Vegetarian women more likely to fracture hips in later life | Hacker News Reader

Vegetarian women more likely to fracture hips in later life

theguardian.com

32 pointsbelter96 comments

I consumed exactly zero plant-based calories during all of 2021 — no alcohol, no plant-based cooking oil — NOTHING from a plant.

I ended the year in about the best shape of my life — and now that I understand nutrition better I plan to get back on that plan (trying to be “moderate” this year has been underwhelming).

Basically, meat makes you healthy and plants make you fart, give you dry skin, and don’t do anything at all for your musculature.

All the vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients are more highly available in animal-based foods than they are in plant-based food, and the macronutrient profile is basically ideal for human health as well.

It honestly makes me sad that so many people incorrectly think that red meat is not healthy. Red meat is in fact the most nutritious food you can eat and it is an ABSOLUTE TRAGEDY that this is not more widely understood.

I am not judging anybody, you can have whichever diet you want.

Nothing from a plant is dangerous according to any scientifically based diet.

We did not evolve with a carnivorous only diet, there are many studies about hunter gatherers and they have mostly a vegetarian diet with occasional meat.

Their gut microbiome is much more varied, and a varied ecosystem is a resilient ecosystem, therefore you are less vulnerable to pathogens bacteria.

You said: "nothing from a plant is dangerous according to any scientifically-based diet". But... plants contain oxalates, lectins, and phytates just for starters. Their seeds, roots, leaves, and stalks are all well defended. Only the fruit is "meant" to be eaten.

In fact, if you go out in the forest and just start randomly eating the plants you find there, then you will discover that 99% of all plants are inedible and will cause you severe distress or death if you persist in eating them.

Plants use chemicals to fend off predators, whereas animals will often fend off predators by running or fighting. So once an animal is dead its defenses have been overcome whereas once a plant has been killed all its chemical defenses are still intact. Interestingly, extraordinarily few animals are unsafe to eat -- less than 1%, which is the complete opposite of the percentage of plants that are edible.

Also, your remark that we did not evolve on a carnivorous diet is just wrong. In fact, homo erectus bones are almost always found together with the bones of mammoths, which they hunted and ate for something like one million years. Mammoths are just one of hundreds of species of mega fauna that ancient human hunted to extinction. Also, to this day there are indigenous human communities that live exclusively on meat (Inuit, Hazda, Sami, Maasai).

None of the groups you mention live (near-)exclusively on meat and that erectus hunted is well known. But hunted does not mean their diet was mainly meat-based. There is plenty of evidence from the teeth usage that our ancestors lived largely/mainly from consuming plants.

Okay, so apparently there is something going around in the vegan community about how humans evolved on plants. From what I can tell this is completely unsubstantiated. I don't deny that ancient humans ate some plant-based calories, probably fruit and berries, maybe a few tea leaves, but the vast, vast, VAST majority of their calories came from hunting -- remember that we're talking about the era before agriculture.

"The Hadza people eat no processed foods, are rarely exposed to antibiotics, and live seasonally, eating more meat in the dry season and a predominantly plant-based, high-fibre diet in the wet season. " "The staples of their diet include the baobab tree, high-fibre tuber roots, berries, fresh honey, and various meats from hunting. A common dish is a soup made from the baobab fruit, something renowned microbiologist Tim Spector sampled while living with them. Just one helping of this creamy mixture contains more fibre than the average Westerner gets in a day!" https://atlasbiomed.com/blog/the-hadza-people-what-can-a-hun...

Humans are omnivorous but it may change with circumstances. Polar bears are carnivorous while their counterparts in hotter climates are omnivorous. For people living in the cold climates there simply are few alternatives, other cultures may decide to eat a lot of meat because their way of living provides it.

Sounds like total BS to me. Whey protein isn’t considered meat but it’s a complete protein.

Same goes for eggs.

Vegetarians eat these things too.

Yeah, it is possible to stay alive on a vegetarian diet if you include eggs and dairy. Some “vegetarians” even include fish. Obviously the more fish, eggs, and dairy you consume the better off you’ll be. Strict vegans, on the other hand, literally die.

Stop spreading things that “someone told you” please.

Were you not aware that vegans need vitamin supplements to avoid death?

Were you not aware that those same supplements (vitamin B12 i guess you referring to) are feed/ injected to livestock? And the “avoid death” is a bit overblowing B 12 is stored in the liver so it takes years to be depleted and same as animal products there are fortified foods which are more than enough to cover the 2.4mcg needed.

