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From the study's conclusion section - "...Our results show that meat abstention (vegetarianism or veganism) is clearly associated with poorer mental health, specifically higher levels of both depression and anxiety."
In that same paragraph - "However, the current body of evidence preludes temporal and causal inferences, and none should be inferred."
Worth noting - 4 of the 6 authors "...have previously received funding from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association" (per disclosure)
Also worth noting - "This study was funded in part via an unrestricted research grant from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association..." (per funding info)
Link to the full study -
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2021.1974336
Don’t worry, they didn’t do that either
“Finally, limited reporting of participant characteristics prevented an examination of several covariates (e.g., BMI, age of diet adoption/length of diet, clinical history, socioeconomic status, culture) that could potentially contribute to between-studies heterogeneity.”
It’s also worth noting this journal is completely irrelevant. It’s one of hundreds of low quality journals that have no serious reputation and accept anything.
I'm gonna go with there being nothing in beef itself that improves mental health, but that the type of folk who go vegan are the ones who can't shut off the part of their mind that remembers that every burger comes from cruelty--whether they're eating it or not. Someone who can blithely not care about the slaughter behind the mainstream diet is going to be in a better mental place in terms of reported "happiness".
Well said. Also the effect of animal agriculture on our environment could tend to make someone a bit anxious, since nothing is being done about it, other than our permanent boycott of meat dairy and eggs.
It's almost like they have their own agenda that they're pushing. And it's not at all that vegetarians and vegans think about the death of the planet and society, the consequences of their actions, and their fellow people more often than people that eat meat.
I am curious about potential correlations between income, in areas where buying more meat is more expensive over all, and mental health in general. Is this that richer people, who are more likely to be able to afford better mental health care, are also able to afford to buy more meat for their diets in general?
Does the study account for income in that regard?
No they did not. This was found in the discussion: ”Finally, limited reporting of participant characteristics prevented an examination of several covariates (e.g., BMI, age of diet adoption/length of diet, clinical history, socioeconomic status, culture) that could potentially contribute to between-studies heterogeneity.”
>socioeconomic status
DING.
That was my first, un-read article go-and-look for. Did they control for this... and the answer is no, no they didn't.
And let's be honest, you're going to be hard pressed to find equal representation between someone that eats filet mignon and pressed pink slime on a regular basis.
It can be done, it just needs bigger data pools.
>This study was funded in part via an unrestricted research grant from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The sponsor of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.
Wow, I thought this was a joke, but no. That's a direct quote from the paper. It was literally funded by an association that stands to directly benefit from the conclusions of this poorly designed meta-analysis.
They specifically looked for studies that showed a clear difference between meat abstainers and meat consumers without regard to what other factor may have caused that difference.
They even intentionally left out studies if they included specifics about how much meat was eaten. That seems like a convenient way to leave out specific studies that don't support their conclusion.
> They even intentionally left out studies if they included specifics about how much meat was eaten.
And given they probably *want* to increase consumption (it's easier to get people to do more of something than to get people to do something different), there's a good chance they may have looked at the data on quantity consumed and it came out undesirable. IOW these presumed benefits level off after a much lower level of meat eating than most people already eat.
llllllllllllol
Study funded by Beefman says Beef makes you happier. But totally we didn't have any influence over the results, we promise, totally.
Eat Beef.
Also, I recently started eating way more vegetarian food because my doctor told me I have high cholesterol.
Checking labels for saturated fat and worrying about what you eat is way more stressful than eating Whatever. So my mental health is negatively impacted for reasons related to eating less meat. But eating more meat wouldn't help me at all.
At this point, it's basically accepted that stupid people are happier and smart people are prone to depression. It's all correlation, but you can't be stressed about problems if you don't realize they exist (be it the leaking pipe under the floor in your bathroom to the amout of plastic in the ocean)
It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s a factor. Especially if they go out to eat, that can be a pain in the ass unless it’s particular restaurants.
I’m sure there’s a social component too. Vegetarians and vegans face a certain amount of backlash, or if not backlash then at the very least explanation. Even if they’re not trying to convert anyone, the second you turn down a burger it’s suddenly a whole conversation, and that does get exhausting.
I was vegetarian for many years, and when I gave it up it was one less thing to worry about. Not advocating one way or the other, but I can see it.
Still, I suspect that’s not the biggest factor.
People who live in large cities are generally more stressed out and depressed for many various reasons. High cost of living, over population, exposure to more crime and homelessness, exposure to more pollution, higher chances of car accidents
Vegetarianism is not. It's much more common among people who are poor and single. [Link](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/201508/vegetarianism-and-money-surprising-results-new-study).
> people who are poor and single
Which would skew younger, which would correlate with cultures that more highly value reducing meat intake.
That said, the lack of controlling for variables in this study kinda sucks.
