Do Vegans Live Longer Lives?
We see headlines like: “Vegetarians have higher stroke risks.” Or “Eat your butter.” We see videos such as “vegan deterioration” or “vegan malnutrition”.📽
But .. .. do vegans actually live longer lives? In this video, let’s take a look at the actual data together to determine whether vegans live longer or shorter lives than their omnivore ounterparts. 📊
If we believe youtube videos, we think that most vegans are deteriorating. And almost everyone has a friend or a friends’ friend which tried veganism and it just ‘wasn’t for them’.
Now I do not need to say this, but that is a lame way of proving things.😒
The reason that is an extremely lame way of proving things, is that humans tend to be very bad at seeing causal effects between non-related things. 🧐
We humans also tend to have a very subjective way of seeing the world. In short, our brains are very bad at critically analyzing a situation, seeing cause and effect relationships and making sound decisions.
So if we can’t use our own reasoning to find truth, we must use:
Studies, or data. Specifically there are 3 studies worth knowing when it comes to longevity:
- Blue Zones If you look at the world, there are certain places that have a higher percentage of centenarians. Meaning, people that live beyond the age of 100. These places are Costa Rica, Okinawa, Sardinia and Loma Linda in California. The first scientist that made that discovery – and saw this discrepancy in human lifespans – was so enthusiastic that he took a pen and circled these areas with blue ink. That’s why these places are now called blue zones. In all of these said places, Costa Rica, Okinawa, Sardinia or Loma Linda – which is due to the 7th day Adventist members, every population relies on a diet largely based on plants. There are other commonalities such as an active lifestyle, close family ties and plenty of vitamin D, but yeah, shocker, not a single area is following a carnivore diet or a meat heavy lifestyle.
- China Study In the early 1970s, the head of China, Chou EnLai, was dying of cancer. In his final weeks, Chou initiated a nationwide survey to collect information about the disease that he was suffering from, cancer. A disease that back then, was not well understood. It was to be a monumental survey of death rates for twelve different kinds of cancer for more than 2,400 Chinese counties and 880 million of Chinese citizens. What the study found was clear. Cancer is geographically localized. There are some areas that have way more cancer than others. To be precise, some areas of China have 100 times more cancer than others. This is a very special finding, because the sample size is gigantic, and the Chinese are very similar genetically with little migration in the 1970s. The study found that, in short, the more vegan nutrition, the less people tend to suffer from one of our major killers, cancer and heart disease.
- Framingham Heart Study On March 17th, 1944, President Roosevelt got admitted to the hospital. Franklin was unable to breath and was sweating heavily. The primary physician of Roosevelt insisted that he was healthy and his blood pressure was “no more than normal for a man of his age.” In reality, Roosevelt had a heart failure due to untreated high blood pressure. One year later, Roosevelt, the president of the United States died. Same in China so in the US, whenever the most important person of a country is dying on a disease, stuff is about to get real. 3 years later, the Framingham Heart Study was created. It’s a massive, long-term study, looking into the effects on heart disease and how to prevent it
To give you a perspective on how old and how important this study is, this is the first study that coined the term ‘risk factors’.
RISK factors.
The term didn’t exist before.
What did that study find?
“Four years after the Framingham Heart Study started, researchers had identified high cholesterol and high blood pressure levels as important factors in the development of cardiovascular disease.”
And again, as seen before, there’s a clear link between animal protein intake with cholesterol and therefore high blood pressure. So, do vegans live longer? In theory, yes. Vegan diets provide the necessary breeding ground for a long and healthy life – more so than an omnivore diet.