Granted, it will take you several years to die. If you're a woman you'll lose your menstrual cycle pretty quick, too.

You’re argument is still trash.

Societies through history have lived healthy lives with little or no meat for centuries.

Indigenous people forever have ate a combination of meat, fish and fruits, nuts, grains and vegetables.

Have you heard of India ?

Yes -- I grew up in India and I am familiar with their diet. India has terrible rates of diabetes and has one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.

I’m skeptical you actually did grow up in India but there’s a lot of factors besides diet as to why India would have a low life expectancy.

I lived in India from 1976 - 1993. What reason do you have to doubt me???

Have a think about it :)

What's the answer?

On the other hand i’ve been vegan for over 10 years, i can squat 300lbs and I’m 190lbs at 10% bf at almost 50 years old. All this without supporting the most cruel and polluting industry. Who is right?

Yeah, the only way to make it work is to be an exercise nut. In order to get the nutrition your body needs from a vegan diet you will need to consume more calories than you would consume on a carnivore diet. So you need to exercise to burn these extra calories off and maintain that “fit vegan” look — although eventually it will catch up with you.

As for “cruel and polluting”, that’s also a bigger problem with agriculture — because of the clear-cutting, the insecticides, the secondary effects of insecticides on birds, all the agricultural run-off, and so forth.

You need to think more critically than “did this piece of food on my plate once have a face?” Just because you’re eating soybeans doesn’t mean you’re not killing animals — it is just indirect and even more ecologically devastating.

If we care about collateral damage done to animals due to plant farming, then we should still stop eating animals due to the efficiency loss in calories when converting plants to animal calories. 70% of soy is grown for animal feed, and so is something like 50% of corn. Don't tell me all cows just need to be grazing all the time. There just isn't enough land for that. Even assuming 100% of our calories aren't coming from meat.

The carnivore diet simply isn't sustainable. Suggesting that's something the entire human race should be doing is lunacy. I'd wager all these people who feel good on the carnivore diet feel that way because they've stopped consuming processed carbs and other garbage. Meanwhile that diet and keto are associated with increase in all-cause mortality.

You said "that diet and keto are associated with an increase in all-cause mortality" -- in fact, I believe the opposite to be the case. Check out The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz to learn more about nutrition science.

I would be inclined to believe thousands of proper scientific studies than a journalist lobbied by the meat and restaurant councils but that’s just me.

http://www.weightymatters.ca/2015/09/saturated-fats-conflict...

Yeah, the vegans really hate her and are trying to discredit her -- but I don't take vegans seriously.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989112/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23372809/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

This is why I want to write my book called "The Carnivore Panacea" -- because there is so much disinformation out there on diet and many people are just slack-jawed when they hear that some study is associated with the Harvard School of Public Health.

Let me assure you that they should be slack-jawed, but not at the rigor of the publication, but at the fact that anything from such an ideologically driven vegan clown show would be considered worthy of publication.

Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqEhPFIlH3U -- some of the wisest words ever spoken. Take them to heart -- and then pray.

We can't eat grass

Yes we can and it is delicious (wheatgrass)

I've been veggie for 10+ years without being an exercise nut and am in top health, rarely sick, best skin of my life, etc. I don't have any of the issues you mention, so I would take a guess that your previous diet was not a balanced one but largely empty carbohydrates, which leads to all the issues you mention. Now mine is anecdotal data, as is your one year experience. If you do want to give serious diet recommendations try at least a few others first - be it Mediterranean, Indian, vegan, traditional Filipino, ...I'd bet you will find that you can and do feel great with many of these as long as you drop the processed crap (essentially anything produced by PepsiCo, Kellogg's or the big fast food chains).

As the other commenter points out, a pure meat diet is not sustainable at scale and you'll find plenty of hints that it isn't healthy (eg red meat associated with colon cancer). It requires huge feed input, produces vast amounts of suffering and has a huge climate impact. In other words: even if it were the best choice health-wise (which is rather unlikely as humans are evolved omnivores) it is still an immoral and selfish choice.

P S.: No ketchup? Mayonaise? Marinade? It seems to be rather unlikely anyone is that purely meat-based...

I've been thinking about diet for a lot longer than just a couple of years and in fact I have tried being a vegetarian. I also grew up in India, so I'm familiar with their diet.

