Link between vegetarianism and risk of eating problems?

[jimmeh]

I've noticed a few articles about this over the weekend. I think the Guardian is the most sensible one I've read, particularly the caveats at the end :)



Teenagers and young adults who are vegetarians eat a more healthy diet in some respects than their meat-eating peers, according to a new study. But they may also be more likely to binge-eat and take unhealthy steps to control their weight.

What do we know already?
People become vegetarians for all sorts of reasons, ranging from concern for animals to simply not liking the taste of meat. Many people go vegetarian to improve their health, forgoing meat for a diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables and low in unhealthy fats.
Indeed, research does suggest that a vegetarian menu can improve people's eating habits and may lower their risk of obesity. But it's not without drawbacks. For example, vegetarians can miss out on important nutrients if their diet is not well-planned. And some people, especially if they're young, may become vegetarians to mask eating disorders, as this allows them to avoid some foods in a socially acceptable way.

What does the new study say?
Researchers took a closer look at the relationship between vegetarianism and young people's eating habits by surveying more than 2,500 teenagers (ages 15 to 18) and young adults (ages 19 to 23).
Participants filled out detailed questionnaires about the foods they ate each day; their height and weight; whether they had binged in the past year; whether they taken extreme weight-control steps, such as using diet pills or making themselves vomit; and whether they were currently, or had ever been, a vegetarian.
Overall, 4.3 percent were vegetarians, 10.8 percent were former vegetarians and 84.9 percent had never been vegetarians. Current vegetarians had the healthiest eating habits based on the survey responses, consuming the most servings of fruits and vegetables and the least amount of unhealthy fats. And among young adults, vegetarians were less likely to be overweight or obese than those who had never been vegetarians.

However, vegetarians were more likely to binge-eat, when they would lose control of their eating for a short time and eat much more than they normally would. Among both teenagers and young adults, 20 percent of vegetarians said they had binged, compared with 5 percent of never-vegetarians. The researchers suggest that vegetarians might have a greater awareness of their food intake in general, so they may be more aware of their binge-eating. Also, vegetarians might be more likely to binge-eat because they feel less full than someone who consumes more protein and fats from meat.

The study also found that, among teenagers, 20 percent of current and former vegetarians reported taking unhealthy steps to control their weight, compared with only 10 percent of never-vegetarians. Among young adults, 27 percent of former vegetarians reported taking unhealthy steps, compared with only 16 percent of current vegetarians and 15 percent of never-vegetarians. These findings support the notion that young people with weight-control issues may be more likely to try vegetarianism, as this allows them to not eat certain foods. However, once they are older and have moved away from home, they may feel less pressure to conceal their eating habits, so they may stop being vegetarians.

How reliable are the findings?
These findings are noteworthy and should lead to more research, but the study has a few important shortcomings.


The researchers relied on participants to describe what they ate each day and to be open about their eating habits. It's likely that some people didn't accurately remember these details, or weren't entirely forthcoming about their behaviour.
The study used a broad definition of 'vegetarian', allowing people to classify themselves as vegetarian if they ate fish and chicken. Conversely, the study used fairly narrow measures to judge the quality of people's diets, focusing on their intake of fruits, vegetables and fats, without finding out how much protein, iron, calcium and other nutrients people were getting.
All the participants were from one state in the US, so the researchers can't be sure that the findings would be similar elsewhere.

Where does the study come from?
The study was done by university researchers in the US. It was funded by the US Maternal and Child Health Bureau and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

What does this mean for me?
This study may be of most interest to you if you are a parent of a young person who's vegetarian. On the plus side, it shows that teenagers and young adults who are vegetarians may have a more healthy diet in some respects than their meat-eating counterparts. But the researchers caution that vegetarian-eating might also indicate a higher risk of bingeing and unhealthy weight-control behaviours. As a parent, this might be something you could watch for.

But bear in mind that this study wasn't designed to show cause and effect, and in no way suggests that being a vegetarian leads to eating disorders. Instead, it merely shows that there may be a link between these behaviours and vegetarianism, but what this link means is still not clear.

