A Fish And Vegetable Diet Could Add Years To Your Life

Flickr

• 5 Controversial Mental Health Treatments
• Brain Surgery Is an Option for Patients with Severe OCD, Study Suggests
• Women Willing to Delay Antibiotics for UTIs

To stave off death by a few extra years, a vegetarian diet appears to be superior to a non-vegetarian one, according to results of a study of more than 73,000 people published today (June 3) in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The study, the largest of its kind, compared the longevity of meat eaters to that of fourtypes of vegetarians: vegans, who eat no animal products; lacto-ovo–vegetarians, who consume dairy products and eggs; pesco-vegetarians, who eat fish but rarely meat; and semi-vegetarians, who eat meat no more than once weekly.

The winners, in terms of cheating death the longest, were the pesco-vegetarians, followed by vegans, and then the lacto-ovo-vegetarians. The vegetarian groups, on average, had a 12 percent lower risk of dying over the study period compared to meat eaters. The study participants were all members of the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

Previous studies have shown that vegetarian diets are associated with decreased risk of numerous chronic diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, circulatory disease and hypertension.