How many times a week do you read those articles that go something along the lines of "People who eat Salmon every second Thursday live years longer"? Usually their purpose is to pimp some attention-starved statistics gathering organisation or, in the case of the Salmon example, a thinly veiled campaign to move more product, backed by totally objective scienticians, of course.

But anyway, my issue is that more often than not these articles make the mistake of confusing correlation with causality. Just because two things are found together doesn't mean one is caused by the other. A recent study suggests vegetarians are more intelligent than meat eaters. Kind of the opposite of what you'd expect, right? At least in the animal kingdom you find this. Herbivores are required to spend most hours of the day grazing bulky plants low in nutrition (cows, sheep, etc) whereas carnivores whose meals are high in protein and fat have more leisure time, not to mention the higher social functions that had to develop to allow hunting/stalking.

Of course that no longer applies to us. Vego's can find plenty of nutrition within the framework of 3 squares a day. But perhaps the higher protein/iron intake would still hold some advantage for the meat eaters. Who knows? I do think there is probably a high correlation between educated people and the choice to become vegetarian. But I think this is more a product of environment and nothing to do with a vegetarian diet. It's silly to imply dropping meat from your diet will make you smarter.

More likely a vegetarian family who raises their child as a vegetarian (the study looked at kids when they were 10 and then again, 20 years later) is fairly socially conscious (OK, or complete hippies) and sure, it's a stereotype, but probably more likely to encourage their children in academic pursuits.