The Adventist Study is interesting, but surely not definitive. It’s not even a RCT. To my knowledge, the only respectable RCT ever conducted analyzing a diet pattern is PREDIMED. It doesn’t test veganism specifically (the treatment group adopts a mediterranean diet), but it does increase the strength of the association between plant based diets and lower overall mortality risk. Overall, I think the level of evidence against meat is only suggestive, but since it’s so time-consuming and expensive to conduct these trials, I don’t expect much further light coming from investigations using metrics like mortality, heart attacks, strokes, etc. I think epigenetic clocks will in the future be a much better way to quickly analyze the effects of diet interventions, and I suspect plant-based diets will have an advantage over other diet patterns.
The Adventist Study is interesting, but surely not definitive. It’s not even a RCT. To my knowledge, the only respectable RCT ever conducted analyzing a diet pattern is PREDIMED. It doesn’t test veganism specifically (the treatment group adopts a mediterranean diet), but it does increase the strength of the association between plant based diets and lower overall mortality risk. Overall, I think the level of evidence against meat is only suggestive, but since it’s so time-consuming and expensive to conduct these trials, I don’t expect much further light coming from investigations using metrics like mortality, heart attacks, strokes, etc. I think epigenetic clocks will in the future be a much better way to quickly analyze the effects of diet interventions, and I suspect plant-based diets will have an advantage over other diet patterns.