Vegetarian Diets and Mental Health (opens in new tab)

There is a pretty strong anti-vegetarianism sentiment where I'm from (the Southeast U.S.). I see it (as a vegetarian for almost 5 years now) when I visit the grocery store and, annoyingly, from my family.

At the grocery store I am often asked "What, are you some kind of vegetarian or something?" when I buy tofu, tempeh, lots of vegetables, and no meat products. And when I say yes, people are often flabbergasted. "I could never do that, I love bacon too much!" That's fine, I'm not asking anyone else to change their diet, and I've never been a "judgy" vegetarian - I honestly don't care what other people eat, it doesn't bother me. But it's annoying when people get all up in my business.

My family is worse, though. Every time I ever have a health issue, they attribute it to being a vegetarian. Get a cold? I need more beef. Sinus infection? I need more chicken. And now my wife's family are blaming me for a health issue that she's having. It's madness.

From an interview with the author of this study:

""" ... Nathalie Burkert: No, no, that's not true. Based on our results, we conclude not that much meat is healthy. There was a press release with which we disagree. Since the results of the study are simply misrepresented. """

http://www.welt.de/gesundheit/article125270740/Vegetarier-le...

As a vegetarian for over 10 years, I can say that this isn't surprising to me. There are all sorts of people who hop around different health trends to fix issues that they have in their lives, and many of them end up participating in a vegetarian diet at some point. You also have a group of people who falsely claim to be vegetarian (just to have something else to say about themselves, or due to a poor understanding of the diet). Then you have the clique vegetarians who needed an identity and social circle to settle into. Lastly, you have a lot of people who try out a vegetarian diet with a strong predisposition that they will suffer negative health consequences from the transition. These ones leave the diet a few days or so later because something is going terribly wrong with them. In short, there tend to be more factors to consider for those involved in a vegetarian diet. With people who eat meat (who I have nothing against), it tends to just be that that's what you've always done, what your parents before you did, and so on.

My anecdotal experience as a lifelong (since birth) lacto-ovo vegetarian leads me to think there's something to this.

I can't speak to the conclusions exactly, but the reasoning - dietary deficiencies - rings true to me. I've experienced dramatic results from supplementing with creatine, choline, zinc and omega 3s. The fact that this article cites so many of things I've come to independent conclusions about seems worthy of consideration.

One thing I'd be really curious about with regard to any correlation between vegan/vegetarianism and mental health issues is simply which came first. Again anecdotally, I've met a lot of vegatarian converts - many for whom I'd wager food is just one manifestation of an existing neurosis.

this study is a cross sectional study of 15k people, but they only actually used something like 1.3k of those individuals in order to match up to the ~330 vegetarians to a person from a different group. (that is 13k discarded survey results...)

this type of cross sample matching (where the majority of the individuals polled are tossed away) is suspect, as is the time it took to conduct the survey and release the results (2007 is when the survey concluded, the study wasn't released until 2014).

imo, the writer of the blog post should extend a critical eye to academic studies (and see where they could be improved), instead of re-posting them as troll bait (and leaving out important scientific notions, like: we can't extrapolate from this study)

The Austrian study that the author of this post cites has serious methodological flaws. In particular, in Austria it is common practice to prescribe vegetarian diets as treatment for various illnesses, and the authors of the paper failed to account for this fact.

I remember this study doing the rounds a few weeks ago. The consensus back then was that there were significant confounding factors. For one thing, you can't be sure that the vegetarians you include in the set didn't become vegetarian specifically to address some lifestyle problem or health issue. Based on my anecdotal experience of vegetarians in wealthy first world nations, a large proportion include health concerns as part of their justification for vegetarianism.

Might have been useful to only include vegetarians who had been on their diet for a minimum length of time, or exclude those who said they had health issues.

Another issue someone already noted below, but the cherrypicking involved in going from thousands of survey responses to the few hundred they actually used must have been enormous.

Maybe people who are overly concerned about their food consumption, of which vegetarianism is a subset, are more likely to be neurotic.

I am Indian, and have been vegetarian since birth. Born into a family of vegetarians, and our ancestors have been vegetarians for centuries. We are fine, thank you.

I think this article is about those in the West who try out being vegetarian. I wish that can be made explicit in the article and the comments here.

Just wanting to reiterate that this is an observational cohort study that shows only a weak correlation. There's no casual information at all in the study referenced in this post and the correlation is so weak that it's unlikely to even provide useful hypotheses for future interventional studies.

Everyone I know who's a vegetarian was a bit wacky to start with :)

I was a vegetarian for twenty years, and I've also dealt with depression for all of my life. The most obvious question I'd have when looking at a correlation like that is, which came first?

In my case, I was spotted by guidance counselors as early as grade school for depression. It also correlated with my high test scores, creativity, and inability to focus on "boring" work.

