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Vegans break more bones then meat eaters

Baobab the fruit
4 min readDec 6, 2020

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A problematic study, at best.

On the 23rd of November 2020 a study was published and subsequently picked up by various other news sources. “vegans break more bones” a nice Title to have in an already divisive and heated debate. But today lets have a look at the specific study referenced by these sites. And why in my eyes its a problematic one at best.

The study itself can be found here :

Vegetarian and vegan diets and risks of total and site-specific fractures: results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study | BMC Medicine | Full Text (biomedcentral.com)

The first thing to look at in a study is of course the sample size, the group of people, animals etc that is being looked at. In general you want the groups to be as close to each other in number as you can. In this case however we are looking at a sample size that consists as follows :

  1. 29,380 Meat eaters.
  2. 8037 Fish eaters.
  3. 15,499 Vegetarians.
  4. 1982 Vegans.

The sample size clearly isn’t equalled out in this case, which already makes it harder to do a reasonable comparison.

The conclusion reads as follows : “Non-meat eaters, especially vegans, had higher risks of either total or some site-specific fractures, particularly hip fractures. This is the first prospective study of diet group with both total and multiple specific fracture sites in vegetarians and vegans, and…

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Baobab the fruit
Baobab the fruit

Written by Baobab the fruit

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A quality assurance engineer, aspiring photographer and writer. In search of a way to express himself, passionate about earth, space and animals.

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