What should I do now?
If your teenager has become a vegetarian, be sure to seek guidance on proper nutrition and meal-planning. Although eating vegetarian may be more healthy in some respects, it's easy to miss out on important nutrients, such as vitamin B-12, calcium, vitamin D, protein, zinc, riboflavin and omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids.

You may also want to ask your child why he or she has become a vegetarian. If weight control is the main reason, consider whether your child shows any signs of having an unhealthy relationship with food, or an unhealthy body image. If so, you should discuss this with your doctor.

From:
Robinson-O'Brien R, Perry CL, Wall MM, et al. Adolescent and young adult vegetarianism: better dietary intake and weight outcomes but increased risk of disordered eating behaviors. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2009: 109; 648-655.

[jimmeh]

Compare this with Giles Coren from The Times. Now, I do love Giles, but he's bloody ignorant sometimes :mad:




Do a pig a favour! Ban vegetarianism now!

People who don't eat meat are not just pale, boring, vain and flaky. They are also suffering from an eating disorder


A report published this week in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association appears to show that teenagers and young adults are more likely to suffer from eating disorders if they have tried being vegetarian.
And I'm, like, “duh!” (I'm like that because that is how American teenagers talk, you understand, and I want them to understand what I am about to say). And the reason that I am, as I say, like, “duh!” is that vegetarians are more likely to suffer from eating disorders because vegetarianism is an eating disorder.

It's a better eating disorder than many others, because at least it doesn't make you fat, and in general it doesn't cause you to wither away and die. But it does make you pale, and flaky, and unbelievably tedious to be around.

Vegetarianism is a cry for help. A sadly transparent attempt to exercise control over your body, which you feel the need to do for psychological reasons of which you are probably unaware. It's why so many vegetarians have tattoos and exotic piercings (you know it's true). It's why anarchists, squatters, G20 protesters and art students are usually vegetarians. Frustrated that they cannot, and never will, control the world, or anything else of any significance, they starve themselves and carve holes in their bodies. It's as primitive a lifestyle as there is. It's why the very oldest religions eschew meat altogether, and others eschew some forms of it - because one exercises what control one can in the shadow of a mighty God with miserable little gestures of abstinence.

It's why vegetarians are mostly girls. Because vegetarianism is a way of controlling one's food intake without drawing attention to one's vanity.
“Don't mind me,” they say when they come to your house for lunch. “I'll just have the vegetables.” And you think: “It's immaterial to me what you put in your mouth, darling, because I can tell from the state of you that you're going to be in my downstairs bog with your fingers down your throat in half an hour, spraying whatever you've pecked at all over the Armitage Shanks.”

It's the same with all these bogus wheat allergies and dairy intolerances - codswallop the lot of them. Just a way of not having to say: “I'm on a diet so that I will look nicer and people will fancy me.” Vegetarians never love food. They merely tolerate it.

I absolutely concur with the notion that we in the developed world eat too much meat. We absolutely do. Current meat consumption levels are unhealthy for the people and a drain on the planet's resources. The neo-Malthusian projection that says there is not enough land to feed the nine billion people who will be living here by 2020 unless most of the meat-producing land is turned over to vegetable crops (or something) is probably not too wide of the mark.

So the thing to do is to eat less meat, not none. You don't make meat a moral issue and campaign to end it. You just lay off it a bit. That way there will be plenty to go round, the land will be able to yield its bounty much more efficiently (after all, without cow crap to nourish the soil, how are your precious carrots going to grow all big and juicy?), nobody will have to die of heart disease and we'll all be able to scoff a juicy steak from time to time.

Meat is not something to be eradicated, like cancer. Its total destruction is not a moral imperative for the human race. Nor is meat something with absolutely no visible function whose continued existence is a baffling mystery, like wasps or men's nipples or television chefs. Meat tastes good. It carries vitamins and minerals with a unique efficiency that is critical to the maintenance of a healthy life. And it gives pigs, quite literally, a reason to live.