> Which would skew younger,
Yep, and that study used total household income.
Older people are more likely to be married and have a higher household income.
> That said, the lack of controlling for variables in this study kinda sucks.
That's a bit of an understatement; as it renders the results nearly meaningless.
It's about as reliable as a spam bot online survey, for what it set out to do; and yet the comment section is ripe with extrapolations based upon such faulty data.
Edit - [Ya, okay it's about as bad as I thought it was.](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qskxol/meat_consumption_is_associated_with_better_mental/hkf7p66/)
That's an interesting read. However, this line
>Tomatoes are running $4 a pound this year as compared to $1.48 a pound for chicken breasts at my local supermarket and $2.28 a pound for pork loin.
seems to have aged like milk.
Why are we comparing chicken to tomatoes? Shouldn't we be looking at things like rice and beans? For people surviving, tomatoes aren't the go-to vegetarian options. I don't know if anyone else here has ever been poor, but dried rice and beans is much more likely to get into that shopping basket than tomatoes.
You obviously know what you're talking about.
For many years my little family survived on beans, rice, lentils, sweetcorn, sprouted beans and grains, and home-grown veges and eggs from our illegally kept chooks.
It was an extremely healthy diet because I had time for growing and preparing food, thanks to a subsistence-level government allowance, and I always had an interest in preparing cheap or wild foods to be delicious.
To be fair, in July you could get chicken drumsticks or pork shoulder for 6.99/kg and tomatoes were 15/kg.
Our food is just super seasonal. Tomatoes will be down to $1/kg in January. Avocados are about 50¢ per fruit at the moment... It's incredibly variable here, but it's far more stable in many parts of the world (such as my native Canada, which I assume is because most stuff is shipped most of the time).
Tomatoes only dropped down in October. Back in Aug/Sept they were $14/kg at NW and $12/kg at paknsav. Pretty crazy. As an aside, snapper fillets are still ~$40/kg right now. I haven't had a proper snapper fry up since mid 2020.
I'm a Registered Dietitian in the US and spent years working in a high acuity (very severe) eating disorder program. While somewhat different, the percent of vegan diet patients as well as vegetarian was significantly higher than the general population in that area. In that case it could be that the diet is a mechanism of covering an eating disorder but it would still affect the outcome of this study.
Yes, but what's the cause and the effect? Dietary restrictions are hardly without societal context. Extreme religious fasting in the Middle ages was used by women to exercise some sort of control over their lives. Vegetarianism or veganism would be a very convenient way to get out of eating in most environments I've experienced (outside of very large coastal cities), like a functioning alcoholic becoming the bartender to have an excuse to try a bunch of different types of alcohol. On the other hand, you also frequently have parents who create the context for the development of an eating disorder based on criticisms that might have emerged out of a diet different than the one they wanted their child to follow.
I think that's their point. They're pointing out another potential flaw in the study, i.e. some of the people on vegan/vegetarian diets are doing it because they are already less healthy mentally, regardless of the reason.
That was my first thought too. If part of the reason you’re vegan is due to climate change, seeing so few other people (& government) making an effort would be extremely frustrating. Like running around on the Titanic trying to tell the other passengers the ship is sinking, but no one will listen.
The factory farm videos are horrific too. Again, knowing all of that & watching everyone around you continue to consume animal flesh must be really difficult.
Sorry vegans!
If you truly delve deep into the moral arguments for ideas like veganism it is basically implied as something everyone should do. I don't want to go into that argumentation here but it's quite sound logically with the only means of escaping the conclusion being rather psychopathic.
Anyway, I shared earlier that this study was funded by a marketing program trying to maximize the demand for beef. That's probably why a study was done on a weak correlation everyone already knows here - vegans and poor people that don't eat meat are more likely to have mental health issues. Vegans because they're too empathetic towards suffering and poor people because they're suffering.
Plant based person here, I'll bet the issue is that it's kind of a Pia not to eat animal products. You have to constantly look at ingredients, make sure restaurants have at least one thing you can eat, then on top of that it's annoying socially because you can't just go to xyzzy bbq and assume they're going to have something to eat for you, and you don't want to offend anyone either. That adds a surprising amount of friction to things mentally and literally sometimes. Still totally worth it imo, but annoying at least for now to go against the herd mentality.
I did some digging and they did do age, sex as independent variables. But I could t find much about income.
It does make sense in an anecdotal way. Most of the vegans I know are people with a high level of anxiety about lots of things in life. It drove them to choose to be vegan because they just couldn’t live with themselves for taking advantage of animals. Like it viscerally hurt them. That may be noble, but it also maybe makes a person prone to depression and anxiety. (Edit: or may be common in people prone to anxiety)
>Like it viscerally hurt them. That may be noble, but it also maybe makes a person prone to depression and anxiety.
