If you are a parent considering raising your child plant-based, consider the case of a 12-year-old girl raised on a strict vegan diet. The girl ended up in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, Scotland suffering from a severe form of rickets.
The girl had already experienced multiple fractures and been diagnosed with a degenerated spine comparable to that of an unhealthy 80-year-old woman.
Fast Food Diet Better for a Child than Veganism
Say what you will about a child who eats junk food, if the diet overall includes animal foods like eggs, meat and dairy…even if from fast food joints…this type of bone degeneration simply does not happen.
For all the downsides of The Standard American Diet, it is shockingly still a better choice than even a whole food vegan diet (aka “plant-based”) that is devoid of numerous critical nutrients a growing child’s body demands.
Pediatrician Discredits Veganism for Children
Media reports indicate that the hospital doctors were under pressure to report the girl’s parents to police and social workers.
Dr. Faisal Ahmed, a pediatrician treating the girl, warned that the dangers of forcing children to follow a strict vegan diet need to be publicized. (1)
If raised strictly vegan, the child would almost certainly have severe deficiencies of Vitamins A and D, both of which are essential bone nutrients that can only be obtained from animal foods.
For example, using aquafaba instead of eggs and plant-based meat substitutes can prove very dangerous.
In all likelihood, the child would also be lacking needed calcium, zinc (the intelligence mineral), B-12 as well as other B vitamins, Vitamin K2, the EPA and DHA fatty acids, and the sulfur containing amino acids methionine and cysteine.
Although the human body is theoretically capable of converting beta carotene from vegetables like carrots into true Vitamin A, children are not able to do so efficiently if at all.
Sunlight could have provided Vitamin D but only if the family spent a lot of time outdoors year-round in a tropical area. Northern climes like Scotland simply do not offer the benefit of Vitamin D-producing sunlight for much of the year.
Other Cases of Child Vegans Suffering Severe Nutritional Deficiencies
Sadly, this is not the first time vegans have been accused of child abuse though it may be the first case involving crippling bone damage. More typically, vegan babies end up in the hospital from malnutrition caused by the use of soy milk instead of infant formula.
Given soy milk alone, babies end up with severe vitamin, mineral, fatty acid, and amino acid deficiencies, which is why soy formula manufacturers are required by law to add methionine and other nutrients that are critical for a baby’s growth.
In 1990, the FDA investigated after a two month old girl in California was hospitalized with severe malnutrition. Her parents had fed her soy milk instead of soy formula. Because of this and a similar incident in Arkansas involving the SoyMoo brand of soy milk, the FDA issued a warning on June 13, 1990. Since then, most brands of soy milk include warning labels in tiny print on their packages.
Clearly, voluntary warning labels have not been enough, and there have been deaths as well as hospitalizations of vegan babies fed soy milk. Vegan parents in Atlanta were found guilty of the death of their six-month-old baby. To supplement the mother’s inadequate supply of breast milk the parents had fed their son soy milk and apple juice. The baby was only 3 1/2 pounds when he died of starvation. (3)
The sad truth is that numerous vegans have been charged and found guilty of unintentionally starving their children from all across the globe, including parents in Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Australia, and the United States among others. (4-10)
Vegan Breastfeeding Dangerous Too
In France, a vegan couple was sentenced to 5 years in prison for the death of their 11-month-old daughter. The baby, who was only 12.5 pounds at the time of her death, had been exclusively breastfed by a vegan mother.
An autopsy showed her to be not only severely underweight and malnourished but severely deficient in Vitamins A and B12. (2, 11-12)
The mother had cared enough to breastfeed, but had an inadequate supply of poor quality milk because of the severe nutritional limitations of her plant-based diet.
While veganism for very young children can be catastrophic, the tragic case of the 12-year-old Scottish girl illustrates that plant based diets for older children are also dangerous. Although finally getting medical treatment, the child’s long-term prognosis for recovery and a normal life remains grim.
Sadly, the word about the dangers of veganism for children doesn’t seem to be getting through to the general public. The continual barrage of highly flawed propaganda-ridden, documentaries such as What The Health guarantees that more well-intentioned but seriously misinformed vegan child malnourishment cases are likely to follow.
References
(1) Parents of 12-Year-Old Vegan Girl Who Has Degenerative Condition May Face Charges
(2) French Vegans Charged with Neglect After Baby’s Death from Nutritional Deficiencies
(3) Vegan Couple Serving Life Sentences for Starving Baby to Death
(4) Vegan Couple Who Fed Child Only Raw Fruit and Vegetables Charged with Murder
(5) Sydney vegan couple starved 20-month-old girl leaving her toothless and with rickets
(6) Baby Death: Parents Convicted of Killing Son with a Diet of Vegetable Milk
(7) Swedish Parents Jailed for Almost Starving Vegan Toddler to Death
(8) Strict vegan parents starved their baby of nutrients so badly that the one-year-old developed cerebral palsy and was in intensive care for a month with rashes and internal bleeding
(9) Italian baby raised on a vegan diet hospitalized for severe malnutrition, removed from parents
(10) Vegan couple will serve life sentences for starving baby to death, Georgia court rules
(11) French Couple Sentenced to 5 Years in Jail for Vegan Breastfeeding Death of 11 Month Old Baby
(12) Vegan Parents Face Jail
Cows thrive on grass because their digestive systems were especially created to thrive on grass. Ours were not.