You say you've been "veggie" for 10+ years without being an exercise nut, but "veggie" is unclear to me -- were you vegetarian or were you vegan?

There is obviously a massive difference between being vegetarian and being vegan because you can be a vegetarian and eat a 100% animal-based diet if you limit yourself to eggs and dairy, which I consider super-duper-nutritious animal-based foods.

I think almost anyone could eat a dozen eggs a day and thrive. Eggs are a super-food.

I am vegetarian but try to stay on the vegan side whenever I can and avoid eggs quite diligently. But note the article you responded to is about both so the question is irrelevant.

What strikes me however is that you very selectively respond to a few points, e.g. in my comment the most non-substantial one

> As the other commenter points out, a pure meat diet is not sustainable at scale and you'll find plenty of hints that it isn't healthy (eg red meat associated with colon cancer). It requires huge feed input, produces vast amounts of suffering and has a huge climate impact. In other words: even if it were the best choice health-wise (which is rather unlikely as humans are evolved omnivores) it is still an immoral and selfish choice.

Even the article quoted by the guardian points out the many higher mortality risks associated with meat eating over a vegetarian diet - so clearly a health choice is not in favour of meat and 100% not in favour of a meat only diet.

I can't reply to every point that everyone makes -- I've been commenting on this thread for quite a while now. But I'll do my best!

In fact, I am so convinced that the carnivore diet would be a panacea for the world if we would just do it at scale that I am thinking of writing a book about it, which I would title "The Carnivore Panacea".

The association between red meat and colon cancer is "an association". Note that in nutrition science it is extraordinarily hard to demonstrate "causation" rather than "an association" because to demonstrate causation you would need the kind of double blind, placebo-controlled trials that are basically impossible to administer in this field.

Most nutrition science relies on people remembering what they ate last month, or feeding people in a controlled setting for a few days or weeks rather than the few months or years that would be necessary.

So, to put it bluntly, I am absolutely certain that eating red meat does not cause colon cancer -- but I am aware that this is a major talking point that has caught hold in the culture.

As for the "suffering" that eating meat causes, it is nothing in comparison to the suffering that eating plants causes, so I think eating meat wins easily on that count.

Note that some people think that if there are only plants on the plate of food that they are eating from, then this means that no animals were harmed to bring them that plate of food. For these people it is just a matter of pointing out the ecological costs associated with agriculture:

* the ten-thousand-acre mono-crop farms the destroy habitats,

* the massive quantities of insecticides that kill all the insects

* the secondary effect on the bird population that has plummeted due to the insecticide use

* the transportation costs (meat is more likely to be local than plant-based food)

* the impact on the health care sector (a major contributor to global warming) from the obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease

All of the above can all be summed up by picturing the vultures that circle behind those combines on those massive mono-crop farms -- vultures because they can devour all the baby deer and little foxes and ground-nesting birds and little mice that live in the fields and get chewed up by the combine -- because when the harvest time comes, death comes with it.

> I am so convinced that the carnivore diet would be a panacea for the world

Are you trying to weaken your argument?

Not at all - imagine a world without chronic disease, without obesity, and with a 90% reduction in mental health disorders -- and then have the epiphany that the dietary approach leading to this world would also be better for the environment.

All those points are invalidated because meat is inefficient, it takes more crops, more water, more pesticides, more “crop deaths” to cultivate food for livestock than for direct consumption. The romanticized picture of the cow pleasantly grazing in an open field is an unsustainable fantasy.

There were herds of bison on the American plains during the early 1800s that were so large it would take a week for the herd to walk past a campsite. I was reading the memoirs of Ulysses S Grant a couple years ago and he reports that when he was on a military expedition in Texas a couple of decades before the American Civil War, they came across a herd of wild horses that was so large that they could climb to the top of a nearby hill and see the herd stretching from horizon to horizon on either side.

My question for you is: what were all these animals eating, since we were not cultivating food for them?

Also, why do you think cows don't graze in open fields? Maybe you should take a drive through Lancaster County, PA, sometime. I hear there are cows out west, too.

