A new study conducted over 166,000 UK adults reveals vegetarians have a healthier biomarker profile than meat-eaters. This applies to adults of any age and weight, and largely remains unaffected by their smoking and drinking habits. Presented at week's European Congress on Obesity (ECO), the study was conducted by researchers from the University of Glasgow to understand whether dietary choice can make a difference to the levels of disease markers in blood and urine.
Biomarkers can have bad and good health effects, promoting or preventing cancer, cardiovascular and age-related diseases, and other chronic conditions, and have been widely used to assess the effect of diets on health. A cross-sectional study analysing data from healthy participants aged 37-73 years was conducted in the UK Biobank study. Participants were divided as either vegetarian (do not eat red meat, poultry or fish; 4,111 participants) or meat-eaters (166,516 participants), according to their self-reported diet.
The researchers examined the association with 19 blood and urine biomarkers related to diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, liver, bone and joint health, and kidney function. Even after taking into account potentially influential factors including age, sex, education, ethnicity, obesity, smoking, and alcohol intake, the analysis found that vegetarians had significantly lower levels of 13 biomarkers as compared to meat-eaters.
These biomarkers include total cholesterol, apolipoprotein A, apolipoprotein B, gamma-glutamyl transferase and alanine aminotransferase, liver function markers indicating inflammation or damage to cells, insulin-like growth factor, urate, total protein, and creatinine. However, they also had lower levels of beneficial biomarkers including high-density lipoprotein, vitamin D, and calcium and higher levels of fats in the blood and cystatin-C.
Dr Carlos Celis-Morales from the University of Glasgow said, “Our findings offer real food for thought. As well as not eating red and processed meat which have been linked to heart diseases and some cancers, people who follow a vegetarian diet tend to consume more vegetables, fruits, and nuts which contain more nutrients, fibre, and other potentially beneficial compounds. These nutritional differences may help explain why vegetarians appear to have lower levels of disease biomarkers that can lead to cell damage and chronic disease.”
