14 DAY TRIAL // People who choose to no longer eat meat and dairy could find themselves leading longer, healthier lives than others, a new report published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine says.
After looking into the health records of 73,308 Seventh-day Adventists, a team of researchers reached the conclusion that death rates are significantly lower among vegetarians than among people who eat animal products on a fairly regular basis.
The 73,308 individuals taken into consideration for this research were both men and women, and were monitored over a period of six years.
Based on their eating habits, the Seventh-day Adventists were split into five different groups: nonvegetarians, semi-vegetarians, pesco-vegetarians, lacto-ovo-vegetarians and vegan.
The mortality risk in the four vegetarian groups combined was found to be about 12% lower than that recorded in the case of the nonvegetarians.
“These results demonstrate an overall association of vegetarian dietary patterns with lower mortality compared with the nonvegetarian dietary pattern,” the researchers reportedly explain in their paper.
“They also demonstrate some associations with lower mortality of the pesco-vegetarian, vegan and lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets specifically compared with the nonvegetarian diet,” they further detail on their findings.
Due to the fact that the people monitored during this investigation were all Seventh-day Adventists, the researchers say that their findings concerning mortality rates could not have been altered by habits such as smoking, drinking and drug abuse.
In other words, it was the presence or absence of meat in these people's diets that made all the difference.
The specialists who carried out this investigation suspect that vegetarians live longer and enjoy a better health because the lack of meat and dairy in their diet keeps them safe from various medical conditions.
Some of these conditions are hypertension, metabolic syndrome, diabetes mellitus and ischemic heart disease.
Interestingly enough, it appears that men get more favorable results when keeping a vegetarian diet than women do.