Why a Vegan or Vegetarian Diet May Lower Heart Disease but Raise Stroke Risk

From the Everyday Health website

Diets that call for avoiding either meat or all animal products get a lot of buzz for being healthy and contributing to weight loss. But there may be a catch to these diets, called vegetarian and vegan diets, respectively: a higher risk for a certain type of stroke.

In a study published in September 2019 in the BMJ, researchers observed that non-meat-eaters had a 22 percent lower risk for coronary artery disease, a type of heart disease, but a 20 percent higher risk for hemorrhagic stroke. At the same time, pescatarians, who eat fish but not meat, had the same risk of stroke but a 13 percent lower risk for heart disease compared with the meat eaters. (The authors did not formally compare these risks in fish eaters versus vegetarians.) To draw their results, the researchers followed 48,000 people in Great Britain for nearly 18 years.

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