In the news article “Vegans are the Healthiest and May Outlive Us All”, the question that was asked was “For people who want to be healthier, does vegan diets compared to other diets, result in a significantly higher amount of biomarkers that can help you live longer?” The article addressed the prevention of disease through changing eating styles. The research showed that there is a relation between plant based diets and the reduction in health problems like cancer, high blood pressure and heart disease. If people eat more plant based food they should have an increased amount of biomarkers that contribute to lower probability of disease.
The truth news claims in the article involves correlation, because it was said that vegans have more biomarkers that may decrease inflammation and inflammation are linked to diseases like cancer. However, this does not mean that without having a vegan diet you do not consume biomarkers. It just means that people with a vegan lifestyle are more likely to have these biomarkers because they eat more plant based diets that contain these biomarkers. A meat eater could also have the same benefits by adding more fruits and vegetables to the diet. It is not causation because one does not cause another; it is correlation because if you are vegan you are more likely to have an increased amount of biomarkers. The studies in the scholarly article “ Plasma, Urine, and Adipose Tissue Biomarkers of Dietary Intake Differ Between Vegetarian and Non-Vegetarian Diet Groups in the Adventist Health Study” were experimental because they took a variable to test a hypothesis, measured the results and used them to verify the hypothesis. In this case, the variable was the 5 different eating styles and the hypothesis was that because there was a significant difference in eating styles between vegetarian and non-vegetarians, there would also be a significant difference in the biomarkers.
The news article did a good job of simplifying and summarizing some of the findings from he scholarly article. However, the news article did not give a clear report of the results between vegans and meat eaters which would have helped understand the significant differences that they were addressing. The news article only refers to the effect of diet on biomarkers. It does not mention other factors that affect the biomarkers such as absorption, metabolism and gut bacteria like how it was said in the scholarly article.
In order to find my three sources background information sources I used Google Scholar and the Gerstein website. I found two of the sources by using Google scholar. I went to the search bar and typed “benefits of vegan diets” and found many articles associated with this topic but I chose the ones that were most relevant to the news article and scholarly article. I also made sure that they had all the elements of a research article like having the abstract, methods, background, discussion and citations. For the third article, when I was using the Gerstein website, I applied the same skills as when I used Google Scholar.
