Vegetarian Diet Weakens Bones

msarro

http://fe18.story.media.ac4.yahoo.com/news/story/maple/us/afp/20090702/hl_afp/healthfooddietaustraliavietnam_20090702103326

SYDNEY (AFP) – People who live on vegetarian diets have slightly weaker bones than their meat-eating counterparts, Australian researchers said Thursday.

A joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between the bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found that vegetarians had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters, said lead researcher Tuan Nguyen.

The issue was most pronounced in vegans, who excluded all animal products from their diet and whose bones were six percent weaker, Nguyen said.

There was "practically no difference" between the bones of meat-eaters and ovolactovegetarians, who excluded meat and seafood but ate eggs and dairy products, he said.

"The results suggest that vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets, are associated with lower bone mineral density," Nguyen wrote in the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"But the magnitude of the association is clinically insignificant," he added.

Nguyen, who is from Sydney's Garvan Institute for Medical Research and collaborated on the project with the Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine in Ho Chi Minh City, said the question of whether the lower density bones translated to increased fracture risk was yet to be answered.

"Given the rising number of vegetarians, roughly five percent (of people) in western countries, and the widespread incidence of osteoporosis, the issue is worth resolving," he said.





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I drink milk and eat eggs, so I'm pretty well safe. Just wanted to make sure that all of you who choose to go vegan make sure you're getting enough calcium in your diets.

Also not sure how they were able to infer significance in a correlational study, unless they had people go veg in a test group.

naugustyniak

Thanks for that...I am octolacto also and take a calcium supplement but it is good to know.

lynniejones

Calcium suppliments. *gag* they are huge but necessary especially to old ladies like myself. Ha!

hiddensecant

The actual scores of a 5% decrease would be less than a half a point. And the difference between 5% and 6% is less than a tenth of a point. Neither will make the difference between a healthy adult and an adult at risk for osteoporosis.

A correlation study takes a sample of one group and a sample of another ... in this case their bone densities were compared to each other. They didn't ask a group to go vegan to see if they would lose any bone density. They also didn't find out how much calcium they were getting, something very easy to do on a Vegan diet if you know what you're doing.

msarro

The actual scores of a 5% decrease would be less than a half a point. And the difference between 5% and 6% is less than a tenth of a point. Neither will make the difference between a healthy adult and an adult at risk for osteoporosis.

A correlation study takes a sample of one group and a sample of another ... in this case their bone densities were compared to each other. They didn't ask a group to go vegan to see if they would lose any bone density. They also didn't find out how much calcium they were getting, something very easy to do on a Vegan diet if you know what you're doing.

I'm thinking the samples were also skewed. I'm still amazed how many "vegetarians" i meet who eat absolutely terrible food, vegans too! Sure, eating twinkies all day is vegan, but don't expect your body to do very well off of it.

Any idea about the actual study? I really wish that places like yahoo would provide a link to the journal the study is being published in.

hiddensecant

The actual scores of a 5% decrease would be less than a half a point. And the difference between 5% and 6% is less than a tenth of a point. Neither will make the difference between a healthy adult and an adult at risk for osteoporosis.

A correlation study takes a sample of one group and a sample of another ... in this case their bone densities were compared to each other. They didn't ask a group to go vegan to see if they would lose any bone density. They also didn't find out how much calcium they were getting, something very easy to do on a Vegan diet if you know what you're doing.

I'm thinking the samples were also skewed. I'm still amazed how many "vegetarians" i meet who eat absolutely terrible food, vegans too! Sure, eating twinkies all day is vegan, but don't expect your body to do very well off of it.

Any idea about the actual study? I really wish that places like yahoo would provide a link to the journal the study is being published in.

Haha, I started looking for the journal and I found other studies comparing similar groups to find no difference in bone density even at lower calcium intakes.

And it's not so much that it's skewed as much as it's being misinterpreted. They didn't even mention if any part of the population had an unhealthy or borderline BMD and which group had them. The majority of unhealthy bone density could easily be in the non-vegetarian groups and still average out to be 5% higher than the vegan group.