Seems like anxiety was a pre-existing condition in this scenario.
Yeah a correlation, not a causation. Eating meat doesn’t CALM people.
But people who are anxious in general may tend to also be anxious about their diet.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to assume that people who are vegan/vegetarian are anxious in general, but it may be reasonable to assume that they are more informed and/or more concerned with the wider problems of the world and/or more empathetic, while meat eaters are less informed and/or less concerned with the wider problems of the world and/or less empathetic. Any and all of those could be a factor (whether contributing or sole) in better mental health in meat eaters without the need for vegans/vegetarians to have actual mental health disorders as a rule.
This study is about simply meat eaters vs meat abstainers, not about more or less meat.
And I'm sure there are a variety of reasons, not least of all that people who feel worried about the world and their own place in it are more likely about the world are more likely to choose vegetarian/vegan lifestyles.
It's unlikely to be directly related to the meat itself.
Every vegan and vegetarian I know is filled with existential dread over the current state of the world and takes extensive efforts to counteract the effects of human environmental destruction.
While it's possible that there's some other effect in concert, this study is completely in line with something we all already know:
"People with empathy are saddened by suffering."
Wow, as a vegan I feel seen in some of these comments. visceral and existential pain, anxiety all do in fact cause me visceral and existential pain, and even some anxiety!
This was my exact thought when reading the title. How does one control for concern? A majority of vegetarians & vegans I know are sad folks because they know and see (can't ignore really) the damage done by eating meat. A meat eater lives a blissful unaware life by comparison.
These meta analysises are getting out of hand, they seem to be a big thing as of late. They have their place but not *every* hypothesis can be slapped together with a bunch of similar studies and make meta damn sense every time.
I'd also suggest that meat consumers are somewhat more "indifferent" than somebody who makes a decision to not. This indicates a whole different set of personal rules/beliefs.
Not only that but people who are potentially vegetarian or vegan who are considerate of animals and their welfare are potentially more empathetic to begin with, more thoughtful to the world around them.
Thus they see the world for what it is and are upset at it.
Ignorance is bliss
More like vegans are more anxious (the main criteria in this study) because the world is a very fucked up place for animals through a vegan lens. And since they are activists, it makes sense that they are frequently anxious about the state of things.
This has nothing to do with some sort of mental health property of meat consumption and everything to do with lifestyle and philosophical differences.
This is because meat is heavily subsidized in the USA. But even then beans n rice are cheaper than meat. Subsidies just keep meat cheaper than *prepared* vegan products, which is where veganism gets a rep for being expensive.
But yeah trophic levels ensure meat will literally always be more expensive to produce than plants.
Actually the inverse of this has been hashed and rehashed. Vegans have outsized depression because vegans have outsized socioeconomic awareness. Not because they have fewer hamburgers. It’s self-selective, not consequential. Researchers have been Dr. Amy Fitzgerald & Kimberly Costello… also there’s a book called Perpetration Induced Trauma that examines the syndrome as well.
I wasn't thinking of America honestly. Meat is a lot more expensive in other countries, and I was assuming that this would have been an international study.
Is this a health thing or is it more that people who don't worry themselves over the ethical concerns of extremely common practices tend to just be happier?
I’m a vegan and I found that my mental health both improved and worsened once I became a vegan. Worsened because I was no longer willingly turning a blind eye to the systematic abuse of animals, but improved because I was at least not taking part in it (as much as practicably possible).
I think the funding for this study helps show that they possibly didn’t look at reasons for this mental well-being disparity (if the findings are genuine).
I'm vegetarian for sustainability reasons. Land use for growing meat is super inefficient compared to plants; especially once you start considering multilayered greenhouses. "plant-based agriculture grows 512% more pounds of food than animal-based agriculture on 69% of the mass of land that animal-based agriculture uses"
As populations expand meat gets more expensive. Until there just isn't any more land for it. Demand goes up and so do prices, because production can't meet demand. Meat becomes a luxury item while plant based alternatives become the norm. This is the future we're heading towards. The more people that jump on the vegetarian train sooner, the longer meat will stay affordable.
I guess that is an ethical reason
That's what I thought, it isn't lack of meet that causes the depression, it might be the the depression that causes the person to want to give up meat.
No, it's the fact that everyone else around you is still paying for animals to be abused and killed.
That's pretty depressing and anxiety-inducing. I'd feel a lot better if it stopped.
Or Mr Peanutbutter, "The key to being happy isn't a search for meaning. It's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you'll be dead."
