A new study has been featured quite a lot in the news lately. Purporting to show that eating meat leads to longer lives, the study – in fact – shows no such thing.

While the study does indeed show that there is a correlation between the longevity of people in 175 countries with the average amount of meat eaten by people in those countries, that correlation does not indicate what the authors claim it does. What the study actually shows is that people with enough income to get their basic nutritional needs met live longer than people who are so poor that they cannot.

A quick check of this site makes the authors’ ruse abundantly clear. The highest meat consumption per capita occurs in very rich countries with excellent health care systems. The lowest, per capita, occurs mostly in the world’s poorest nations (and in quite poor, culturally meat-averse countries). The correlation the authors of this ‘newsworthy’ paper found was a foregone conclusion.

Maddeningly, it is pretty clear that the authors know that – and that their claim is a propagandistic ruse. Indeed, while the authors’ state in their abstract, “Worldwide, bivariate correlation analyses revealed that meat intake is positively correlated with life expectancies,” they go on to say this in the text of their article:

… proteins are easy to obtain by incorporating nuts and beans into diet [sic]. Vitamin B12 can be absorbed adequately from cheese, eggs, milk, and artificially fortified pills, and iron can be found in legumes, grains, nuts, and a range of vegetables. Relying on meat nutrient replacements and available food products, well-planned vegetarian diets, including vegan diets, are nutritionally adequate and are appropriate for various individuals during all stages of life, but it is only because their nutritional composition adequately imitates and replaces what is commonly provided by meat. These technological developments provide an opportunity for individuals to select their dietary behaviours based on religious and ethical concerns.

Add in the plethora of studies showing significant health benefits of leaving animal products off of our plates (reviewed, e.g., here and here and here), and you get the picture. I could go deeper and include mischaracterizations of others’ work included in the text of the paper, but there is no need. Obviously, it is clearly best – wherever one can – to eat a nutritionally complete diet without animal products. 

In summary, this is one very low quality study – its data extraordinarily poorly interpreted, perhaps willfully so. The only reason to pay attention to it is to debunk it. And wow is it easy to debunk.