I wrote this blog post mostly in response to comments I got on this post, where at #2, I say that the association in time between increased suicide rates among young adults and increased numbers of vegans and vegetarians in that age group should be of concern.

A few people pointed out this was post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc reasoning, and to be fair, up to a point it is. It is however not the only line of evidence pointing at the potential danger of a diet low in animal products on mental health.

So in this post I tried to show another line of evidence pointing to the potential mental health issues with a vegan diet.

When however I found out about the strength of the associations involved I started to get worried people reading my post might draw false certainty from the data. For that reason I wrote the second part of the blog post in order to put the strength of the association into perspective.

I think the crime scene metaphor covers thins quite decently. We know a crime took place. low-meat was the first to flee the crime scene. Vegetarian India was the 8 year old found holding a bloody knife, and low-milk, low-meats big brother, was also on the crime scene turned out to be a more likely suspect than low-meat. Maybe one of them did it. Maybe they did it together, or maybe there are other people still hiding on the crime scene and all three just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One thing is sure though. Until someone explains away the evidence with a solid mechanistically sane causal model that fits the data, you don't want your 13-year-old kid anywhere close to anyone of the three identified suspects.