Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
1–10 of 231 posts
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#2Perhaps because vegetarians always need to explain themselves to friends and found it frustrating?
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#3Anecdotally true IME, however morally inconvenient the source of one's meat may be.
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#4This is nothing but conjecture, but my suspicion is that neurotically conscientious people are more likely to become vegan, and also more likely to be depressed and anxious.
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#5It looks like this is a meta-analysis, and the line "Twenty studies met the selection criteria representing 171,802 participants with 157,778 meat consumers and 13,259 meat abstainers." suggests that this is a post hoc analysis so we can't rule out the most obvious confounding variable: are people who care more about externalities (e.g., as they pertain to meat eating, more likely to be depressed or anxious?
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#6Seems like this has a lot more to do with the type of people who abstain from meat vs those who do--rather than the effects of eating meat.
People who abstain from eating meat due to animal compassion (empathy) might be more susceptible to depression due to their empathetic disposition.
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#7I am curious whether it implies causation or just correlation. I can easily explain it away with correlation. Most likely vegans will be people who are quite attuned to somebody else's (including animal) suffering. And the same empathy my guess would cause a higher level of anxiety. (All of this obviously, my guesses and I don't have any data to prove it)
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#8I eat a lot of meat and still suffer from depression and anxiety.
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#9I'd say the first big thing to highlight is that correlation is not causation - you wouldn't want someone to take this study as proof that eating meat makes you less depressed. I would imagine that vegans (in particular vegans who chose their diet on ethical grounds) are overall more concerned about the state of the world around them - or are at least subjected to more of an echo-chamber effect from their peers - which would contribute to anxiety and depression?
Re: Meat and mental health: Meat eaters suffer less depression, anxiety
#10Makes me concerned about the pressure to abstain from eating meat that I've been seeing recently. I wonder if, as a species, the trend away from meat eating will be to our collective detriment.