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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

The current life expectancy for Iceland in 2020 is 83.07 years, a 0.18% increase from 2019. [1]

Life expectancy for Hong Kong is 84.7 years. [2]

Based on a comparison of 158 countries in 2013, Maldives ranked the highest in fish consumption per capita with 166 kg followed by Iceland and Hong Kong [3]

Hong Kong also beats most countries in beef consumption, out-eating Americans by nearly 50% per capita. [4]

So of the countries in the top 10 for life expectancy, we see a lot of meat in the diet. India has the most vegetarians of any country (at 38%). And their life expectancy ranks 133rd at 69.4 years.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... [3] https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per... [4] https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capit...

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These are highly confounding statistics. Meat consumption grows with wealth and lifespan also grows with wealth. To say lifespan grows with wealth because of meat consumption doesn’t make sense.

Hong Kong’s beef consumption doubled since 2003. I’d wager your average elderly American ate more meat in their life than your average Hong Kong resident.

Source: https://medium.com/@ecyY/meat-consumption-growth-in-hong-kon...

Their life expectancy keeps increasing right along with their meat consumption:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HKG/hong-kong/life-exp...

More like their wealth.

If you look at the article I linked to, it shows relatively flat beef consumption until the mid 2000s.

I’m not saying beef will kill you, but picking two or three rich countries that eat a lot of meat — and have a huge amount going for them in other ways — and comparing them to India is not science or a statistically significant thing. It’s like comparing teacher salaries and alcohol prices in the 1970s and saying one causes the other when they’re both the result of inflation.

No it shows a rising trend in meat eating beginning in 1961. Hong Kong has been prosperous for generations, by the way. It's not a recent phenomenon that Hong Kong has gotten wealthy.

You can look at the entire top 10 list of countries by life expectancy. They have plenty of meat consumption. There are no clinical studies implicating meat in shortened lifespans.

But people blindly spout off that a plant based diet is supposedly healthiest for you. There's no evidence to support that.

So has almost every other statistic... if you singled out every other factor such as internet access, technological advancements, health care, medicine and just gave people meat as a substitute for all of that do you think that would suddenly increase their life expectancy by 50%?

Some big confounding factors there. Hong Kong and Iceland are also very wealthy compared to India.

Well at 133rd there are plenty of 3rd world countries above them. There's only 185 countries on the planet. It certainly shows that meat consumption doesn't hurt.

There is a fortunate coincidence here. There are wealthy vegetarian castes in India, and India tracks demographics by caste, so it's likely that the data is out there for us to figure this part out.

An alternative is to do something like follow second-generation Western people of Indian origin. I know at least one study of Tuberculosis in the UK tested the effect of vegetarianism there and used the British Asian sub-population to do so, so there's probably some info there too.

I don't know of any other large vegetarian groups.

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