Just because you’re eating vegetarian or vegan doesn’t mean you’re eating healthy.
Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Vegan Junk Food?
4.7/5 - (135 votes)
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
Plant-based diets are associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, mortality, and dying from all causes put together. This study of a diverse sample of 12,000 Americans found that “progressively increasing the intake of plant foods by reducing the intake of animal foods may be associated with benefits on cardiovascular health and mortality…”, but when it comes to plant-based diets for cardiovascular disease prevention, all plant foods are not created equal. Were the vegetarians in the British study that found the higher stroke risk just eating a lot of vegan junk food?
Any diet devoid of certain animal food sources can be claimed to be a vegetarian or vegan diet; so, it’s important to see what they’re actually eating. One of the first things I look at when I’m trying to see how serious a population is about healthy eating is look at something undeniably, uncontroversially bad: soda, liquid candy. Anyone drinking straight sugar water obviously doesn’t have health, top of mind. In the big study of plant-based eaters in America, where people tend to cut down on meat for health reasons far more than ethics… flexitarians drink fewer sugary beverages than regular meat-eaters, as do pescatarians, vegetarians, and vegans.
In the UK study, though, where the increased stroke risk was found, where folks are more likely to go veg or vegan for ethical reasons, the pescatarians are drinking less soda, but the vegetarians and vegans are drinking more. I’m not saying that’s why they had more strokes; it just might give us an idea of how healthy the people were eating. In the UK study, the vegetarian and vegan men and women were eating about the same amount of desserts, cookies and chocolate, and about the same total sugar. In the U.S. study, the average nonvegetarian is nearly obese, even the vegetarians are a little overweight, and the vegans were the only ideal weight group. In this analysis of the UK study, though, everyone was about the same weight—in fact the meat-eaters were skinnier than the vegans. The EPIC-oxford study seems to have attracted a particularly health conscious group of meat-eaters weighing substantially less than the general population.
Let’s look at some particular stroke-related nutrients. Dietary fiber appears beneficial for the prevention of cardiovascular disease including stroke, and it appears the more the better. Based on studies of nearly a half a million men and women there doesn’t seem to be any upper threshold of benefit; so, the more, the better. More than 25 grams of soluble fiber, 47 grams of insoluble dietary fiber and you can really start seeing a significant drop in associated stroke risk; so, one could consider these as the minimal recommendable daily intakes to prevent stroke at a population level. That’s what you see in people eating diets centered around minimally processed plant foods. Dean Ornish got up around there with his whole food plant-based diet. Maybe not as much as we were designed to eat, based on the analyses of fossilized feces, but that’s the kind of neighborhood where we might expect significantly lower stroke risk. How much were the UK vegetarians getting? 22.1. Now, in the UK they measure fiber a little differently; so, that may actually be closer to 30 grams, but not the optimal level for stroke prevention. So little fiber that the vegetarians and vegans only beat out the meat-eaters by about 1 or 2 bowel movements a week, suggesting they were eating lots of processed foods.
The vegetarians were only eating about a half serving more of fruits and vegetables, thought to reduce stroke risk in part because of their potassium content, yet the UK vegetarians at higher stroke risk were evidently eating so few greens and beans they couldn’t even match the meat-eaters, not even reaching the recommended minimum daily potassium intake of 4700 mg a day.
And what about sodium? The vast majority of the available evidence indicates that elevated salt intake is associated with higher stroke risk. There’s like a straight-line increase in the risk of dying from a stroke the more salt you eat. Even just lowering sodium intake by a tiny fraction every year could prevent tens of thousands of fatal strokes. Reducing sodium intake to prevent stroke: time for action, not hesitation, but the UK vegetarians and vegans appeared to be hesitating, as did the other dietary groups. All groups exceeded the advised less than 2400 mg daily sodium intake—and that doesn’t even account for salt added at the table, and the American Heart Association recommends under just 1500 a day; so, they were all eating lots of processed foods. So, no wonder the vegetarian blood pressures were only 1 or 2 points lower; high blood pressure is perhaps the single most important modifiable risk factor for stroke.
