Men who are vegetarians live longer: they are less likely to suffer from one of the life-threatening diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure. Strangely, female vegetarians don’t seem to get the same health benefits.
Male vegetarians are 12 per cent less likely to develop one of the chronic killer diseases compared to a meat eater, and the benefits were even clearer in two of the major killer conditions of cardiovascular and heart diseases.
But the same benefits weren’t there when researchers looked at the profiles of female vegetarians.
Researchers from the Loma Linda University in California made their discoveries when they analysed the health profiles of 73,308 Seventh Day Adventists.
Pesco-vegetarians-people who eat seafood but no other meat-also fared better than their meat-eating counterparts.
(Source: Journal of the American Medical Association, 2013; doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.6473).
