In the same vein, vegans are forty pounds lighter on average than those who eat conventional diets,1803 but that doesn’t mean that cutting out meat, dairy, and eggs will necessarily make you lose forty pounds. Those who eat healthier also tend to live healthier, so it’s not necessarily the diet per se. Maybe vegans eat out less and work out more. To see if meat has an independent effect on obesity, we need to control for both dietary and nondietary factors.