To eat no meat at all is to take an extreme position in an area where extremism is not called for. People always say “Hitler was a vegetarian”, as if that were some sort of paradox, some sort of surprise. Well it isn't to me. He was a vegetarian because he was an extremist. He was incapable of doing things by halves. Annoyed that the banking system in Weimar Germany was largely controlled by Jews (as it certainly was), he might well have proposed a programme to make banking more attractive to gentiles, offered some economics scholarships to giant Bavarian pork-munchers, dragged some idle Christian dimbos out of the beer halls and taught them to count... but he didn't, he decided to kill every Jew in Europe.
In exactly the same way, had he been a more even-tempered man, he might well have reacted to the meat-heavy traditional German diet (which presumably didn't agree with him) by simply ladling more sauerkraut onto his plate and holding back on the wurst, by eating a bit of salad occasionally, and by not having ham for breakfast. But no. He was an extremist. He had to eat NO! MEAT! EVER! AGAIN!
The ideological road from nut cutlets to Belsen is straight, and short.

[cobweb]

^ oh.my.god

[Korn]

But bear in mind that this study wasn't designed to show cause and effect, and in no way suggests that being a vegetarian leads to eating disorders. Instead, it merely shows that there may be a link between these behaviours and vegetarianism, but what this link means is still not clear.

Lots of people with eating disorders may be attracted to any kind of diet that they assume will influence their weight, and with the text sayingthat study was not designed to show cause and effect, and in no way suggests that being a vegetarian leads to eating disorders, I really can't see why Guardian chose a the title they did ("Young vegetarians may have higher risk of eating problems"), and definitely why this thread had the title it had ("Young vegetarians have a higher risk of eating disorders"), because both these titles (especially the last one) actually does indicate a cause and effect. Since cause and effect is unknown, the article may just as well have been called "Are young people with eating problems more likely to go vegetarian?".

Please, everybody - if you post articles like this...

Don't post the full version of a copyrighted article
Please post links to the actual source (in this case: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/besttreatments/2009/apr/01/young-vegetarians-may-have-higher-risk-of-eating-problems)
If the article already is biased or has a biased or potentially misleading title, please don't tweak it so it actually becomes more misleading than it already is!

There's no need to post anti-vegetarian or anti-vegan propaganda here - even if it's in the form of links to other articles or quotes from them. We have no reason to help writers who write nonsense to spread their words. If you want to comment something which is wrong, misleading or contains false info on what others write, please do that - but the emphasis should be on providing a vegan perspective on what they write, not just copy/paste their (often copyrighted) articles. By doing so, we'd essentially just do what trolls sometimes do: post attacks on someone's viewpoint, but refuse to take part in a discussion or respond to their attacks.

[Korn]

This: "Current vegetarians had the healthiest eating habits based on the survey responses" is kind of strange along with "If your teenager has become a vegetarian, be sure to seek guidance on proper nutrition and meal-planning", isn't it? If the vegetarians had the healthiest eating habits, shouldn't the non-vegetarians have at least as good a reason to "seek guidance on proper nutrition and meal-planning"?

It's like they write 'we looked at two groups, one seemed to have a more healthy eating habits than the other, and we recommend that the group that already had the healthiest eating habits now should take a closer look on their eating habits - the others can just continue with their less healthy eating habits."



Indeed, research does suggest that a vegetarian menu can improve people's eating habits and may lower their risk of obesity. But it's not without drawbacks. For example, vegetarians can miss out on important nutrients if their diet is not well-planned.
Everybody may miss out on important nutrients. By claiming that one of two observed groups has a 'drawback', one indicates between the lines that the other group doesn't have that same drawback (may miss important nutrients).


And some people, especially if they're young, may become vegetarians to mask eating disorders, as this allows them to avoid some foods in a socially acceptable way. This may be true, but it also clearly suggests that the eating disorder came first, and that their vegetarianism came afterwards. Why, then, does the article (and title) partially indicate that it's the other way round?



The study also found that, among teenagers, 20 percent of current and former vegetarians reported taking unhealthy steps to control their weight, compared with only 10 percent of never-vegetarians. Since vegetarian diets are associated with losing weight, the reason they take "unhealthy steps to control their weight" most likely isn't that the vegetarian diet made them gain weight. This rather suggests that they already wanted to gain weight before they went vegetarian, and that they actually combined eating vegetarian (they had "the healthiest eating habits", according to the survey results) with other methods to lose weight ("unhealthy steps to control their weight"). Still, the title and partially the article sort of gives the impression that there's a "risk" involved in being vegetarian. Except that these people weren't necessarily vegetarians, since they included people who were eating fish and chicken in the vegetarian group.



