It’s all over the news and it’s going to have quite a big impact on the rapidly growing vegan movement. Food manufacturers have had to catch up. People are concerned about the environment and they are more knowledgeable about how cattle can contribute to global warming and how they also contribute to deforestation. People are also more concerned about animal welfare and more environmentally enlightened so it is a big knockback that the finding of an Oxford University study is that vegans (who forego all foods derived from animals) have a far higher risk of broken bones compared to people who eat meat and fish.
Specifically, the researchers found that vegans have a 43% higher risk of bone fractures compared to meat eaters. The study is published today in the journal BMC Medicine. There were 55,000 participants of the study in Britain of which 2,000 were vegan and they were followed for 18 years.
We found that vegans had a higher risk of total fractures, which resulted in close to 20 more cases per 1000 people over a 10 year period compared with people who ate meat.-Tammy Tong, nutritional epidemiologist at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at Oxford University and the study’s lead author.
The biggest problem relates to hip fractures where the risk was 2.3 times higher for vegans compared to meat-eaters. People who only eat fish and vegetarians were also found to have a higher risk of hip fractures.
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