Vegetarian diet for all would prevent a third of early deaths

AT LEAST one third of early deaths could be prevented if everyone adopted a vegetarian diet, Harvard scientists have calculated.

Dr Walter Willett of Harvard Medical School said that the benefits of a plant-based diet had been vastly underestimated.

Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics suggested that around 24 per cent or 141,000 deaths each year in Britain were preventable, but most of that was due to smoking, alcohol or obesity. However, figures from Harvard suggested that at least 200,000 lives could be saved each year if people cut meat from their diets.

Speaking at the Unite to Cure conference in Vatican City, Dr Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition, said: “We have just been doing some calculations looking at the question of how much could we reduce mortality shifting towards a healthy, more plant based diet, not necessarily totally vegan, and our estimates are about one third of deaths could be prevented.

“That’s not even talking about physical activity or not smoking, and that’s all deaths, not just cancer deaths. That’s probably an underestimate as well.”

British-born Prof David Jenkins, of the University of Toronto, also told the conference that the benefits of vegetarianism had been “undersold”.

He said humans would do better following a “simian” diet, similar to lowland gorillas who eat stems, leaves, vines and fruits rather than a “Paleo” diet which cuts carbohydrates but allows meat.

After studying the feeding habits of gorillas in central Africa, his team recreated the diet for humans – amounting to 63 servings of fruit and vegetables a day. They found a 35 per cent fall in cholesterol in just two weeks, the equivalent of taking statins.

“That was quite dramatic,” he said “We showed that there was no real difference between what we got with the diet and what we got with a statin.”

Dr Jenkins added: “We’re saying you’ve got a choice, you can change your diet ... or you can take a statin.”

Dr Neal Barnard, the president of the Committee for Responsible Medicine, told delegates that people need to wake up to the health benefits of vegetarianism and veganism.

“When these diets are properly constructed I think they are enormously powerful,” he said. “A low-fat vegan diet is better than any other diet I have ever seen for improving diabetes.”