What evidence do I have that if the vegetarians and vegans ate better their stroke risk would go down? Well, in rural Africa where they were able to nail the fiber intake that our bodies were designed to get by eating so many whole healthy plant foods— fruits, vegetables, grains, greens and beans, their protein almost entirely from plant sources, not only was heart disease, our #1 killer, almost non-existent, so apparently, was stroke, surging up from out of nowhere with the introduction of salt and refined foods to their diet.
Stroke also appears to be virtually absent in Kitava, a quasi-vegan island culture near Australia whose diet was very low in salt and very rich in potassium, because it was a vegetable-based diet. They ate fish a few times a week, but the other 95% or so of their diet was lots of vegetables, fruits, corn and beans, and they had an apparent absence of stroke, even despite their ridiculous rates of smoking. After all, we evolved eating as little as like less than an 8th of a teaspoon a day of salt and our daily potassium consumption is thought to have been as high as like 10,000 mg. We went from an unsalted, whole-food diet to salty processed foods depleted of potassium whether we eat meat or not.
Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic tried putting about 200 patients with established cardiovascular disease on a whole food plant-based diet. Of the 177 that stuck with the diet only one went on to have a stroke in the subsequent few years compared to a hundred-fold greater rate of adverse events—including multiple strokes and deaths in those that strayed from the diet. “This is not vegetarianism,” Esselstyn explains. Vegetarians can eat a lot of less-than-ideal foods. This new paradigm is exclusively whole food, plant-based nutrition.
Now this entire train of thought, that the reason typical vegetarians don’t have better stroke statistics is because they’re not eating particularly stellar diets, may explain why they don’t have significantly lower strokes rates, but that still doesn’t explain why they may have higher stroke rates. Even if they’re eating similarly crappy, salty, processed diets at least they’re not eating meat, which we know increases stroke risk; so, there must be something about vegetarian diets that so increases stroke risk that it offsets their inherent advantages? We’ll continue our hunt, next.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- Kim H, Caulfield LE, Garcia-larsen V, Steffen LM, Coresh J, Rebholz CM. Plant-Based Diets Are Associated With a Lower Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease, Cardiovascular Disease Mortality, and All-Cause Mortality in a General Population of Middle-Aged Adults. J Am Heart Assoc. 2019;8(16):e012865.
- Hemler EC, Hu FB. Plant-Based Diets for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: All Plant Foods Are Not Created Equal. Curr Atheroscler Rep. 2019;21(5):18.
- Tong TYN, Appleby PN, Bradbury KE, et al. Risks of ischaemic heart disease and stroke in meat eaters, fish eaters, and vegetarians over 18 years of follow-up: results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study. BMJ. 2019;366:l4897.
- Segovia-siapco G, Sabaté J. Health and sustainability outcomes of vegetarian dietary patterns: a revisit of the EPIC-Oxford and the Adventist Health Study-2 cohorts. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2019;72(Suppl 1):60-70.
- Almost half of UK vegans made the change in the last year, according to new data. Vegan Trade Journal. Published November 19, 2018.
- Papier K, Tong TY, Appleby PN, et al. Comparison of Major Protein-Source Foods and Other Food Groups in Meat-Eaters and Non-Meat-Eaters in the EPIC-Oxford Cohort. Nutrients. 2019;11(4)
- Schmidt JA, Crowe FL, Appleby PN, Key TJ, Travis RC. Serum uric acid concentrations in meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians and vegans: a cross-sectional analysis in the EPIC-Oxford cohort. PLoS ONE. 2013;8(2):e56339.
- Spencer EA, Appleby PN, Davey GK, Key TJ. Diet and body mass index in 38000 EPIC-Oxford meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2003;27(6):728-34.
- Mcrae MP. Dietary Fiber Is Beneficial for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: An Umbrella Review of Meta-analyses. J Chiropr Med. 2017;16(4):289-299.
- Threapleton DE, Greenwood DC, Evans CE, et al. Dietary fiber intake and risk of first stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Stroke. 2013;44(5):1360-8.
- Threapleton DE, Greenwood DC, Burley VJ. Response to letter regarding article, "dietary fiber intake and risk of first stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis". Stroke. 2013;44(9):e110.
- Tikhonoff V, Palatini P, Casiglia E. Letter by Tikhonoff et al regarding article, "dietary fiber intake and risk of first stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis". Stroke. 2013;44(9):e109.
