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Mortality in British vegetarians: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC-Oxford). Key TJ, Appleby PN, Spencer EA, Travis RC, Roddam AW, Allen NE. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Mar 18. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 19297458 doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.26736L

"One of the problems - if it could be called a problem - in writing this blog and moderating the comments is most readers are pretty intelligent. Occasionally I have the angry vegetarian wander in, take me to task for my errant ways, and, after a comeback or two on my part, drift away to never be heard from again. Thanks to the confirmation bias, this blog pretty much selects against the non-meat eater. So, I tend to forget how many people there are out there who are pretty much clueless about basic nutrition, and how many people there are who bobble through life spouting cliches they've heard along the way as great nutritional truths. Based on the comments I get on this blog, it seems to me that most people are pretty nutritionally sophisticated and reasonable."

"Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain. Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew. In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper. "The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis" (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn't evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat. It was our gradual drift toward the much higher quality diet provided by food from animal sources that allowed us to develop the large brains we have. It was hunting and meat eating that reduced our GI tracts and freed up our brains to grow. As I wrote at the start of this post, the evidence indicates that we didn't evolve to eat meat - we evolved because we ate meat."

August of this year, the BBC reported that the British Advertising Standards Authority attacked a vegetarian organization for making "alarmist" and "unsubstantiated" claims about the risks of eating meat. Headlines like "Vegetarian group slammed over advertising" splashed across the evening news. What "exaggerated" claims were targeted by the Agency? The vegetarian group claimed that meat-eaters were at increased risk of dying from heart disease and stroke, and that vegetarians lived longer than meateaters. How could the agency possibly find fault with such incontrovertible facts? Because, simply put, our "facts" aren't true. The latest science and the best science that we have that we have suggests that we vegetarians do not live longer than our meat-eating counterparts. The latest published results came out January, 2002 in a journal called Public Health Nutrition. Eight thousand vegetarians were followed for 18 years, and no survival advantage was found. Then April, 2002 the results of a study twice that size were released at the International Congress on Vegetarian Nutrition held at Loma Linda University. A study involving seventeen thousand vegetarians followed for about 9 years confirms the bad news-no survival advantage for vegetarians. Even more worrisome, both this huge studies found that vegetarians had an increased risk of dying from degenerative brain diseases