Veggie foods need more energy to be digested so the net calories are lower than the intake even being negative for some. Livestock is fed 80% of the global soy production, rainforests are burnt to plant soy for that purpose, meat production releases methane and its manure lagoons leech into groundwater and end up in the sea, 82% of the antibiotics produced are administered to livestock, many are feed food waste including wrapping (this is allowed) so it’s not surprising than more than 73% of the analyzed meat and dairy products contain microplastics. As of 2014 there was about 23 billion chickens and 1.5 billion cattle around the world to give you some perspective there’s less than 8 billion people in the world. So we need to be more objective on where is the real ecological disaster.

Would you be happy eating meat if it was raised in an ethical and environmentally-sustainable way?

There’s no ethical or “humane” way to kill a sentient being just for the pleasure of tasting its flesh. Is it more ethical to kill a free person than a slave?

I think that's checkmate, I win!

When you eventually die from colon cancer, remember this day and remember that somebody warned you that too much meat is bad for you. Also, try reading up on the benefits of leafy greens. I suspect you'll take neither of these advice, but here ends the attention to your health that you'll receive from me.

What about fiber? As far as I know you can only get fiber from plants, and we need some fiber in our diets to maintain a healthy gut.

This was one of the biggest eye-openers for me. First, it turns out that you don’t need fiber for a healthy gut. Second, it also turns out that a zero-fiber diet will reduce the volume of poop you produce by 75% and you’ll also completely stop farting.

There won't be any planet to live on if people followed this moronic advice

So no vitamine c intake? Wouldn't recommend it on the long term https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy

I have addressed this point elsewhere in this thread, and it has also been explained ten thousand times on forums such as https://reddit.com/r/carnivore

The long and the short of it is that fresh meat contains vitamin C and the carnivore diet also reduces your body's need for vitamin C because vitamin C is used for the synthesis of collagen and you will be getting collagen directly by following this diet.

Ah never knew meat contains vitamin c, seems to be mostly in the liver.

Well it's an interesting experiment going on meat and see how the body responds.

yes, beef liver is the most nutritious thing you can eat on Earth, bar none. But there are some carnivores who only eat ribeye steaks and do not eat the organ meats -- and they don't get scurvy.

In eating meat you are probably eating some cancer that was present in the animals. Not sure if acid digested animal cancer can cause human cancer, anyone know of a study?

I agree. Meat is the most nutritionally complete food. I haven't eaten vegetables in years. There's nothing more gentle on the digestive system than meat.

EXACTLY! “Gentle on the digestive system” is the perfect way to describe it.

You never feel bloated, but you feel satiated after eating, you find that you naturally begin eating less frequently because you are more fully nourished when you do eat, and then you notice that you’re pooping half as often as you used to and the Volume is also half what it used to be — because it turns out that your body is actually USING what you are, instead of just passing it through your system after gleaning a few scraps of nutrition, which is what happens when you eat plants.

Also, it is honestly remarkable to COMPLETELY stop farting after switching to an animal-based diet.

plants are good for your health, so are plants. Both extremes have their pitfalls

Where do you get vitamin c?

Fresh meat contains vitamin C, as does liver.

In fact, it has been known for hundreds of years that fresh meat prevents scurvy — the reason people associate vitamin C with citrus is because lemons were taken on board long ship voyages back in the day to prevent scurvy — but this is because you can’t keep meat fresh for months on a ship without refrigeration.

So you eat organ meats too?

Most carnivores argue that "you're not doing it right" if you avoid offals. Some take offals in pill form or blend some into burgers. There are lots of actually delicious ways to eat them, especially in Asian cuisine (admittedly I'm biased here).

I do eat liver, but I go in spurts - sometimes I'll go several months without eating any liver, other times I'll eat it daily for a week or two.

It appears incontrovertible that it is harder (but not impossible) to have a nutritionally complete diet without meat, and particularly without dairy either.

It appears also incontrovertible that the additional components required to complete such a diet are expensive to produce (in terms of energy and high quality arable land) and likely cannot be scaled to any significant proportion of the population.

Perhaps if 80% of edible crops weren’t feed to livestock and subsidies were removed from animal agriculture then those will be no-issues. I find appealing that anyone on HN being a progressive and open-minded public with an objective opinion would be promoting an environmentally destructive industry like the animal AG.

Most animal feed is in fact not edible - that is my point, animals are very good at converting stuff you can grow anywhere (like grass), stuff that wouldn't give you much nutrition beyond carbs (wheat?), and stuff you wouldn't like to eat anyway (like left overs from the brewing industry). Replacing animals in our food chain without mass starvation/malnutrition would appear to be impossible.

