Low body mass index in non-meat eaters: the possible roles of animal fat, dietary fibre and alcohol

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To examine the associations of diet and other lifestyle factors with body mass index (BMI) using data from the Oxford Vegetarian Study. SUBJECTS: 1914 male and 3378 female non-smokers aged 20±89 y at recruitment to the study. MEASUREMENTS: All subjects completed a dietalifestyle questionnaire at recruitment giving details of their usual diet and other characteristics including height and weight, smoking and drinking habits, amount of exercise, occupation and reproductive history. Answers to the food frequency questionnaire were used to classify subjects as either meat eaters or non-meat eaters, and to estimate intakes of animal fat and dietary ®bre. Subjects were further classi®ed according to their alcohol consumption, exercise level, social class, past smoking habits and parity. RESULTS: Mean BMI was lower in non-meat eaters than in meat eaters in all age groups for both men and women. Overall age-adjusted mean BMIs in kgam 2 were 23.18 and 22.05 for male meat eaters and non-meat eaters respectively (P`0.0001) and 22.32 and 21.32 for female meat eaters and non-meat eaters respectively (P`0.0001). In addition to meat consumption, dietary ®bre intake, animal fat intake, social class and past smoking were all independently associated with BMI in both men and women; alcohol consumption was independently associated with BMI in men, and parity was independently associated with BMI in women. After adjusting for these factors, the differences in mean BMI between meat eaters and non-meat eaters were reduced by 36% in men and 31% in women. CONCLUSIONS: Non-meat eaters are thinner than meat eaters. This may be partly due to a higher intake of dietary ®bre, a lower intake of animal fat, and only in men a lower intake of alcohol.

Dietary fiber intake, dietary glycemic index and load, and body mass index: a cross-sectional study of 3931 Japanese women aged 18–20 years

“…Fiber, glycemic index and load, and obesity K Murakami et al in previous cross-sectional studies (Appleby et al, 1998;Sasaki et al, 2003;Spencer et al, 2003;Howarth et al, 2005;Liese et al, 2005), although one study did not show an inverse association (Stookey, 2001). Higher total dietary fiber intake has also been associated with lower body weight gain (Ludwig et al, 1999) and lower increase in body weight and BMI (Liu et al, 2003) in several prospective studies.…”

“…In contrast, intake of dietary fiber (unavailable carbohydrate) has been shown to be independently negatively associated with a measure of obesity in several (Appleby et al, 1998;Ludwig et al, 1999;Liu et al, 2003;Sasaki et al, 2003;Spencer et al, 2003;Howarth et al, 2005;Liese et al, 2005), but not all (Stookey, 2001), observational studies. Although high dietary fiber intake is often correlated with low dietary GI and/or GL (Howarth et al, 2001;Bouche et al, 2002;Scholl et al, 2004;Schulze et al, 2004;Sloth et al, 2004;Schulz et al, 2005), few observational studies have examined these dietary factors simultaneously in relation to a measure of obesity, especially in non-Western populations (Toeller et al, 2001;Amano et al, 2004;Sahyoun et al, 2005).…”

“…Dietary fat intake has long been assumed to be a major nutritional contributing factor to obesity, but the results of observational studies have been mixed (Appleby et al , 1998;Ludwig et al, 1999;Stookey, 2001;Sasaki et al, 2003;Spencer et al, 2003;Howarth et al, 2005). Although this inconsistency may be due to selective underestimation of dietary fat intake by obese people (Goris et al, 2000), the potential role of dietary carbohydrate in the development of obesity has thus become an important question, because the intake of another macronutrient, protein, is fairly constant in normal diets.…”

Three major dietary patterns are all independently related to the risk of obesity among 3760 Japanese women aged 18–20 years

“…The role of dietary fat [1][2][3][4][5] and carbohydrate intake 5,6 in the etiology of obesity has been widely investigated, but results have been controversial. One reason for the inconsistent findings may owe to the traditional single nutrient-based approach in nutritional epidemiology, which is commonly used in largely nutritional epidemiological research.…”

Relationship between meat intake and the development of acute coronary syndromes: the CARDIO2000 case–control study

“…Meat and especially red and processed meat consumption have been also associated with increased risk for type II diabetes (van Dam et al, 2002;Song et al, 2004), obesity (Appleby et al, 1998), hypertension (Sacks et al, 2001) and metabolic syndrome (Baxter et al, 2006). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to evaluate the association between meat intake and the prevalence of a first, non-fatal event of an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) (MI or unstable angina (UA)), in a Greek sample.…”