There’s a new study out that just might take the cake for being absolutely ridiculous. It’s a study of cats, supposedly looking at the health status of pet cats based on whether they eat meat or whether they’re on a vegan diet.
Some things are simply ridiculous on their face and can be dismissed without being deconstructed. This is one of those cases. Also, the study isn’t really about cat health. They didn't run any tests. They didn't give the cats checkups. They relied entirely on the owners reporting their impression of their pets' health status.
First of all, a cat cannot be on a vegan diet. Cats are not vegans; they are obligate carnivores. And for a cat to survive without actual meat in its diet, it has to consume the most contrived, highly processed, and engineered lab diet known to man. It’s a ridiculous mix of specific amino acids, isolated and extracted fatty acids, minerals, and essential vitamins. You could just feed your cat some meat, or you could assemble a team of scientists and engineers to create a lab just to produce a dried paste of amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals that might come close to the utility of just giving the meat to the cat.
Plus, cats are notoriously stoic. It’s not that they can’t tell you when they’re in pain; they often can’t even tell themselves. Cats are designed to grin and bear the worst of ailments just to keep up appearances and not appear weak to other animals. It's really hard to determine a cat's health status without extensive testing.
Furthermore, the omnivorous cats in the study are the pets of your average cat owner who might just buy a bag of food and dump it in the bowl every day. Whereas if you are going so far as to put your cat on a vegan diet, you are an extremist. You are a diehard zealot whose sense of self-worth, identity, and values requires that you prove to the world that your way is the healthiest. That being vegan is so healthy that you can put a carnivore on a vegan diet and it will thrive. So, these vegan cat owners have every reason to potentially deceive themselves about how their cats are doing.
One last thing. I know I said I wasn’t going to analyze such a ridiculous study, but there’s one thing I have to mention. The vegan cats were much younger than the omnivorous cats. Cats, like all animals, tend to get unhealthier the older they are. There is no way around this, and there isn’t any way to fully control for it when designing a study. Older animals are just unhealthier animals.
Anyway, have you seen any ridiculous studies out there lately? Let me know the silliest you've come across in the comment section of New and Noteworthy. 