Animals are not “magic machines” the protein on their bodies comes from the food they eat. The only magic machines are plants that turn water, minerals and light into food.

http://ussoy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/consumption-1.jp...

What's your point? Humans can't eat grass, but cows can eat grass and then human's can eat cows. Think of a pasture as a "lab" and a cow as "lab-grown meat" if it makes you feel better.

Honestly, do you think that 2 billion cows can be fed grass only?

There’s no viable way to keep meat consumption at the current levels feeding them grass.

Yes -- I think we should use nuclear power to desalinate sea water and turn the Sahara dessert into a vast pasture to raise two billion cows on. I also think we should do this in Australia.

Vegetarian diets are not expensive even with meat/dairy being subsidized ($38B/year in US).

Vegetarians need to make sure they exercise and consume high quality plant proteins: vegetables, nuts, legumes, beans and whole grains and keep a normal BMI.

Meat eaters have the opposite issue: too much protein and fat leading to heart disease (#1), cancer (#2), stroke (#5) and diabetes (#8). Hip fractures do not even chart.

Protein and fat causing those issues is baloney.

Metabolic heart disease is caused by small LDL particle size creating plaques , and a low carb diet fixes that. I'm not going to blame carbs on that one, but cutting them out does either directly or indirectly help.

Nitrites and nitrates used for cured meats are the carcinogenic you have to worry about, not meat. It is a good thing to point out, not an argument against general meat consumption.

No idea about stroke factors, won't comment on that.

The mere suggestion that something with the glycemic index of meat causes diabetes is laughable.

Almost everyone thinks this, but I don’t. I have come to believe that a person’s risk for heart disease, cancer, stroke, and high blood pressure will all be reduced by switching to a 100% red meat diet. If anyone actually cares, they can read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz to learn about nutrition science.

There is a good reason why everyone thinks that. The evidence is overwhelming that consuming meat increases your chances of heart disease and stroke[1].

Nina Teicholz does not have any medical or nutrition science training or credentials[2]. Even if she did she would need to amass an extreme amount of evidence over long periods of time.

Red meat is considered carcinogenic.[3][4] Red meat is directly associated with high blood pressure[5] Low fiber diets e.g. 100% red meat is associated with constipation, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), diverticulitis, heart disease and some cancers (including bowel)[6].

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/eating-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Teicholz

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2121650/

[4] https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021... [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658466/

[6] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/fib...

"About 90% of hip fractures are linked to falls, which are more common in older people"

Well, some believe that some of those falls are actually the result of the hip fracture.

Heavy resistance exercise, for example power lifting, is an excellent way for women (and men too!) to significantly increase their bone density. I've personally confirmed this with a DEXA scan as has everyone else I lift with that got a DEXA scan too.

I don't see why the same effect couldn't be achieved on a vegetarian diet, if nutrients and micronutrients were adequate.

I wonder to what extent the standard American diet results in obesity results in on-going, daily power-lifting as people just move about and if this effect is strong enough to appear as “vegetarians more likely to fracture hips”.

It would be easy to observe this if thin meat-eaters broke their hips as often as vegetarians do.

In fact, people who ONLY eat red meat will find it LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to be overweight.

Try eating only steak, eggs, and sardines for a year and then check the state of your six-pack abs if you’re curious.

> In fact, people who ONLY eat red meat will find it LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to be overweight.

This is such an absurd statement. There's many factors around gaining weight, but it all boils down to simple how many calories you spent vs how much you eat. There's no magical "eat however much you want" diet that it's impossible to gain weight on

I'm not sure if it applies to red meat, which usually has more fat, but certainly you'll starve to death if you eat only lean meat. It's colloquially known as rabbit starvation, because if you only eat rabbit and nothing else, you'll starve to death. Doesn't matter how many calories you consume - your body cannot process the calories, so you starve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

It does not apply to red meat generally. The larger an animal is the higher a percentage of fat it contains. A blue whale has 35% body fat, a cow is roughly 25% body fat, and a squirrel/rabbit is roughly 5% body fat.

