False Cause

Casts farming as the thing preventing overpopulation, when farming is what produces the population. The causal arrow points the other way.

Casts animal agriculture as the thing sustaining ecosystems, reversing the direction of the main documented effect.

Attributes soya-driven deforestation to tofu consumption, when the demand actually driving expansion of the crop is demand for animal feed.

Attributes the symptoms to the absence of animal products rather than to the identifiable features of how the diet was assembled: most often insufficient calories or missing B12.

Observes that the two sometimes occur together and infers that one produces the other. The better-supported reading runs the other way (an existing disorder adopts an acceptable framing.

It treats a link found in a single snapshot as evidence that fibre causes diverticulosis. In that study, diet and diagnosis were measured at the same time, so the likelier explanation that people with gut problems had already raised their fibre intake cannot be ruled out.

The claim treats a correlation between national meat supply and national life expectancy as evidence that meat causes longer life. It does this when wealth, healthcare and escape from undernutrition rise alongside meat supply, and adjustment for a few national indicators cannot rule them out.

The survey only found that vegetarianism and certain illnesses showed up together at one point in time. Offering that as evidence the diet worsens health treats co-occurrence as cause. It ignores the obvious alternative that people who were already ill changed their diet.

Infers a hormonal effect in men from a shared name ('phytoestrogen') rather than from measured outcomes. The compounds were named for the receptor they bind, not for an effect they were observed to produce.

Clients get better after starting the diet, and the speaker credits the meat. The same clients also cut processed food, lost weight and got regular support, and any of those changes could explain the improvement.

Attributes the effect to the diet when the measured cause is a specific nutrient deficiency that occurs across all diets. The association holds for deficient omnivores too, which is the test the explanation fails.

Attributes the additional effort to plant-based food rather than to unfamiliarity, which attends any change in how someone cooks and resolves with practice.