- Tuohy KM, Gougoulias C, Shen Q, Walton G, Fava F, Ramnani P. Studying the human gut microbiota in the trans-omics era--focus on metagenomics and metabonomics. Curr Pharm Des. 2009;15(13):1415-27.
- Sobiecki JG, Appleby PN, Bradbury KE, Key TJ. High compliance with dietary recommendations in a cohort of meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians, and vegans: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition-Oxford study. Nutr Res. 2016;36(5):464-77.
- Sanjoaquin MA, Appleby PN, Spencer EA, Key TJ. Nutrition and lifestyle in relation to bowel movement frequency: a cross-sectional study of 20630 men and women in EPIC-Oxford. Public Health Nutr. 2004;7(1):77-83.
- Potassium-rich foods linked to lower stroke risk. Harv Heart Lett. 2014;25(4):8.
- Iacoviello L, Bonaccio M, Cairella G, et al. Diet and primary prevention of stroke: Systematic review and dietary recommendations by the ad hoc Working Group of the Italian Society of Human Nutrition. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. 2018;28(4):309-334.
- Jayedi A, Ghomashi F, Zargar MS, Shab-bidar S. Dietary sodium, sodium-to-potassium ratio, and risk of stroke: A systematic review and nonlinear dose-response meta-analysis. Clin Nutr. 2019;38(3):1092-1100.
- Appel LJ. Reducing sodium intake to prevent stroke: time for action, not hesitation. Stroke. 2014;45(3):909-11.
- Appel LJ. Reducing sodium intake to prevent stroke: time for action, not hesitation. Stroke. 2014;45(3):909-11.
- Appel LJ, Frohlich ED, Hall JE, et al. The importance of population-wide sodium reduction as a means to prevent cardiovascular disease and stroke: a call to action from the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2011;123(10):1138-43.
- Pandian JD, Gall SL, Kate MP, et al. Prevention of stroke: a global perspective. Lancet. 2018;392(10154):1269-1278.
- Shaper AG, Jones KW. Serum-cholesterol, diet, and coronary heart-disease in Africans and Asians in Uganda: 1959. Int J Epidemiol. 2012;41(5):1221-5.
- Mccarty MF. Up-regulation of endothelial nitric oxide activity as a central strategy for prevention of ischemic stroke - just say NO to stroke!. Med Hypotheses. 2000;55(5):386-403.
- Mccarty MF. A low-fat, whole-food vegan diet, as well as other strategies that down-regulate IGF-I activity, may slow the human aging process. Med Hypotheses. 2003;60(6):784-92.
- Lindeberg S, Lundh B. Apparent absence of stroke and ischaemic heart disease in a traditional Melanesian island: a clinical study in Kitava. J Intern Med. 1993;233(3):269-75.
- Hunt BD, Cappuccio FP. Potassium intake and stroke risk: a review of the evidence and practical considerations for achieving a minimum target. Stroke. 2014;45(5):1519-22.
- Esselstyn CB, Gendy G, Doyle J, Golubic M, Roizen MF. A way to reverse CAD?. J Fam Pract. 2014;63(7):356-364b.
- Esselstyn CB, Favaloro RG. More than coronary artery disease. Am J Cardiol. 1998;82(10B):5T-9T.
Video production by Glass Entertainment
Motion graphics by Avocado Video
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
Plant-based diets are associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, mortality, and dying from all causes put together. This study of a diverse sample of 12,000 Americans found that “progressively increasing the intake of plant foods by reducing the intake of animal foods may be associated with benefits on cardiovascular health and mortality…”, but when it comes to plant-based diets for cardiovascular disease prevention, all plant foods are not created equal. Were the vegetarians in the British study that found the higher stroke risk just eating a lot of vegan junk food?
Any diet devoid of certain animal food sources can be claimed to be a vegetarian or vegan diet; so, it’s important to see what they’re actually eating. One of the first things I look at when I’m trying to see how serious a population is about healthy eating is look at something undeniably, uncontroversially bad: soda, liquid candy. Anyone drinking straight sugar water obviously doesn’t have health, top of mind. In the big study of plant-based eaters in America, where people tend to cut down on meat for health reasons far more than ethics… flexitarians drink fewer sugary beverages than regular meat-eaters, as do pescatarians, vegetarians, and vegans.