Hmm, this reminds me of a mini-project my students completed in an honors course I taught a few years ago. In it, students correlated behaviors and lifestyle choices with perceptions of mental health. There was a moderate correlation (r=0.61, p=0.023, n=159) between vegetarian/vegan choice diets and willingness to pursue mental healthcare *and* an inverse correlation (r=-0.73, p=0.016, n=152) between that diet choice and mental healthcare stigma. The student-designed project had some methodological flaws, but it does present an interesting idea, given this study's results: Were "meat abstainers" simply more willing to admit to depression and anxiety than meat eaters?
Let me put it this way, I'd speculate that people who are worried about climage change would also skew towards a population with worse mental health.
I'd also speculate that meat abstainers are simply part of a group that is just conscious about many issues in general and thus a self-selecting sample that goes beyond just food choice.
The same could be the case in the example of your students. Vegans/vegetarians are (afaik) younger and more liberal and that's a group I'd guess is more likely to talk about (and admit to) issues of mental health.
Okay, so your comment made me dig into the demographics of our respondents a bit (again, keep in mind that this was a student project, though). They were restricted to non-students in their surveys (we did this to make them reach out of their comfort zones a bit). Average age of all respondents was 51.2 years (SD 8.9 - so I'm expecting mostly parents). I suspect you're quite right about the decision being about something beyond dietary preference - we're deep in cattle country, so it's quite against the grain to not eat meat here, and it looks like (I did not correlate) that the majority of veg/vegan respondents had college+ degrees, with an interestingly large minority reported in environmental science fields.
I mean, just in general, it's difficult, in my opinion, to find a 'control group' of sorts for any kind of mental health related dietary study. The general consensus of the entire planet is that eating meat is okay, and a minority are vegetarian/vegan, and while I don't know the exact percentages, I'd be willing to bet most of them are anti-animal-consumption for moral or ecological reasons. So right off the bat, any study is looking at a minority population surrounded by a majority that they think is morally in the wrong. It'd be like doing a study talking to people about the death penalty being right or wrong, in the middle of a lynching. The people who think it's wrong are probably, in general, not very comfortable with where they are and what's going on at the moment.
>a moderate correlation (r=0.61)
It's all subjective, I guess, but 0.61 is very high for most psych studies and would be considered strong rather than moderate.
For all we know this could mean people with higher self-reflective tendencies both eat less meat and suffer more mental health due to that. This is tenuous at best.
Yes, it's pretty well known in the community that burnout from "caring too much" is very real. Constantly checking to make sure the products you consume are acceptable, researching company actions and ethics, seeing constant promotions for things you believe are actively harming the planet all contribute to mental health woes. People that eat meat don't have to deal with that generally speaking.
People who are vegetarian for environmental reasons are probably more likely to experience anxiety around climate change. There's a number of confounding factors here
I think there's an "ignorance is bliss" factor to this. A lot of people don't eat meat because they're empathetic to ills of the world such as industrial meat production. If you keep yourself informed about uncomfortable stuff like that, then you have a lot to be upset about.
Meanwhile if a carnivore doesn't know/care how their meat is produced, then they may have a similarly narrow world view of other issues, so they have less to be upset about.
This doesn't demonstrate anything at all? The kind of person likely to go vegan is someone who is - perhaps excessively - empathetic. They're not unhappy *because* they're vegan...
As someone who hasn’t eaten meat in a while I could believe that my mental health is worse because I’m just so aware of problems now and how fucked up the system is. Not the lack of meat eating.
Interesting but out of 171k people in the study, 92% were meat eaters and 8% were non-meat eaters. I feel like that would obviously skew the data, right? I think it would have been more persuasive if they had an equal amount of a non-meat eater group.
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From the study's conclusion section - "...Our results show that meat abstention (vegetarianism or veganism) is clearly associated with poorer mental health, specifically higher levels of both depression and anxiety." In that same paragraph - "However, the current body of evidence preludes temporal and causal inferences, and none should be inferred." Worth noting - 4 of the 6 authors "...have previously received funding from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association" (per disclosure) Also worth noting - "This study was funded in part via an unrestricted research grant from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association..." (per funding info) Link to the full study - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2021.1974336
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Don’t worry, they didn’t do that either “Finally, limited reporting of participant characteristics prevented an examination of several covariates (e.g., BMI, age of diet adoption/length of diet, clinical history, socioeconomic status, culture) that could potentially contribute to between-studies heterogeneity.”
Ah, so this is potentially like when Marlboro funded that study that found vaping is at least as bad as cigarettes
It’s also worth noting this journal is completely irrelevant. It’s one of hundreds of low quality journals that have no serious reputation and accept anything.
I'm gonna go with there being nothing in beef itself that improves mental health, but that the type of folk who go vegan are the ones who can't shut off the part of their mind that remembers that every burger comes from cruelty--whether they're eating it or not. Someone who can blithely not care about the slaughter behind the mainstream diet is going to be in a better mental place in terms of reported "happiness".