Milk from an animal does more harm than good when it’s pasteurized and homogenized. Do YOUR research. Eating meat doesn’t pose any dangers to your health (unless you eat CAFO meat), the earth (except CAFO farms), or the animal (except in CAFO farms). Pasture-raised animals live WONDERFUL lives, and people who eat meat from pasture-raised animals enjoy amazing health.
To start a sentence with, “I know this is your blog, but…” is dangerous territory, and you should probably take a breath and reevaluate. Research, time and time again, has proven the benefits of meat and raw milk from healthy, happy animals. Sarah’s only passing the info from that research along. Everyone is welcome to investigate for him/herself to verify this research, but be careful about blasting someone on their own blog if you haven’t. If nothing else, it makes you look petty and ridiculous.
Thanks to Dr. Daniel for digging this story up. It will be heartbreaking in years to come with all these vegan girls who won’t be able to have children. Absolutely heartbreaking.
I’ll let ya know. 😉 for now, though, no unprotected sex for this vegan.
Yeah, cos one case of a badly planned diet = all vegan babies die. Way to oversensationalise.
This is like finding a case where a person consuming a paleo diet has been charged and found guilty of rape and writing an article “Strict Paleo Diet Favoured By Rapists” or “Paleo Diet Fuels Rape”.
Paleo at a theoretical level plays no part in the rapist’s bad decision making, in the same way that veganism is not to blame for this couple not correctly planning their childs diet. This article is fearmongering trash.
In response to your first paragraph: It’s not that all their babies will die, Mark. Most likely they will all be infertile, and unable to either conceive, or carry a baby to term if they do manage to conceive. Do some research on traditional fertility foods. Hint: they’re not plants. They’re grassfed liver, grassfed raw milk and cheeses, pastured eggs, grassfed bone broth, wild caught fish and roe, etc.
I have no response to the rest of your comment, as it is completely incomprehensible and untelligible.
i agree jen, but i don’t think you needed to clarify… i think mark needs to learn how to read….
Four stomachs and MICROBES to digest all that plant matter.
There wasn’t the social media presence at the time .. glad this can make the rounds now.
The cow has 4 stomachs to make sure they get all the nutrients they need from grass.
Good for you Jennifer since it looks like you have researched in order to get everything you need. I would guess most vegans don’t do that. It’s so much easier to just eat what our ancestors ate! If yours are vegetarians, this is the way to go for you. For others to go through pregnancy and breast feeding as a vegan would seem like an experiment I would not want to chance. No vegan cultures out there as far as I know.
I was vegan for 5 years. I ate a very healthy and balanced diet and felt wonderful. I was vegan through my first pregnancy and through breastfeeding. Despite my great diet and being very careful to get all the nutrients I and my baby needed, we both ended up very depleted. By the time she was almost 15 months old and still just 16 lbs, I had had enough. She hadn’t gained weight in months. We started on raw milk, grassed beef, pastured chicken and eggs from local farmers. I learned about Weston A Price’s research and never went back to veganism. That was 9 years ago.
You are very blessed to have been open enough to know that something wasn’t right. That is a good quality in a mom. (:
Thanks for sharing your experience. I had somewhat similar experience too. I was not vegan 100% though, but ate very healthy, as I thought. Now I know how wrong I was. The bad thing is that you really believe that what you do is best thing in the world without realizing that you can heart your child and yourself.
Ignoring basic biology is reason enough for my case against veganism, but to each your own…unless it’s a child. Malnutrition is malnutrition is malnutrition no matter what SAD or fad diet you have adopted.
Yeah go compare your “canines” to a tiger or another meat eating animal. Then try and open your jaw enough to take a bite off the side of an animal after taking it down with your “claws”.
Wait… your fingers arent sharp enough? Your jaw is too small? Well at least that raw meat that we are biologically set up to consume won’t sit in your small intestine for too long. Oops, sorry my mistake, your intestine is way too long to digest meat properly.
Well i guess you are the professional on “biology”.
You should tell this to other omnivorous primates.
It takes 4.stomachs to break down the grass to the point where the cow gets the full nutrient value. Humans have one.
Yes, it takes 4 stomachs, specialized friendly flora to break down tough plant fibers, and bringing the cud back up for more chewing. None of which we have.
Yeaaahhh….sorry to be the one to break this to you…but….vegans dont eat grass.
Dumbasses.