In the UK study, though, where the increased stroke risk was found, where folks are more likely to go veg or vegan for ethical reasons, the pescatarians are drinking less soda, but the vegetarians and vegans are drinking more. I’m not saying that’s why they had more strokes; it just might give us an idea of how healthy the people were eating. In the UK study, the vegetarian and vegan men and women were eating about the same amount of desserts, cookies and chocolate, and about the same total sugar. In the U.S. study, the average nonvegetarian is nearly obese, even the vegetarians are a little overweight, and the vegans were the only ideal weight group. In this analysis of the UK study, though, everyone was about the same weight—in fact the meat-eaters were skinnier than the vegans. The EPIC-oxford study seems to have attracted a particularly health conscious group of meat-eaters weighing substantially less than the general population.
Let’s look at some particular stroke-related nutrients. Dietary fiber appears beneficial for the prevention of cardiovascular disease including stroke, and it appears the more the better. Based on studies of nearly a half a million men and women there doesn’t seem to be any upper threshold of benefit; so, the more, the better. More than 25 grams of soluble fiber, 47 grams of insoluble dietary fiber and you can really start seeing a significant drop in associated stroke risk; so, one could consider these as the minimal recommendable daily intakes to prevent stroke at a population level. That’s what you see in people eating diets centered around minimally processed plant foods. Dean Ornish got up around there with his whole food plant-based diet. Maybe not as much as we were designed to eat, based on the analyses of fossilized feces, but that’s the kind of neighborhood where we might expect significantly lower stroke risk. How much were the UK vegetarians getting? 22.1. Now, in the UK they measure fiber a little differently; so, that may actually be closer to 30 grams, but not the optimal level for stroke prevention. So little fiber that the vegetarians and vegans only beat out the meat-eaters by about 1 or 2 bowel movements a week, suggesting they were eating lots of processed foods.
The vegetarians were only eating about a half serving more of fruits and vegetables, thought to reduce stroke risk in part because of their potassium content, yet the UK vegetarians at higher stroke risk were evidently eating so few greens and beans they couldn’t even match the meat-eaters, not even reaching the recommended minimum daily potassium intake of 4700 mg a day.
And what about sodium? The vast majority of the available evidence indicates that elevated salt intake is associated with higher stroke risk. There’s like a straight-line increase in the risk of dying from a stroke the more salt you eat. Even just lowering sodium intake by a tiny fraction every year could prevent tens of thousands of fatal strokes. Reducing sodium intake to prevent stroke: time for action, not hesitation, but the UK vegetarians and vegans appeared to be hesitating, as did the other dietary groups. All groups exceeded the advised less than 2400 mg daily sodium intake—and that doesn’t even account for salt added at the table, and the American Heart Association recommends under just 1500 a day; so, they were all eating lots of processed foods. So, no wonder the vegetarian blood pressures were only 1 or 2 points lower; high blood pressure is perhaps the single most important modifiable risk factor for stroke.
What evidence do I have that if the vegetarians and vegans ate better their stroke risk would go down? Well, in rural Africa where they were able to nail the fiber intake that our bodies were designed to get by eating so many whole healthy plant foods— fruits, vegetables, grains, greens and beans, their protein almost entirely from plant sources, not only was heart disease, our #1 killer, almost non-existent, so apparently, was stroke, surging up from out of nowhere with the introduction of salt and refined foods to their diet.
Stroke also appears to be virtually absent in Kitava, a quasi-vegan island culture near Australia whose diet was very low in salt and very rich in potassium, because it was a vegetable-based diet. They ate fish a few times a week, but the other 95% or so of their diet was lots of vegetables, fruits, corn and beans, and they had an apparent absence of stroke, even despite their ridiculous rates of smoking. After all, we evolved eating as little as like less than an 8th of a teaspoon a day of salt and our daily potassium consumption is thought to have been as high as like 10,000 mg. We went from an unsalted, whole-food diet to salty processed foods depleted of potassium whether we eat meat or not.
Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic tried putting about 200 patients with established cardiovascular disease on a whole food plant-based diet. Of the 177 that stuck with the diet only one went on to have a stroke in the subsequent few years compared to a hundred-fold greater rate of adverse events—including multiple strokes and deaths in those that strayed from the diet. “This is not vegetarianism,” Esselstyn explains. Vegetarians can eat a lot of less-than-ideal foods. This new paradigm is exclusively whole food, plant-based nutrition.
Now this entire train of thought, that the reason typical vegetarians don’t have better stroke statistics is because they’re not eating particularly stellar diets, may explain why they don’t have significantly lower strokes rates, but that still doesn’t explain why they may have higher stroke rates. Even if they’re eating similarly crappy, salty, processed diets at least they’re not eating meat, which we know increases stroke risk; so, there must be something about vegetarian diets that so increases stroke risk that it offsets their inherent advantages? We’ll continue our hunt, next.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- Kim H, Caulfield LE, Garcia-larsen V, Steffen LM, Coresh J, Rebholz CM. Plant-Based Diets Are Associated With a Lower Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease, Cardiovascular Disease Mortality, and All-Cause Mortality in a General Population of Middle-Aged Adults. J Am Heart Assoc. 2019;8(16):e012865.
- Hemler EC, Hu FB. Plant-Based Diets for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: All Plant Foods Are Not Created Equal. Curr Atheroscler Rep. 2019;21(5):18.
- Tong TYN, Appleby PN, Bradbury KE, et al. Risks of ischaemic heart disease and stroke in meat eaters, fish eaters, and vegetarians over 18 years of follow-up: results from the prospective EPIC-Oxford study. BMJ. 2019;366:l4897.
- Segovia-siapco G, Sabaté J. Health and sustainability outcomes of vegetarian dietary patterns: a revisit of the EPIC-Oxford and the Adventist Health Study-2 cohorts. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2019;72(Suppl 1):60-70.
- Almost half of UK vegans made the change in the last year, according to new data. Vegan Trade Journal. Published November 19, 2018.
- Papier K, Tong TY, Appleby PN, et al. Comparison of Major Protein-Source Foods and Other Food Groups in Meat-Eaters and Non-Meat-Eaters in the EPIC-Oxford Cohort. Nutrients. 2019;11(4)
- Schmidt JA, Crowe FL, Appleby PN, Key TJ, Travis RC. Serum uric acid concentrations in meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians and vegans: a cross-sectional analysis in the EPIC-Oxford cohort. PLoS ONE. 2013;8(2):e56339.
- Spencer EA, Appleby PN, Davey GK, Key TJ. Diet and body mass index in 38000 EPIC-Oxford meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2003;27(6):728-34.
- Mcrae MP. Dietary Fiber Is Beneficial for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: An Umbrella Review of Meta-analyses. J Chiropr Med. 2017;16(4):289-299.
- Threapleton DE, Greenwood DC, Evans CE, et al. Dietary fiber intake and risk of first stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Stroke. 2013;44(5):1360-8.
- Threapleton DE, Greenwood DC, Burley VJ. Response to letter regarding article, "dietary fiber intake and risk of first stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis". Stroke. 2013;44(9):e110.
- Tikhonoff V, Palatini P, Casiglia E. Letter by Tikhonoff et al regarding article, "dietary fiber intake and risk of first stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis". Stroke. 2013;44(9):e109.
- Tuohy KM, Gougoulias C, Shen Q, Walton G, Fava F, Ramnani P. Studying the human gut microbiota in the trans-omics era--focus on metagenomics and metabonomics. Curr Pharm Des. 2009;15(13):1415-27.
- Sobiecki JG, Appleby PN, Bradbury KE, Key TJ. High compliance with dietary recommendations in a cohort of meat eaters, fish eaters, vegetarians, and vegans: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition-Oxford study. Nutr Res. 2016;36(5):464-77.
- Sanjoaquin MA, Appleby PN, Spencer EA, Key TJ. Nutrition and lifestyle in relation to bowel movement frequency: a cross-sectional study of 20630 men and women in EPIC-Oxford. Public Health Nutr. 2004;7(1):77-83.
- Potassium-rich foods linked to lower stroke risk. Harv Heart Lett. 2014;25(4):8.