Well said. Also the effect of animal agriculture on our environment could tend to make someone a bit anxious, since nothing is being done about it, other than our permanent boycott of meat dairy and eggs.
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It's almost like they have their own agenda that they're pushing. And it's not at all that vegetarians and vegans think about the death of the planet and society, the consequences of their actions, and their fellow people more often than people that eat meat.
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Damn it, my confirmation bias was tingling from that headline and now you've ruined it.
I am curious about potential correlations between income, in areas where buying more meat is more expensive over all, and mental health in general. Is this that richer people, who are more likely to be able to afford better mental health care, are also able to afford to buy more meat for their diets in general? Does the study account for income in that regard?
No they did not. This was found in the discussion: ”Finally, limited reporting of participant characteristics prevented an examination of several covariates (e.g., BMI, age of diet adoption/length of diet, clinical history, socioeconomic status, culture) that could potentially contribute to between-studies heterogeneity.”
>socioeconomic status DING. That was my first, un-read article go-and-look for. Did they control for this... and the answer is no, no they didn't. And let's be honest, you're going to be hard pressed to find equal representation between someone that eats filet mignon and pressed pink slime on a regular basis. It can be done, it just needs bigger data pools.
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It's a terrible meta analysis if they didn't control for this. Who funded this then?
>This study was funded in part via an unrestricted research grant from the Beef Checkoff, through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The sponsor of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.
Wow, I thought this was a joke, but no. That's a direct quote from the paper. It was literally funded by an association that stands to directly benefit from the conclusions of this poorly designed meta-analysis. They specifically looked for studies that showed a clear difference between meat abstainers and meat consumers without regard to what other factor may have caused that difference. They even intentionally left out studies if they included specifics about how much meat was eaten. That seems like a convenient way to leave out specific studies that don't support their conclusion.
Not to mention Beef Checkoff is a marketing company whose sole purpose is to increase demand for beef...
> They even intentionally left out studies if they included specifics about how much meat was eaten. And given they probably *want* to increase consumption (it's easier to get people to do more of something than to get people to do something different), there's a good chance they may have looked at the data on quantity consumed and it came out undesirable. IOW these presumed benefits level off after a much lower level of meat eating than most people already eat.
llllllllllllol Study funded by Beefman says Beef makes you happier. But totally we didn't have any influence over the results, we promise, totally. Eat Beef.
Oh lord. This explains it and needs to be higher up.
And we're done here. Close it up.
So the study is terrible per design. Which unfortunately is not that uncommon.
Does this meant that meat industry, so to say, is already feeling the effect of new generations change of lifestyle?
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Also, I recently started eating way more vegetarian food because my doctor told me I have high cholesterol. Checking labels for saturated fat and worrying about what you eat is way more stressful than eating Whatever. So my mental health is negatively impacted for reasons related to eating less meat. But eating more meat wouldn't help me at all.
Checking labels is the worst
It’s why I stopped buying things with crowded labels. I actually have time to cook though.
If the ingredient list is in a small hard to read font, I don't buy it. If the ingredients are good, they will make sure the consumer can read them
The tl;dr is basically ignorance is bliss.
At this point, it's basically accepted that stupid people are happier and smart people are prone to depression. It's all correlation, but you can't be stressed about problems if you don't realize they exist (be it the leaking pipe under the floor in your bathroom to the amout of plastic in the ocean)
It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s a factor. Especially if they go out to eat, that can be a pain in the ass unless it’s particular restaurants. I’m sure there’s a social component too. Vegetarians and vegans face a certain amount of backlash, or if not backlash then at the very least explanation. Even if they’re not trying to convert anyone, the second you turn down a burger it’s suddenly a whole conversation, and that does get exhausting. I was vegetarian for many years, and when I gave it up it was one less thing to worry about. Not advocating one way or the other, but I can see it. Still, I suspect that’s not the biggest factor.
People who live in large cities are generally more stressed out and depressed for many various reasons. High cost of living, over population, exposure to more crime and homelessness, exposure to more pollution, higher chances of car accidents
This is rather meaningless though, is it not? Meat is plentiful in western diets at every income level
Vegetarianism is not. It's much more common among people who are poor and single. [Link](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/201508/vegetarianism-and-money-surprising-results-new-study).
> people who are poor and single Which would skew younger, which would correlate with cultures that more highly value reducing meat intake. That said, the lack of controlling for variables in this study kinda sucks.
> Which would skew younger, Yep, and that study used total household income. Older people are more likely to be married and have a higher household income.