...the study used fairly narrow measures to judge the quality of people's diets, focusing on their intake of fruits, vegetables and fats, without finding out how much protein, iron, calcium and other nutrients people were getting.

This gets worse and worse. How can they compare two (non-vegetarian) groups of people, with two different eating habits, without knowing anything about which of these groups that are getting the healthiest amounts of nutrients?




But the researchers caution that vegetarian-eating might also indicate a higher risk of bingeing and unhealthy weight-control behaviours.
According to Google, "risk means"...


• hazard: a source of danger; a possibility of incurring loss or misfortune; "drinking alcohol is a health hazard"
• a venture undertaken without regard to possible loss or injury; "he saw the rewards but not the risks of crime"; "there was a danger he would do the wrong thing"

"Risk" often indicates a source/effect relationship, and the first example above ("drinking alcohol is a health hazard") does focus on the risks involved in (too much) drinking of alcohol, and not on that drinking (too much) alcohol may be an effect of underlying conflicts. When they write that there's a risk attached to eating a diet consisting of vegetarian food + fish + chicken (plus, most likely, diary products and egg?), they certainly give the feeling that eating the food they eat is what's creating the increased risk.





Although eating vegetarian may be more healthy in some respects, it's easy to miss out on important nutrients, such as vitamin B-12, calcium, vitamin D, protein, zinc, riboflavin and omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids.

And, let me add: if your teenager is living on a non-vegan diet, make sure that he/she (and his parents) doesn't suffer from the many nutrient deficiencies that are so common among people who eat a standard, non-vegan diet (http://www.veganforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24).

[Ms_Derious]

Good Good.... I do love a nice bit of propaganda.

I'd say my veganism is actively helping me recover from my ED, as I don't feel 'guilt' over eating.

Oh.... and I was a tubby lil thing when I was just a veggie. The only ED I had then was the inability to put down my fork ;)

[Jiffy]

I must admit that since turning vegan I have indeed developed an eating problem, I love my grub more than ever!

I'm also in far better shape than I have been for many years ;)

[kriz]

A relative of mine worked in a psychiatric unit with women with eating disorders and many of them claimed to be vegan. But it was also commonly known that for some it was a way to mask their disorder. So if one wouldn't be aware of this it would be easy to draw the conclusion that veganism often leads to anorexia or bulimia. Sure, we can suffer from all kind of stuff just like any other group, but I don't believe for a second that we are more prone to eating disorders and that it has anything to do with vegetarianism.

In my experience, a person who has weight issues is likely to try all kinds of diets to lose weight.

I've never felt guilt over eating something non-vegan by mistake or whatever and I don't spend any time at all thinking about what I'm abstaining from. I'm sure some vegans do in the beginning, but the sometimes exhaggerated food awareness will fade away, and things will become more stable and normal.

[Prawnil]

if one wouldnt be aware of this it would be easy to draw the conclusion that veganism often leads to anorexia...
I think that this is sometimes true of the publicly visible "What did you eat..." type threads on this forum itself.

[Gorilla]

the so-called vegetarians in this study weren't even vegetarians because they were including those who ate chicken and fish in this category. :rolleyes:

[Charlotte]

I think that being aware of what you eat might make you more prone to eating disorders, just because you make decisions and its a part of your life.

I started to turn vegetarian from the age of five, been vegan since I turned 21 and have had an eating disorder most of the time since I was 10, not severe enough to require hospitalisation but I'm underweight and get tired easily. Other than being aware of what was I eating I think my veganism/previous vegetarianism and my eating disorder are unrelated. Its very easy to be vegan without being stick thin. What annoyed me was that when I attended a university eating disorders self help group was that the other anorexia/buliminia sufferers asked me if I was vegan because of my eating disorder which I find offensive; I'm vegan because I can't morally justify not being vegan in the same way I couldn't justify having slaves or killing people.