- Iacoviello L, Bonaccio M, Cairella G, et al. Diet and primary prevention of stroke: Systematic review and dietary recommendations by the ad hoc Working Group of the Italian Society of Human Nutrition. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. 2018;28(4):309-334.
- Jayedi A, Ghomashi F, Zargar MS, Shab-bidar S. Dietary sodium, sodium-to-potassium ratio, and risk of stroke: A systematic review and nonlinear dose-response meta-analysis. Clin Nutr. 2019;38(3):1092-1100.
- Appel LJ. Reducing sodium intake to prevent stroke: time for action, not hesitation. Stroke. 2014;45(3):909-11.
- Appel LJ. Reducing sodium intake to prevent stroke: time for action, not hesitation. Stroke. 2014;45(3):909-11.
- Appel LJ, Frohlich ED, Hall JE, et al. The importance of population-wide sodium reduction as a means to prevent cardiovascular disease and stroke: a call to action from the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2011;123(10):1138-43.
- Pandian JD, Gall SL, Kate MP, et al. Prevention of stroke: a global perspective. Lancet. 2018;392(10154):1269-1278.
- Shaper AG, Jones KW. Serum-cholesterol, diet, and coronary heart-disease in Africans and Asians in Uganda: 1959. Int J Epidemiol. 2012;41(5):1221-5.
- Mccarty MF. Up-regulation of endothelial nitric oxide activity as a central strategy for prevention of ischemic stroke - just say NO to stroke!. Med Hypotheses. 2000;55(5):386-403.
- Mccarty MF. A low-fat, whole-food vegan diet, as well as other strategies that down-regulate IGF-I activity, may slow the human aging process. Med Hypotheses. 2003;60(6):784-92.
- Lindeberg S, Lundh B. Apparent absence of stroke and ischaemic heart disease in a traditional Melanesian island: a clinical study in Kitava. J Intern Med. 1993;233(3):269-75.
- Hunt BD, Cappuccio FP. Potassium intake and stroke risk: a review of the evidence and practical considerations for achieving a minimum target. Stroke. 2014;45(5):1519-22.
- Esselstyn CB, Gendy G, Doyle J, Golubic M, Roizen MF. A way to reverse CAD?. J Fam Pract. 2014;63(7):356-364b.
- Esselstyn CB, Favaloro RG. More than coronary artery disease. Am J Cardiol. 1998;82(10B):5T-9T.
Video production by Glass Entertainment
Motion graphics by Avocado Video
Republishing "Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Vegan Junk Food?"
Terms
You may republish this material online or in print under our Creative Commons licence. You must attribute the article to NutritionFacts.org with a link back to our website in your republication.
If any changes are made to the original text or video, you must indicate, reasonably, what has changed about the article or video.
You may not use our material for commercial purposes.
You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that restrict others from doing anything permitted here.
If you have any questions, please Contact Us
Title
Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Vegan Junk Food?
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
From a medical standpoint, labels like vegan and vegetarian just tell me what you don’t eat. It’s like identifying yourself as a “No-Twinkie-atarian.” Uh, that’s great that you don’t eat Twinkies, but what’s the rest of your diet like?
OK, so what are the healthiest foods? Check out my daily dozen.
To catch up on the series so far, check out:
- What to Eat for Stroke Prevention
- What Not to Eat for Stroke Prevention
- Do Vegetarians Really Have Higher Stroke Risk?
- Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Vitamin D?
- Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Omega 3s?
Stay tuned for:
- Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Saturated Fat?
- Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors—Animal Protein?
- How to Test for Functional Vitamin B12 Deficiency
- Should Vegetarians Take Creatine to Normalize Homocysteine?
- The Efficacy and Safety of Creatine for High Homocysteine
UPDATE: The EPIC-Oxford authors issued a correction. The actual values are left-right mirror reversed, so the vegan BMI is 22.2 and the “Low meat-eaters” 23.7. Doesn’t change any of the conclusions in the video but does certainly make more sense. Hat tip to Chloe!
2023 Update: I recently put out a new video, Update on Vegetarian Stroke Risk.
If you haven't yet, you can subscribe to our free newsletter. With your subscription, you'll also get notifications for just-released blogs and videos. Check out our information page about our translated resources.
Previous Video
Next Video