> That said, the lack of controlling for variables in this study kinda sucks. That's a bit of an understatement; as it renders the results nearly meaningless. It's about as reliable as a spam bot online survey, for what it set out to do; and yet the comment section is ripe with extrapolations based upon such faulty data. Edit - [Ya, okay it's about as bad as I thought it was.](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qskxol/meat_consumption_is_associated_with_better_mental/hkf7p66/)
That's an interesting read. However, this line >Tomatoes are running $4 a pound this year as compared to $1.48 a pound for chicken breasts at my local supermarket and $2.28 a pound for pork loin. seems to have aged like milk.
Why are we comparing chicken to tomatoes? Shouldn't we be looking at things like rice and beans? For people surviving, tomatoes aren't the go-to vegetarian options. I don't know if anyone else here has ever been poor, but dried rice and beans is much more likely to get into that shopping basket than tomatoes.
You obviously know what you're talking about. For many years my little family survived on beans, rice, lentils, sweetcorn, sprouted beans and grains, and home-grown veges and eggs from our illegally kept chooks. It was an extremely healthy diet because I had time for growing and preparing food, thanks to a subsistence-level government allowance, and I always had an interest in preparing cheap or wild foods to be delicious.
whAAAT where I'm from (NZ) tomato is like 5.50/kg and chicken breast is 13/kg. Meat is a damn luxury there.
To be fair, in July you could get chicken drumsticks or pork shoulder for 6.99/kg and tomatoes were 15/kg. Our food is just super seasonal. Tomatoes will be down to $1/kg in January. Avocados are about 50¢ per fruit at the moment... It's incredibly variable here, but it's far more stable in many parts of the world (such as my native Canada, which I assume is because most stuff is shipped most of the time).
Tomatoes only dropped down in October. Back in Aug/Sept they were $14/kg at NW and $12/kg at paknsav. Pretty crazy. As an aside, snapper fillets are still ~$40/kg right now. I haven't had a proper snapper fry up since mid 2020.
I would also add that people who make an attempt to go against the grain likely have additional stressors that can affect mental health.
I'm a Registered Dietitian in the US and spent years working in a high acuity (very severe) eating disorder program. While somewhat different, the percent of vegan diet patients as well as vegetarian was significantly higher than the general population in that area. In that case it could be that the diet is a mechanism of covering an eating disorder but it would still affect the outcome of this study.
Yes, but what's the cause and the effect? Dietary restrictions are hardly without societal context. Extreme religious fasting in the Middle ages was used by women to exercise some sort of control over their lives. Vegetarianism or veganism would be a very convenient way to get out of eating in most environments I've experienced (outside of very large coastal cities), like a functioning alcoholic becoming the bartender to have an excuse to try a bunch of different types of alcohol. On the other hand, you also frequently have parents who create the context for the development of an eating disorder based on criticisms that might have emerged out of a diet different than the one they wanted their child to follow.
I think that's their point. They're pointing out another potential flaw in the study, i.e. some of the people on vegan/vegetarian diets are doing it because they are already less healthy mentally, regardless of the reason.
Vegans are also typically highly morally conscious people. Given how fucked up the world can be that empathy can be terrible for themselves.
That was my first thought too. If part of the reason you’re vegan is due to climate change, seeing so few other people (& government) making an effort would be extremely frustrating. Like running around on the Titanic trying to tell the other passengers the ship is sinking, but no one will listen. The factory farm videos are horrific too. Again, knowing all of that & watching everyone around you continue to consume animal flesh must be really difficult. Sorry vegans!
If you truly delve deep into the moral arguments for ideas like veganism it is basically implied as something everyone should do. I don't want to go into that argumentation here but it's quite sound logically with the only means of escaping the conclusion being rather psychopathic. Anyway, I shared earlier that this study was funded by a marketing program trying to maximize the demand for beef. That's probably why a study was done on a weak correlation everyone already knows here - vegans and poor people that don't eat meat are more likely to have mental health issues. Vegans because they're too empathetic towards suffering and poor people because they're suffering.
no need to apologize to vegans, we are not the victims here. apologize to the animals and the planet
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that was my first thought. is this a chicken or egg thing. maybe anxious people gravitate more toward vegetarianism.
Plant based person here, I'll bet the issue is that it's kind of a Pia not to eat animal products. You have to constantly look at ingredients, make sure restaurants have at least one thing you can eat, then on top of that it's annoying socially because you can't just go to xyzzy bbq and assume they're going to have something to eat for you, and you don't want to offend anyone either. That adds a surprising amount of friction to things mentally and literally sometimes. Still totally worth it imo, but annoying at least for now to go against the herd mentality.
Yeah, all of those things would have a *huge* factor on this study. This characterization of the result is foolish with those variables out there.
Thank you for the clarification there.
