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Enewsletter • Feb. 28, 2007 | ||
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Notes from Vegan Outreach
Vegans, Shows, and Rock-and-RollMusicians around the world are using their music to promote animal welfare and vegetarianism. Two Massachusetts artists -- Kyle Vincent and inblackandwhite -- shared with us their experiences distributing Vegan Outreach materials on their recent concert tours. You can read the article, compiled by Jenna Calabrese, here.
New Study Answers Questions about the Vegan Diet, Calcium, and Bone Health-Jack Norris, RD If you’ve been a vegan for long, you’ve probably heard that:
Finally, you might have come to the conclusion that the lower levels of protein in a vegan diet protect against osteoporosis. For almost ten years now, Vegan Outreach has cautioned vegans that the jury was still out on these issues and that vegans should try to meet the U.S. recommended intakes for calcium. In recent years, the evidence has been mounting against the above statements. In February of 2007, a study was released, the first study of its kind, that gives us pretty good answers to these questions. (1) The EPIC-Oxford study recruited 57,000 participants, including over 1,000 vegans and almost 10,000 lacto-ovo vegetarians (LOV), from 1993 to 2000. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire to measure what they ate. About 5 years after entering the study, they were sent a follow-up questionnaire asking if they had suffered any bone fractures. After adjusting for age alone, the vegans had a 37% higher fracture rate than meat-eaters. After adjusting for age, smoking, alcohol consumption, body mass, physical activity, marital status, and births and hormone replacement therapy for women, the vegans still had a 30% higher fracture rate. That’s not good news; in fact, it’s something I’ve feared for some time now given the vegan propaganda about animal protein, calcium, and bones which has fostered complacency among vegans about calcium and vitamin D. Yet, there is some good news in this study. When calcium intake was adjusted for, the vegans no longer had a higher rate of fractures. And among the subjects who got 525 mg of calcium a day (only 55% of the vegans compared to about 95% of the other diet groups), vegans had the same fracture rates as the other diet groups. (And if you’re wondering about how the other diet groups (meat-eaters, fish-eaters, and LOV) fared over all, none of them differed from each other in any of the analyses performed.) Does this mean lower calcium intakes are the cause of the fractures? It could be that people who eat more calcium also eat more or less protein or get more vitamin D. The authors noted that fracture rates did not correlate with protein or vitamin D intake among the people in this study. For now, we should assume that calcium is what the vegans with higher fracture rates were lacking. The study did not measure calcium
intake from supplements. I’m not
sure if this affected the results,
but for now I would assume it did
not. More information on calcium, vitamin D, and bones can be found at VeganHealth.org on this page: http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/bones Footnote 1. Appleby P, Roddam A, Allen N,
Key T. Comparative fracture risk
in vegetarians and nonvegetarians
in EPIC-Oxford. Eur J Clin Nutr.
2007 Feb 7; [Epub ahead of print]
Product of the Week Send your nominees for Product of the Week to product (at) veganoutreach (dot) org; previous products can be found here.
Notes from All OverMeatout 2007 Approches!
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Vegan Outreach is a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit organization dedicated to
reducing the suffering of farmed animals
by promoting informed, ethical eating.
Vegan Outreach
POB 30865, Tucson, AZ 85751-0865
Visit our networking pages:
Pippi:
For great taste -- 
On
or around March 20 -- the first
day of spring -- thousands of caring
people in all 50 US states and around
the world will hold informative
and educational events for 