Meat eaters are hereby put on notice: Vegetarians have got you beat in the biomarkers department, a European study suggests. So don’t turn your nose up at fruits and vegetables.
A biomarker is short for biological marker. It’s simply a characteristic about your body that’s measurable. Blood pressure, for example, is a biomarker. Others involve measurements on the molecular level. Lipid biomarkers give us a clue about our cholesterol. Certain proteins found in the blood might point to heart disease or impaired kidney function.
In this study, researchers crunched health data from nearly 180,000 healthy people who agreed to give blood and urine samples so some critical biomarkers could be assessed. Get this: Only 4,100 were categorized as vegetarians who didn’t consume red meat, poultry or fish. The rest were carnivores.
Scientists measured 19 biomarkers relating to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, liver, bone and joint health, and kidney function. They found that vegetarians had significantly lower levels of biomarkers that might indicate poorer health. Meat eaters, meantime, were not so fortunate.
This remained true even after the analysis accounted for confounding factors such as age, sex, education, ethnicity, obesity, smoking and alcohol consumption.
It isn’t all good news for those inclined to a meatless diet. They did have lower readings of a couple of beneficial biomarkers. These included good HDL cholesterol, vitamin D and calcium. They also had higher levels of fat in the blood.
This is an observational study. So conclusions on cause and effect aren’t possible. But perhaps mom was on to something when she told you to finish those last peas on your plate.