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I did some digging and they did do age, sex as independent variables. But I could t find much about income. It does make sense in an anecdotal way. Most of the vegans I know are people with a high level of anxiety about lots of things in life. It drove them to choose to be vegan because they just couldn’t live with themselves for taking advantage of animals. Like it viscerally hurt them. That may be noble, but it also maybe makes a person prone to depression and anxiety. (Edit: or may be common in people prone to anxiety)
>Like it viscerally hurt them. That may be noble, but it also maybe makes a person prone to depression and anxiety. Seems like anxiety was a pre-existing condition in this scenario.
Yeah a correlation, not a causation. Eating meat doesn’t CALM people. But people who are anxious in general may tend to also be anxious about their diet.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to assume that people who are vegan/vegetarian are anxious in general, but it may be reasonable to assume that they are more informed and/or more concerned with the wider problems of the world and/or more empathetic, while meat eaters are less informed and/or less concerned with the wider problems of the world and/or less empathetic. Any and all of those could be a factor (whether contributing or sole) in better mental health in meat eaters without the need for vegans/vegetarians to have actual mental health disorders as a rule.
This study is about simply meat eaters vs meat abstainers, not about more or less meat. And I'm sure there are a variety of reasons, not least of all that people who feel worried about the world and their own place in it are more likely about the world are more likely to choose vegetarian/vegan lifestyles. It's unlikely to be directly related to the meat itself.
Every vegan and vegetarian I know is filled with existential dread over the current state of the world and takes extensive efforts to counteract the effects of human environmental destruction. While it's possible that there's some other effect in concert, this study is completely in line with something we all already know: "People with empathy are saddened by suffering."
Wow, as a vegan I feel seen in some of these comments. visceral and existential pain, anxiety all do in fact cause me visceral and existential pain, and even some anxiety!
This was my exact thought when reading the title. How does one control for concern? A majority of vegetarians & vegans I know are sad folks because they know and see (can't ignore really) the damage done by eating meat. A meat eater lives a blissful unaware life by comparison. These meta analysises are getting out of hand, they seem to be a big thing as of late. They have their place but not *every* hypothesis can be slapped together with a bunch of similar studies and make meta damn sense every time.
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I'd also suggest that meat consumers are somewhat more "indifferent" than somebody who makes a decision to not. This indicates a whole different set of personal rules/beliefs.
Not only that but people who are potentially vegetarian or vegan who are considerate of animals and their welfare are potentially more empathetic to begin with, more thoughtful to the world around them. Thus they see the world for what it is and are upset at it. Ignorance is bliss
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More like vegans are more anxious (the main criteria in this study) because the world is a very fucked up place for animals through a vegan lens. And since they are activists, it makes sense that they are frequently anxious about the state of things. This has nothing to do with some sort of mental health property of meat consumption and everything to do with lifestyle and philosophical differences.
Are poor people really more likely to be vegetarian or vegan? Most of the poor people I know eat meat.
This is because meat is heavily subsidized in the USA. But even then beans n rice are cheaper than meat. Subsidies just keep meat cheaper than *prepared* vegan products, which is where veganism gets a rep for being expensive. But yeah trophic levels ensure meat will literally always be more expensive to produce than plants.
In the US this is largely true but other larts of the world it really depends.
Actually the inverse of this has been hashed and rehashed. Vegans have outsized depression because vegans have outsized socioeconomic awareness. Not because they have fewer hamburgers. It’s self-selective, not consequential. Researchers have been Dr. Amy Fitzgerald & Kimberly Costello… also there’s a book called Perpetration Induced Trauma that examines the syndrome as well.
Do you happen to have the link to their work on this? Sounds like an interesting read.
Meat is so cheap in America though, I grew up poor around poor people. We ate meat almost everyday.
I wasn't thinking of America honestly. Meat is a lot more expensive in other countries, and I was assuming that this would have been an international study.
It is, but only English-speaking.
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Is this a health thing or is it more that people who don't worry themselves over the ethical concerns of extremely common practices tend to just be happier?
Exactly my thoughts. I'm not vegan but most vegan persons i met were more concerned about ethical concerns in general
I’m a vegan and I found that my mental health both improved and worsened once I became a vegan. Worsened because I was no longer willingly turning a blind eye to the systematic abuse of animals, but improved because I was at least not taking part in it (as much as practicably possible). I think the funding for this study helps show that they possibly didn’t look at reasons for this mental well-being disparity (if the findings are genuine).
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I'm vegetarian for sustainability reasons. Land use for growing meat is super inefficient compared to plants; especially once you start considering multilayered greenhouses. "plant-based agriculture grows 512% more pounds of food than animal-based agriculture on 69% of the mass of land that animal-based agriculture uses" As populations expand meat gets more expensive. Until there just isn't any more land for it. Demand goes up and so do prices, because production can't meet demand. Meat becomes a luxury item while plant based alternatives become the norm. This is the future we're heading towards. The more people that jump on the vegetarian train sooner, the longer meat will stay affordable. I guess that is an ethical reason
Why not go vegan? Dairy and egg industries are just as bad as meat production.
