on stroke risk. Links to the other videos are in the related posts below.
