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Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

I found this intriguing and interesting:

> Nutrient deficiencies do not explain this association. The nature of the association remains unclear, and longitudinal data are needed to clarify causal relationship.

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Maybe people who are vegetarians have a more compassionate way of thinking, making them more prone to depression?

I.e. they're not depressed because they're vegetarians, but the other way around?

Just my spontaneous thought when I read this.

That is an interesting paragraph. I wonder if it could be linked to people often choosing a meatless diet due to animal cruelty concerns. The more aware of it you are, the more you see it. A bit like veterinarians having higher rates of depression.

This was done in brazil which is a very meat focused culture. Not eating meat automatically makes you an outsider or maybe people doing this are outsiders in the first place. Outsiders = depression :)

> Limitations.

> The cross-sectional design precluded the investigation of causal relationships.

Some have argued that meat contains compounds that, while not strictly essential nutrients, are still beneficial, like creatine. But this is pretty controversial.

What they literally mean is "the model of nutrition we are using does not predict the association". This is evidence that whatever model they're using isn't complete.

Nutrition science is still under rapid development, and its epistemic rigor is not yet very high. There are many reasons that plant-based diets are theorized to cause health issues that are not yet conclusively proven or disproven, such as the effects of plant fat profiles on human metabolism. Plants are certainly not chemically fungible with animals, and popular nutritional models do not incorporate many details of this.

Really sounds like some kind of nutritional deficiency though, specifically Vitamin B12: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688056/

It seems unlikely that the nutritional researchers would have missed checking for vitamin B12 deficiency?

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