So U think Vegan is healthy?

[Aractus]

poorer health ≠ don't live as long

LOL, um yes I'm afraid that's exactly what it is. Here's a short presentation by Dan Buettner:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-jk9ni4XWk

The healthy work effect (or healthy user bias) would only work as a counterargument if the study found no difference. Since it did find a difference, finding that the vegans lived longer, the healthy user bias would suggest that the difference was underestimated.

SDA's live on average longer than the base populations of western countries, but that's not unique to SDA and is in fact the case for all Christians, and other faiths as well. The study did not separate people with lower BMI's from those with higher BMI's. The important question isn't whether a healthy weight vegan lives longer than an obese omni.

Say the vegetarian population is 10% of the general population - that's 10% of people who are concerned with their health and would prioritize it more than many of the remaining 90% - what you need to do with the remaining 90% is find the other 10% that are equally concerned with their health and then do a comparison. Without doing that you're not differentiating between those who eat healthy meat-inclusive diets, and those who eat unhealthy meat-inclusive diets, and therefore your results are truly and completely meaningless for the purpose you want to use it for.

We can go to any gym and find fit and healthy people on a complete range of different diets.

The other factors don't have to be controlled for unless I want to suggest that veganism causes [lower] mortality.

If you want to suggest that meat consumption or diary consumption or fish consumption increases mortality compared to no consumption then they do need to be factored and controlled. 63% of Australian adults are overweight - the numbers are similar in the USA and UK. You do not want to look at that 63%, nor do you want to look at the 1.5% that are underweight - you need to concern yourself with the healthy-weight population which might be 35% or so of the overall population and then you can draw your results as to whether veganism or other diets reduce mortality or not. Doing it any other way is junk science.

The only real problem is that participants didn't update their dietary status throughout the study. The vegan and vegetarians could have gone back to meat during the study. But I doubt that very many of them did.

There is no one diet that is right for everyone.

Those that claim otherwise are not just wrong, but morally misguided and have a mental disorder.

Also your assertion that you "doubt many of them" went back to eating meat is based on what? Do you have any evidence or is that another assumption? True that as the reason for their abstinence is religious it may not be as high as the based population, however the generally accepted figure is the one from Psychology Today that says 75% of vegetarians in the USA go back to a vegan diet with the average length of time on a vegetarian diet being 9 years. There's no data on vegans going to and from vegetarian diets - however it is possibly quite high as I've seen a number of Youtube videos of vegans who have gone between vegan and vegetarian a number of times.