Discussion Board

Are mortality rates for people on a pure plant based diet different than for people on a typical animal based diet?

It seems from searching the internet that there is no significant advantages for plant based diet.

These are tough numbers to find for several reasons. One is there hasn't been a lot of 100% plant based people to draw numbers from. Two is as Dr. McDougall points out often, a lot of vegetarian and vegan people eating a very poor diet. So what we have are various studies looking at groups of people that have significant changes from each other such as the many 7th Day Adventist research. There we can compare all manner of differences. I am not sure of the mortality numbers but most all of the quality of life and health numbers greatly favor those following the plant based recommendations. Even here, few people tended to follow those recommendations their entire life.
In many ways, we are the groundbreakers for that body of work.
There is a statistic that is interesting regarding longevity and that's the fact that the longest lived cultures consumed the least animal products. Perhaps not 100% but enough to make us sit up and look at the stats from that perspective. But even there the longest lives cultures seemed to do well on an intake of much less than 10% calories from animal product. The Okinawans, groups of centenarian Chinese and others make this case.
f1jim