This was in reference to a comment made that even cows eat just grass and get along just fine. It was an explanation as to why cows can eat just grass and be totally fine, whereas we cannot. And yeaaahhh, just about everyone eat grasses…wheat, barley, rye, to name a VERY few of the MANY edible grasses in existence today. Be careful of that name-calling there, buddy. Like I said before, unless you’ve done a ton of research to back yourself up there, you make yourself out to look like a real idiot.
Actually, cows don’t have 4 stomachs. They have one stomach with 4 chambers.
cows eat grass… grass covered in bugs. protein! cows aren’t vegan and they are here to nourish us.
Makes you wonder how a diet that requires supplements, such as veganism, could ever be considered good and healthy for a human. Cows are made to eat grass, as evidenced by their teeth and digestive system. Humans? Not made to eat grass solely for nutrition.
Veganism requires a single supplement: B12. Even then, many foods that even you eat are fortified with vitamins and minerals, from cereals to orange juice to milk…
Also, vegans don’t “eat grass solely”. I’m desperately hoping that’s a joke. Vegans eat EVERYTHING that is not from an animal.
Katie, you’ve clearly never been on this site before. Take a look around and I’m sure you’ll learn a lot. Not for one minute does Sarah advocate store cereals, store orange juice or milk. This is a wholefoods blog and about what was traditionally eaten by our ancestors, back in the day when they were healthy and didn’t suffer from degenerative disease. You sound very firm on your vegan ideals, and each to their own, however you may find information that is useful in your day-to-day life, despite it’s source being a meat eating blog 🙂
“when they were healthy and didn’t suffer from degenerative disease.”
Sorry, but that is absolutely hilarious. Until the past century, Human life expectancy has hardly ever been above 30 years. It’s hard to die of a degenerative disease when the state of your teeth, or an infectious disease kills you so early in life. Degenerative disease has always been there, we just didn’t understand them at the time, making most impossible to diagnose.
I’m not against whole foods at all, but using historical eating habits as your argument is ridiculous.
A well planned vegan diet is an excellent diet. A well planned paleo diet is great too from a health perspective. But this article simply tries to discredit veganism by dressing an awfully poorly planned diet as a perfect example of the diet in question. It’s cheap, trashy, slanderous journalism. If the couple fed their child a paleo diet that failed to include numerous vitamins (the claims that a strict vegan diet results in almost certain vit A and D deficiency is absolutely pathetic), the child would have met exactly the same demise.
The idea that all the people of the past had an average lifespan of 30 years (or even 40) is just patently false. Even among some of the well documented moments in history of abnormally short life expectancy the case can only be made by ignoring specific causes of death and pretending that people just did not live long full lives ever. It is every bit as bad as all the colorful insulting tactics you just used. Oh the irony. This blog is the furthest thing from trashy, but I agree that it sometimes deserves to be classified as journalism in spite of its far less lofty aspirations.
I get so tired of people making the claim ” Until the past century, Human life expectancy has hardly ever been above 30 years”. That is just NOT TRUE. Have you ever read the “Little House on the Prairie” books? Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband both lived into their 90’s and that was not unusual. Please open your mind a little and don’t just parrot something because it fits what you want others to believe. I would love to know of any person who lived their lives as a vegan who lived into their 90’s or beyond. There are tons of cases of meat and milk consumers who have.
That is untrue about “life expectancy”. There is life span and life expectancy. The AVERAGE life expectancy was lower prior to modern medicine and other modern conveniences like refrigeration because of infectious diseases etc, and there was also lower infant mortality. People could and often did live long lives then, i.e. have the potential for a life span similar to today. Just look at the age of death of US presidents. All the founding fathers had long lives. Adams 90; Jefferson 83; Madison 85, etc… Longer than the average male life expectancy today. And not so many of the chronic diseases then as we have today.
Quote from http://longevity.about.com/od/longevitystatsandnumbers/a/Longevity-Throughout-History.htm
…”by this data, the main cause of death for centuries would most certainly have been infections, whether from infectious diseases or infected wounds from accidents or fighting. Unhygienic living conditions, with little access to effective medical care, meant life expectancy was likely limited to about 35 years of age. That’s life expectancy at birth, a figure dramatically influenced by infant mortality — pegged as high as 30%. It does not mean that the average person living in say, 1200 AD, died at the age of 35. Rather, for every child that died in infancy, another person might have lived to be 70….”
Nope, I’ve never been on this site, I was merely directed here from someone who saw the awfully misleading article. I love me some whole foods as well, trust me. I don’t personally rely on fortified foods (actually, I must rely on a college meal plan, which luckily features a full salad bar and stir-fry area) but I know that other vegans and non-vegans make use of them. And I already have tons of information that’s useful in my day-to-day life with a balanced diet that’s been working very well to help me thrive. I don’t know who Sarah is, but I am concerned about Kaayla, the author of this particular article. Thanks! Keep up the whole food love. That’s where it’s at.
“little house on the prairie” was a non fiction piece? i never knew that….
Anyway, people should listen to their bodies, learn what their bodies need to thrive and appreciate anything nature provides us as food, including meat…
yes!! we are MEANT to eat meat!