This post bought to you by the tofu gang
First,
and I really want to like this paper, but I find it lacking (at least in commentary and discussion if not for their somewhat dubious assumptions):The word "mask" appears exactly 0 times in the manuscript.
For a study on self-reported behaviors and their link to infection risk, I would think the bare minimum is asking participants at least a few basic questions about their masking behavior. Even if there isn't a standardized survey they could pull from another work's methods section, it should be pretty easy to have respondents report how often they mask when in an enclosed space with people who don't live in their household. Without a reason to discount potential associations between diet and mask-wearing, this seems like a major oversight.
There's no effort to rule out socioeconomic variability as a confounding factor.
Definitely some odd things about it. It also seems to not exactly match other studies that found plant-based diets reduce severity rather than occurrence. Might be asymptomatic/low severity cases that aren't being reported
Edit: actually it does seem to line up with this meta analysis (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.28298) but I can't find it in sci hub to compare details
Intuitively it makes sense that vegans/vegetarians would have a lower death rate, but it doesn't for them to have a lower incidence or Long-COVID incidence rate
This reminds me of the obesity factor, where obesity only plays a role if you're vulnerable to the virus in the first place (by increasing chance of death). But there are still millions of obese people walking around who are pretty unaffected by COVID
A basic food frequency questionnaire served as a tool for validation of the main self-reported dietetic pattern. The omnivorous were those who consumed any food of animal origin. The plant-based food pattern included flexitarian/semi-vegetarian (individuals who consumed meat at a frequency ≤3 times a week)
lmao why can't they actually define terms properly
Indeed.
lmao why can't they actually define terms properly
fucking seriously
I've seen so much shoddy crap in journals that I don't trust anything unless I'm looking at the raw data
I remember an anthropology paper about the rise of pastoralism, and they cited the vitamin D in milk as a factor lol
I remember an anthropology paper about the rise of pastoralism, and they cited the vitamin D in milk as a factor lol
how do milk drinkers not know basic shit about milk?! they even say "fortified with vitamin d" in the advertisements (at least in 
It was in an actual paper too, like the ones that get posted on NCBI
those are some pretty big flaws for sure, but still 39%, jesus
Yeah and I don't think the work is totally meritless. I definitely have terminal-paper-reviewer-brain.
Damn, combine this post with this article and it explains how I have managed to not get covid yet
america really was the confluence of everything that could possibly make covid worse, huh?
seems like an overreach - COVID is a vascular disease, yeah? so it stands to reason that Americans, with our arteries blocked by chunks of hamburger meat, would be less vulnerable, due to the increased difficulty of the virus penetrating our vascular systems
Another factor that bugs me about vegetarian-related studies like this is that they're almost always correlative and thus self-selective, but never causative.
You can just as easily study the US population of Non-White people and conclude that "Being Asian is predictive of greater income, Black of lower income". Because all the self-sorting of various other non-racial related strata already happened (the fact that whites only let in the super STEM profession Asian immigrant whitecollar classes, while Black Americans went through slavery AND a century+ of land theft before those Asians even arrived).
Obviously, concluding that "being Black is inherently inferior" from this would be factually wrong.Tbf that’s almost always going to be the case with nutritional epidemiology because it’s too hard to run an RCT for long enough to measure long term outcomes. If they can be paired with rcts looking at biomarkers, causative explanations and well controlled for interfering factors they can offer some good evidence.
