One ecological study that is familiar to many vegans is the China Study, which compared the types of food consumed and average disease rates in different counties in China, mostly during the 1980s. Although the China Study didn’t look at vegan diets, it did find that the more plant foods and less animal foods consumed in a given county, the lower the rates of chronic diseases like heart disease and certain cancers. It’s not possible to draw firm conclusions about diet and health from ecological studies like the China Study because this type of research doesn’t control for other factors. But
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