AdanacA study from the University of Oxford found vegetarians have substantially lower risk of five types of cancer
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-025-03327-4
Can we make a link to the study mandatory pls?
Regarding the study, I think it’s plausible in a sense that they have a large, diverse sample and control for the things that you should control for but what I always miss in medical papers is a more sophisticated quantitative part. It might be somewhere where I just didn’t see it because I’m not from the field but I don’t really understand their mathematical model that has led to these findings, nor do I understand how to interpret these findings independently.
Vegetarian diets and cancer risk: pooled analysis of 1.8 million women and men in nine prospective studies on three continents - British Journal of Cancer
Vegetarian diets might influence cancer risk. We studied 1,645,555 meat eaters, 57,016 poultry eaters, 42,910 pescatarians, 63,147 vegetarians and 8849 vegans in 9 cohorts (UK, US, Taiwan, India). After a median 16 years follow-up, incident cancers were: 4504 mouth and pharynx, 1308 oesophagus (squamous cell), 2105 oesophagus (adenocarcinoma), 3578 stomach, 30,528 colorectum, 2970 liver, 8030 pancreas, 3077 lung (never smokers), 61,368 breast, 11,220 endometrium, 8076 ovary, 45,946 prostate, 7193 kidney, 6869 bladder, 11,651 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 4658 multiple myeloma and 7306 leukaemia. Multivariable Cox regression was used to estimate cohort-specific hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), and the results were combined using meta-analysis. Compared to meat eaters, poultry eaters had lower risk of prostate cancer (0.93, 0.88–0.98), pescatarians had lower risks of colorectal (0.85, 0.77–0.93), breast (0.93, 0.88–0.98) and kidney cancer (0.73, 0.58–0.93), vegetarians had lower risks of cancers of the pancreas (0.79, 0.65–0.97), breast (0.91, 0.86–0.97), prostate (0.88, 0.79–0.97), kidney (0.72, 0.57–0.92) and multiple myeloma (0.69, 0.51–0.93) but higher risk of squamous cell carcinoma of the oesophagus (1.93, 1.30–2.87), and vegans had higher risk of colorectal cancer (1.40, 1.12–1.75). Vegetarian diets might influence risk for several cancers. The generalisability should be considered cautiously.
All that is carefully explained in the methods section. 3 pages long.
One criticism is that the comparison sets of data are not balanced, they compared 1.6M meat eaters with barely 75000 vegetarians and vegans.
Regardless, there have been many studies with similar conclusions which can be compared with meta analysis.
Vegetarians have a much more active digestion allowing shorter exposure to carcinogenic products found by digesting meat and they have a completely different gut flora. On autopsy, you can always tell a vegetarian because their adipose tissue is pure white, not dark. The also have a lower BMI. But this is just cancer, there is literally no disease that is not reduced with vegetarian diets.
I’m sorry but it’s not. They are running a regression model. You don’t need to show me that you can write down the equation but it is common to at least show something like ANOVA or just in general a table that shows your model and the coefficient estimates. It might be buried somewhere because the tables aren’t rendered next to the text but I couldn’t find it.
I‘m not sure why we call this community science if I have to explain why I would like to see the mathematical model that justifies the core result of a paper.
An unfortunate issue with Lemmy. Seems to generally skew tech which makes sense but there isn’t as much scientific literacy necessarily.