Carl,
The study by Bjørnerem et al. definitely had a stronger finding in favor of breastfeeding (based on the abstract). Since EPIC-Oxford adjusted for parity, it seems like vegans with children would have to be less likely to breastfeed than meat-eaters for breastfeeding to have impacted the results. I can’t recall any research measuring breastfeeding rates in vegans vs. meat-eaters, but I don’t see a reason to believe vegans with children breastfeed less.

Here is the study from Mic‘s video. Breastfeeding reduced the risk of hip fractures by 50%. So if vegan women in the study were younger or had less children then their omnivore counterpart this might impact the results:
https://asbmr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jbmr.496

He also points out that men did not have more fractures, which again makes a case for the breastfeeding theory.

Kind regards from Vienna!

Here is the link to his video, you can delete this part from the comment, if you don‘t want to publish a link to Youtube: https://youtu.be/B3qxQFFLFt8

Carl,

The EPIC-Oxford results were adjusted for “parity (none, 1–2, ≥ 3, unknown)”. Breastfeeding wasn’t mentioned and I haven’t looked into that. A quick search (just now) for breastfeeding and fractures didn’t reveal a lot of research, but I found this “Although breastfeeding for 12 months or longer was associated with a higher risk of any fractures (aHR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.03-1.08) and vertebral fractures (aHR, 1.22; 95% CI, 1.17-1.27), it was associated with a lower risk of hip fracture (aHR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.76-0.93)” (link).

Based on this small amount of info I wouldn’t think that breastfeeding is a likely explanation for the difference in total fractures in EPIC-Oxford. I say this because of the different directions the association points to in the study above and because the majority of adjustment in EPIC-Oxford for breastfeeding likely occurred when adjusting for parity.

The higher percentage of vegan women without children could be driving up the numbers against their omnivore counterparts.

I heard this argument from Mic the Vegan in his analysis. What do you think about it?