{"id":23904,"date":"2024-11-15T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2024-11-15T14:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/?p=23904"},"modified":"2024-11-01T11:17:25","modified_gmt":"2024-11-01T15:17:25","slug":"covid-19-and-vegan-vegetarian-diets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/2024\/11\/15\/covid-19-and-vegan-vegetarian-diets\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19 and Vegan\/Vegetarian Diets"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_23905\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/vegan-photo-from-Freepik.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23905\" class=\"size-full wp-image-23905\" src=\"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/vegan-photo-from-Freepik.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-23905\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">photo from Freepik<\/p><\/div>\n<p>By Reed Mangels, PhD, RD<\/p>\n<p>As of June 1, 2024, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/covid\/about\/index.html\">according to the CDC<\/a>, nearly 1.2 million people have died of COVID-19 in the United States. Worldwide, <a href=\"https:\/\/data.who.int\/dashboards\/covid19\/deaths?n=o\">the World Health Organization<\/a> reports that 7.1 million people have died of Covid-19. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/covid19\/pulse\/long-covid.htm\">CDC reports<\/a> that, In the United States, 5.3% of adults are currently experiencing post-COVID conditions\u00a0(long COVID). These adults had COVID, had long-term symptoms, and are still experiencing symptoms.<\/p>\n<p>In December 2022, I responded to a question about Covid-19, namely, \u201cDoes being vegan affect my risk of getting Covid-19 or severe Covid-19?\u201d At that time, no studies had been published investigating the association between a vegan diet and Covid-19 risk. Studies that looked at healthy diets or eating more plant foods found that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Higher healthful plant-based diet scores (more fruits and vegetables) were associated with lower risk of Covid-19 and severe Covid-19. (1).<\/li>\n<li>Health care workers had a lower risk of having moderate-to-severe Covid-19 if their diets were more \u201cplant-based\u201d (more vegetables, legumes and nuts; less poultry and red\/processed meat) (2).<\/li>\n<li>Higher \u201chealthy eating\u201d scores (more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts and less red\/processed meat) were associated with a lower risk of Covid-19 and of severe infection (3).<\/li>\n<li>Eating more vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and fish in the year prior to a Covid-19 diagnosis was associated with significantly less severe Covid-19 and a shorter duration of hospitalization (4).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Since then, a couple of studies have been published that include vegetarian subjects. There still have not been published studies looking exclusively at vegans. Here\u2019s what the newer studies found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In Taiwan, in a study of 509 people who had been diagnosed with Covid-19, study subjects age 65 years and older who reported that they followed a vegetarian diet, were likely to have less severe symptoms than similarly aged subjects who were not vegetarian (5).<\/li>\n<li>In Brazil, study subjects were divided into 2 groups \u2013 omnivores (424 people) and plant-based (278 people). The plant-based group included people consuming meat 3 or fewer times per week, lacto-ovo vegetarians, and vegans. The plant-based group were less likely to get Covid-19; the nonvegetarian group had a higher rate of moderate-severe Covid-19 compared to the plant-based group (6). This study\u2019s researchers reported that the results seen in the plant-based group were mainly due to the vegetarian + vegan subgroup. The group differences persisted even after adjustments were made for BMI, suggesting that other factors in the plant-based diet were responsible for the lower risk of Covid-19 and moderate-severe Covid-19.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The results of these studies suggest that in addition to other health benefits, vegetarian\/vegan\/plant-based diets could reduce risk and severity of Covid-19. This information could be useful in case of new outbreaks of Covid-19 in the future.<\/p>\n<p><em>References<\/em><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Merino J, Joshi AD, Nguyen LH, et al. Diet quality and risk and severity of COVID-19: a prospective cohort study. <em>Gut<\/em>. 2021;70:2096-2104.<\/li>\n<li>Kim H, Rebholz CM, Hegde S, et al. Plant-based diets, pescatarian diets and COVID-19 severity: a population-based case-control study in six countries. <em>BMJ Nutr Prev Health<\/em>. 2021;4:257-266.<\/li>\n<li>Yue Y, Ma W, Accorsi EK, et al. Long-term diet and risk of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity. <em>Am J Clin Nutr<\/em>. 2022;116:1672-1681.<\/li>\n<li>Zargarzadeh N, Tadbir Vajargah K, Ebrahimzadeh A, et al. Higher adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern is inversely associated with severity of COVID-19 and related symptoms: A cross-sectional study. <em>Front Med (Lausanne)<\/em>. 2022;9:911273.<\/li>\n<li>Hou YC, Su WL, Chao YC. COVID-19 illness severity in the elderly in relation to vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets: A single-center experience. <em>Front Nutr<\/em>. 2022;9:837458.<\/li>\n<li>Acosta-Navarro JC, Dias LF, de Gouveia LAG, et al. Vegetarian and plant-based diets associated with lower incidence of COVID-19. <em>BMJ Nutr Prev Health<\/em>. 2024;7:4-13.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>You can read the earlier article I wrote about diet and Covid-19 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/journal\/vj2023issue2\/2023_issue2_nutrition_hotline.php\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Reed Mangels, PhD, RD As of June 1, 2024, according to the CDC, nearly 1.2 million people have died of COVID-19 in the United States. Worldwide, the World Health Organization reports that 7.1 million people have died of Covid-19. The CDC reports that, In the United States, 5.3% of adults are currently experiencing post-COVID [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23906,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23904\/revisions\/23906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vrg.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}