08/16/2025
So this paper is making the headlines on social media apparently…
https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(25)00328-4/fulltext
As with all studies, the data are interesting, but is it a smoking gun as a vindication of plant powered claims of anti-carcinoma? Not that dramatic, it seems.
To start, all the authors are tied to Loma Linda University, a hotbed of Seventh-Day Adventism, who is as close to religiously-sanctioned veganism as you can get, so there is that bias right off the bat.
Then we see all the study participants are Adventists as well, so at least culturally homogenized, and all likely eating the same way (because God-induced peer pressure, right?)
And then we get to exclusion criteria, where 17% of the initial cohort are weeded out because they’ve had cancer before and/or are too skinny/fat. So they’re already skewing the dataset before the analysis can begin!
And with no non-denominational control group, it’s hard to say what association there is, but among this culturally insular set (exclusion criteria notwithstanding), the data are interesting to parse, especially when even among these reduced-meat eaters, there’s no consistency among the groups of cancer associations (e.g. a vegan will have less association with myeloma than their animal-eating brethren, but stronger associations than them with say, colorectal cancer).
And as always, it’s important to understand the differences between relative risk (association, really) and absolute risk. A difference between 0.81 and 0.84 is not that great (taking a couple of HRs from the association table), but if you say there’s a 104% difference, now THAT gets headlines! And almost all epidemiological studies massage numbers like this, not just plant-based ones.