When I became a vegetarian at age 15, it was as much a reaction to my surroundings (an Iowa farm town) and worldview as anything else. As a creative, bright, curious, kid, possibly dealing with low levels of depression, it's not too surprising that by 1986 I was a massive fan of The Smiths. The album Meat is Murder, combined with my social alienation, and not a few cows looking at me with their big ol' eyes every day, turned me into a vegetarian.

I don't think my depression increased when I gave up meat, at least not any more than it does for anyone going through their late teens and early twenties. By my thirties, life had improved, and so had my psyche. I was still vegetarian.

At age 35, I took stock of my vegetarianism, and decided I was no longer doing it for the reasons I had begun, and it had become something I only did because others expected me to. So I started eating meat. Now that I've been an omnivore for a few years, my mind works the same way it always has. With every year that I mature, things get better, but it's a trajectory I was on long before I changed my dietary habits.

I know the OP said that they were only pointing out correlation, not causation, but it seems clear to me that it's worth considering whether people who struggle with depression are turning to vegetarianism, rather than the other way around. There are so many variables and factors involved, it seems silly to make any statements about vegetarians and mental health at all, positive or negative.

As someone who never ate any meat or fish during the life and feels perfectly fine, stuff like this always makes me giggle. And I just love to see how people take only one specific point out of article and exploit it ignoring everything else. Including very important statement: "no statements can be made whether the poorer health in vegetarians in our study is caused by their dietary habit or if they consume this form of diet due to their poorer health status". So, yeah..

Vegetarian for ethical/environmental reasons. I buy that this could be the case and would be surprised if there weren't some bad effects to go along with the good. The source, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

I look forward to meat growing on trees, so we can study meat without a bunch of ideology creeping in (from either the vegetarianism-is-ethically-good-therefore-it-must-be-healthier crowd or the I-hate-vegetarians-and-love-meat-therefore-meat-must-be-required crowd).

Western omnivorous diets have far more meat than what's needed to fulfill required long-term nutritional needs. The consequences are pretty obvious. However, we are omnivores, and we really do need some meat in our diet.

Lots of people switch to vegetarian/vegan diets report short term (less than 5 years) health benefits. And I have no doubt these are true. Anecdotally, my couple goes at low meat/no meat diets were the same.

But most long term studies of people on primarily plant based diets show long term detriments that are double doctorate in nutrition and food science hard to eliminate.

It's a very hard pill to swallow for people who've spent considerable mental effort at designing a lifestyle around these kinds of diets, and have deeply held philosophical beliefs driving this choice.

Unfortunately, biology is an important driver here, and humans need some meat over the long term. Just not anywhere near what's common in the diets of citizens of most wealthy countries.

The good news is that we have an amazingly adaptable digestive system, capable of sustaining us on all sorts of crazy things. There's very few animals on the planet capable of sustenance from such an incredible diversity of food sources. It's no doubt one of the reasons humans have been able to spread so far and wide.

Within a remarkably short period of time, we've also been able to specialize. Humans in some corners of the world exist almost purely off of animal products while others live off of almost purely plant products, some of these populations have adapted so well they can consume dangerous levels of some nutrients or adapt to relatively low amounts of others.

A bit more on the biological specialization of humans and our evolved digestive systems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763330

Don’t most people eat vegetarian for ethical reasons? For those these health considerations do not play a role at all when it comes to deciding whether to eat vegetarian or not. (They obviously do play a role when it comes to considering what to eat.)

While I can't speak to the issue of mental health effects, I can say with certainty that being purely vegan requires a very high level of knowledge and understanding about the human body's intrinsic dietary needs and metabolic processes.

Most vegans I know have acquired this knowledge over time. A vegan diet demands physiological due diligence and truthful self-discovery. Neither of which is a bad thing.

>particularly when it comes to anxiety, eating disorders, and depression

I would be interesting in the eating disorder part being proven as a cause and not a correlation. Knowing someone with an eating disorder and being introduced into that world, lots of people use being vegetarian or vegan as an excuse not to eat. It's very common. I'm skeptical that it's a cause in this case.

I wonder how practising Hindus and Buddhists will scale in this kind of a study. I am a practicing Hindu. My family/clan and say some 20-30% of whole population of my country are lacto-vegetarians(no eggs and meat, but will consume milk) for generations. I hope the researcher does a study among that ethnic group too. That will fix this debate for good.

it is pretty clear that people who think about ethical issues, must be unhappy in and with this world.

Vegetarian is a way of life. Whether its healthy or not I can't judge and I'll leave that to the scientists that are doing research on that specific matter.

Although speaking from my own experience... I ain't a vegan I eat meat, and a lot of it cause I gym. I keep a healthy and balanced diet for a long time now. I am healthy and that's what doctors have been telling me on my annual check up. In the other hand I got a cousin that we are close with and he is a vegan. Although he is a vegan he drinks alcohol, not excessively but occasionally. He is unhealthy and unstable at the moment...

Life is not only about food but there are a lot of factors in there that needs to be considered.

Also regarding mental health... WALKING I found is the best solution.