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.
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.