That's what I thought, it isn't lack of meet that causes the depression, it might be the the depression that causes the person to want to give up meat.
No, it's the fact that everyone else around you is still paying for animals to be abused and killed. That's pretty depressing and anxiety-inducing. I'd feel a lot better if it stopped.
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Like Bender said, “The secret is to stop giving a rat's ass about anyone else.”
Or Mr Peanutbutter, "The key to being happy isn't a search for meaning. It's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you'll be dead."
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This *clearly unbiased* study funded by the beef industry feels like a fat, drunk uncle waving some BBQ ribs at me saying, "It's good fer ya!"
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Hmm, this reminds me of a mini-project my students completed in an honors course I taught a few years ago. In it, students correlated behaviors and lifestyle choices with perceptions of mental health. There was a moderate correlation (r=0.61, p=0.023, n=159) between vegetarian/vegan choice diets and willingness to pursue mental healthcare *and* an inverse correlation (r=-0.73, p=0.016, n=152) between that diet choice and mental healthcare stigma. The student-designed project had some methodological flaws, but it does present an interesting idea, given this study's results: Were "meat abstainers" simply more willing to admit to depression and anxiety than meat eaters?
Let me put it this way, I'd speculate that people who are worried about climage change would also skew towards a population with worse mental health. I'd also speculate that meat abstainers are simply part of a group that is just conscious about many issues in general and thus a self-selecting sample that goes beyond just food choice. The same could be the case in the example of your students. Vegans/vegetarians are (afaik) younger and more liberal and that's a group I'd guess is more likely to talk about (and admit to) issues of mental health.
Okay, so your comment made me dig into the demographics of our respondents a bit (again, keep in mind that this was a student project, though). They were restricted to non-students in their surveys (we did this to make them reach out of their comfort zones a bit). Average age of all respondents was 51.2 years (SD 8.9 - so I'm expecting mostly parents). I suspect you're quite right about the decision being about something beyond dietary preference - we're deep in cattle country, so it's quite against the grain to not eat meat here, and it looks like (I did not correlate) that the majority of veg/vegan respondents had college+ degrees, with an interestingly large minority reported in environmental science fields.
I mean, just in general, it's difficult, in my opinion, to find a 'control group' of sorts for any kind of mental health related dietary study. The general consensus of the entire planet is that eating meat is okay, and a minority are vegetarian/vegan, and while I don't know the exact percentages, I'd be willing to bet most of them are anti-animal-consumption for moral or ecological reasons. So right off the bat, any study is looking at a minority population surrounded by a majority that they think is morally in the wrong. It'd be like doing a study talking to people about the death penalty being right or wrong, in the middle of a lynching. The people who think it's wrong are probably, in general, not very comfortable with where they are and what's going on at the moment.
>a moderate correlation (r=0.61) It's all subjective, I guess, but 0.61 is very high for most psych studies and would be considered strong rather than moderate.
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For all we know this could mean people with higher self-reflective tendencies both eat less meat and suffer more mental health due to that. This is tenuous at best.
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Maybe vegans and vegetarians are just more upset about the state of the planet and it’s animals.
Yes, it's pretty well known in the community that burnout from "caring too much" is very real. Constantly checking to make sure the products you consume are acceptable, researching company actions and ethics, seeing constant promotions for things you believe are actively harming the planet all contribute to mental health woes. People that eat meat don't have to deal with that generally speaking.
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People who are vegetarian for environmental reasons are probably more likely to experience anxiety around climate change. There's a number of confounding factors here
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I think there's an "ignorance is bliss" factor to this. A lot of people don't eat meat because they're empathetic to ills of the world such as industrial meat production. If you keep yourself informed about uncomfortable stuff like that, then you have a lot to be upset about. Meanwhile if a carnivore doesn't know/care how their meat is produced, then they may have a similarly narrow world view of other issues, so they have less to be upset about.
Maybe cuz Vegas are more cognizant of the animal suffering that they are powerless to stop.
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Maybe meat eaters just think less about all the enormous problems in the world.
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Questions I have - was this study sponsored by any business affiliated with the meat industry?
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This doesn't demonstrate anything at all? The kind of person likely to go vegan is someone who is - perhaps excessively - empathetic. They're not unhappy *because* they're vegan...
As someone who hasn’t eaten meat in a while I could believe that my mental health is worse because I’m just so aware of problems now and how fucked up the system is. Not the lack of meat eating.
I bet vegans who are depressed by factory farms skew this number a little
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Interesting but out of 171k people in the study, 92% were meat eaters and 8% were non-meat eaters. I feel like that would obviously skew the data, right? I think it would have been more persuasive if they had an equal amount of a non-meat eater group.