science

Vegetarian and low-carb diets aren’t ideal for our brains.

Agreed. Go egan.

This ~~vegetarian~~ omnivore-brained study design precludes gleaning anything meaningful from comparisons with the "vegetarian" category

which they're defining as plant eaters "who have a lower preference for protein". They're building that into their analysis from first principles!

Is meat-brain so deeply engrained in human culture that these fucks got published in nature when "protein and plants are essentially mutually exclusive" was baked into their analysis?

It's also worth pointing out that the study's analysis does a shit load of signal compression to separate subjects into "dietary subtypes" diet survey->weird stratified-PCA approach I've never seen in any BIO paper -> hierarchical clustering, then they study associations between clusters and health outcomes

A better study would have had dietary science experts informing the data processing and categorizing subjects manually based on material differences in diet. Most "vegetarians" I know sometimes consume fish, often consume dairy and eggs, and have radically different intake compared to most of my egan friends.

It's also kinda sus that everybody on the paper works in computational neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, data science, or computer science. Not a single nutritional science expert in the author list. The closest they got to including the one expert they needed has an MD, but is a neurologist.