Also, I render my own tallow from beef suet and often add it to ground beef. I also slow-cook roasts in tallow.

jononomo's claim is factually correct. It's been experimentally proven in metabolic ward studies that dietary protein is never stored as body fat. While hypothetically it appears that since there is a protein to glucose pathway and a glucose to lipid pathway that excess protein could conceivably be stored as body fat, what actually happens is the kidneys just eliminate the excess nitrogen. Again, that's not a theoretical result. It has been observed repeatedly in metabolic ward studies. For those who aren't aware, a metabolic ward study is run in what is effectively a prison. The study participants are physically deprived access to any food or beverage except that which the experimenters provide. Needless to say these studies are extremely expensive, since people expect to be well compensated for being imprisoned for weeks or even months.

Incidentally, when it comes to health, weight gain and weight loss are of relatively minor importance compared to body composition. Gaining weight in your musculoskeletal system is a good for survivability and quality of life! Denser muscles and bones are not a bad thing. It's excess body fat, in particular visceral body fat, that causes morbidity and mortality. If you get fat enough your body will start storing those lipids in your vital organs, and that's a recipe for inflammation, early cancer, and other kinds of death.

Edit: here’s a fun story about a normal guy trying a high protein diet: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rock-dwayne-johnson...

Great comment! I agree with all of it.

Do you have a link to these studies?

I'm not your personal librarian. Go to your local university library, or if that fails try scholar.google.com. Be sure and search specifically for metabolic ward studies on protein intake and nutrient partitioning. I found this data for myself many years ago. Sadly I didn't save the references and unfortunately digging through research like this isn't as simple as searching for the latest movie show times. I wish I had, but if so I'd have already included them. Feel free to believe me or not.

You’re just wrong on this. The calories-in-calories-out thing doesn’t work since the nutrient profiles of different kinds of calories effect the body’s calorie-burn-rate.

But you wouldn’t be the first one to tell me I’m wrong without actually trying the diet and seeing for yourself whether you gain or lose weight on it.

Also, consider the fact that some calories will result in hormonal signals in your body that increase your hunger, whereas other calories will result in hormonal signals that decrease your hunger.

Your body needs nutrients, not just calories — that’s why we can’t just drink gasoline and call it a day.

Actually, that’s a good question for you — why is it that people can’t just drink gasoline, since it contains calories?

Do you think a person would gain weight if they only drank gasoline and didn’t exercise enough? Do you think a person would feel hungry again just a couple hours after drinking some gasoline?

*carnivorous humans more likely to destroy their planet through climate change.

Interesting study but the authors themselves highlight many limitations which the journalists sadly did not take note if, e.g.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

> The single questionnaire administered at recruitment was the only method of assessing diet and lifestyle information; therefore, we could not account for changes in the diet group or covariates over time. Additionally, food and nutrient intake in vegetarians in recent years could differ from when data were collected at recruitment due to changes over the last two decades in the availability of vegetarian food products, such as increases in the number of available meat substitute products [49]. Consequently, the generalisability of our findings to modern-day vegetarians is reduced.

But for me more striking are some things that are not explicitly checked, e.g. they excluded from their data those that had prior hip problems and the meat eaters were on average significantly older - could there be some selection?

Also studies seem to get somewhat different results depending on the exact data:

> Other epidemiological studies have found that adherence to diets low in meat consumption, such as the Mediterranean diet and Alternative Healthy Eating Index, was protectively associated with hip fracture risk [33, 34], and adherence to Western diets in which meat consumption is high was positively associated with hip fracture risk [35]. Conversely, total meat intake has been inversely associated with hip fracture risk [21]. These results cannot be fairly compared with risks in vegetarians and non-vegetarians, which no other study has directly assessed.

Most interesting is this table:

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

What is not clear to me is how the final % is reached as those that died during the 20 year study period are taken into account up to their death. So a woman died of cancer at year 10 gives 10 years of 'no hip fractures to the pool of years while a woman that lived throughout the study

If I do a simple division of cases divided by person years I get the following "annual chance of hip fracture":

* Regular meat-eater: 394 / 252610 = 0.1559‰

* Occasional meat-eater: 247 / 145639 = 0.1695%

* Pescetarians: 80 / 74077 = 0.1079%

* Vegetarian/vegan: 101 / 84042 = 0.1202%

In words: pescetarians have the lowest annual chance of hip fractures (11/10.000), followed by vegetarians (12/10.000). Meat eater have the highest chance of fractures, with occasional meat-eaters (17/10.000) having a higher chance than regular meat-eaters (16/10.000).

Unless I read this data VERY wrong the chance of fractures is much lower for vegetarians and vegetarians than meat eaters.

It's not like they weren't warned

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