Mental Floss: Being Vegetarian Is Not Bad For Your Mental Health

Late last year, Women's Health Magazine published a sensational article headlined The Scary Mental Health Risks of Going Meatless. As you can probably imagine, this didn't go down too well with the vegetarian community.

So, despite the fact that our vegetarian diets have probably made us too crazy to have a valid argument, here is our take on the claims made by Women's Health...

First of all, while the melodramatic headline suggests that mental health disorders are a symptom of a vegetarian lifestyle, it only takes a quick read of the two studies it is based on to see that this absurd conclusion is not actually in the scope of either.

The article cites one Australian study and one German study in its ludicrous assertions. The Australian study seemed to show a casual link in Western countries between people keeping predominantly vegetarian diets and reporting mental health issues. But the researchers emphasize throughout that this is a casual link. And amongst the participants of the German study, adopting a vegetarian diet tended to follow any mental health diagnosis.

Because the truth is that no research has ever found that a vegetarian diet causes mental health issues. Also, it's important to note that the research suffers to define 'vegetarian' which varies from omitting red meat to eating completely plant-based which is a blurry definition at best. And don't even get me started on the anecdotal 'evidence' scattered throughout the Women's Health article: "Sure enough, six weeks after adding animal protein back onto her plate, her energy rebounded and her panic attacks dropped by 75 percent." 75 percent of what? How was this measured? Excuse my eyes rolling to back of my head.

An interesting thing about the idea that vegetarians aren't quite as mentally healthy as omnivores is that vegetarians tend to do better in all other measures of health. As a population they are generally younger, have higher IQs, are less likely to smoke or drink alcohol, more likely to exercise, they tend to value a system of ethics and care about the quality of their food. However, the constroverial article opens with a cringe-worthy: "More and more women are vegging out... of their minds", and it is true that vegetarians are more likely to be female, and as a social group women are more likely to be associated with anxiety, depression, and eating disorders - by a long shot.

Other research has suggested that people who identify as vegetarian or vegan may actually be more empathetic than people who eat meat. A 2010 study performed MRI scans on the brains of participants as they were shown images of suffering of both humans and animals. The researchers found higher levels of brain activity in regions associated with empathy amongst the people who identified as vegetarian or vegan than in their omnivore counterparts. The notion that veggies are more empathetic than omnivores has indeed been supported by other studies in the past.

Of course, we're not trying to suggest that a vegetarian diet causes an increase in empathy no more than anyone could claim that a vegetarian diet causes anxiety. But what it does suggest is that people with higher levels of empathy are more likely to become vegetarian. Tie that in with the research that shows the more empathic you are, the more anxious you are and the studies cited by Woman's Health start to become more explainable. Just massively, massively misinterpretted.

Because nobody's going to start writing articles entitled 'Meat-Eaters Completely Lack Empathy"... are they?