Interesting study but the authors themselves highlight many limitations which the journalists sadly did not take note if, e.g. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentra

Interesting study but the authors themselves highlight many limitations which the journalists sadly did not take note if, e.g. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02468-0 https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... > The single questionnaire administered at recruitment was the only method of assessing diet and lifestyle information; therefore, we could not account for changes in the diet group or covariates over time. Additionally, food and nutrient intake in vegetarians in recent years could differ from when data were collected at recruitment due to changes over the last two decades in the availability of vegetarian food products, such as increases in the number of available meat substitute products [49]. Consequently, the generalisability of our findings to modern-day vegetarians is reduced. But for me more striking are some things that are not explicitly checked, e.g. they excluded from their data those that had prior hip problems and the meat eaters were on average significantly older - could there be some selection? Also studies seem to get somewhat different results depending on the exact data: > Other epidemiological studies have found that adherence to diets low in meat consumption, such as the Mediterranean diet and Alternative Healthy Eating Index, was protectively associated with hip fracture risk [33, 34], and adherence to Western diets in which meat consumption is high was positively associated with hip fracture risk [35]. Conversely, total meat intake has been inversely associated with hip fracture risk [21]. These results cannot be fairly compared with risks in vegetarians and non-vegetarians, which no other study has directly assessed. Most interesting is this table: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02468-0/figures/1 https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... What is not clear to me is how the final % is reached as those that died during the 20 year study period are taken into account up to their death. So a woman died of cancer at year 10 gives 10 years of 'no hip fractures to the pool of years while a woman that lived throughout the study If I do a simple division of cases divided by person years I get the following "annual chance of hip fracture": * Regular meat-eater: 394 / 252610 = 0.1559‰ * Occasional meat-eater: 247 / 145639 = 0.1695% * Pescetarians: 80 / 74077 = 0.1079% * Vegetarian/vegan: 101 / 84042 = 0.1202% In words: pescetarians have the lowest annual chance of hip fractures (11/10.000), followed by vegetarians (12/10.000). Meat eater have the highest chance of fractures, with occasional meat-eaters (17/10.000) having a higher chance than regular meat-eaters (16/10.000). Unless I read this data VERY wrong the chance of fractures is much lower for vegetarians and vegetarians than meat eaters.