Vegan girl

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Taken from here

I'm going to go so far as to say that this is child abuse. Now I know some Vegans can live perfectly normal lives, but that should be an adult decision, not forced on a developing child.

 

That's the point I see being made in the quote. For a Vegan Diet to work, I would assume that some research would need to be done. You need to know what nutrients you are giving up by cutting meat, eggs and dairy products out of your diet, and what you need to increase consumption of to make up for what you are losing by the changes.

That said, Ethical reasons for Veganism are . The Animal Cruelty that they piss and moan about is illegal in most civilized countries.

What Vegans can bring to the world is a better understanding of how we can change our diets. It's likely that the majority of us eat more meat than is healthy, and perhaps there are alternatives that would be healthy to reduce the meat intake. If the Ethical differences can be put aside and the practicality of the diet discussed, then even those that don't want to give up meat might learn something that leads them to a healthier life style. Wouldn't that lead to something positive?

 

Ridiculous. It is fine of the parents to be vegans, but to force it upon their child is ignorance, neglect, stupidity, or a combination of the above.

Even if they adhere to a vegetarian diet, they should still give the child appropiate proteins, perhaps through tofu or eggs. I don't recall last hearing a piece of bean being tortured before dying to provide tofu.

 

It appears that none of you folks know anything about veganism at all. A vegan diet can be just as nourishing or unhealthy as a meat based diet for kids, grown-ups, or the elderly. Don't take my word for it, though. Check out what the ADA (American Dietetics Association) has to say about it. As long as you manage your B12 intake and watch your calcium*, a vegan diet is perfectly healthy for children of all ages. D vitamins, it may surprise some of you to know, aren't normally found in milk, either. Milk is fortified with it. Any vegan who takes in a nominal amount of soy milk daily (or just takes a multi-vitamin) is already getting all the D vitamins he needs, since most soy milk is also fortified with vitamin D.

The bottom line, here, is that the results of not monitoring the nutritional intake of your child is no more or less dire for vegans than it is for meat eaters. Living on McDonald's and Mac and Cheese is just as likely - maybe even more likely - to kill you as eating a poorly balanced vegan diet.

* There are plenty of plant sources of calcium out there with a similar level of bio-availability to what is found in milk (the best sources usually being soy milk or Tofu, since Calcium is already used in their production, or Arugula, a leafy green vegetable). While American vegans tend to take in less calcium than the USRDA, so does everyone else. In fact, when they compared the calcium intake of American vegans to the rest of the country, they turned out to take in the exact same amount of calcium as the general public (despite the fact that vegans actually need a little less calcium than meat eaters, anyway).

Dude, you need to get out more. Google "de-beaking" or "beak trimming". Check out an industry site to make sure the information isn't "biased" when you do. Look up rennet. Look up how the US dairy industry disposes of the calves that are a necessary bi-product of Milk production (you have to periodically impregnate the cows if you want them to do milk and the calves are either sold to the veal industry or disemboweled for rennet). Take a look at the stun gun failure rates in a typical slaughter house (when the bolt fails, the animal is unfortunately slaughtered alive and fully conscious to avoid slowing down the line). You have the right to disagree about whether these practices are unethical (and I have no interest whatsoever in debating it, either), but not only are these practices legal, but they are also quite common.

 

Perhaps not for you or your children, because you're well informed. However, I'm far from convinced you could say that about all vegans. I'm assuming that the parents were not deliberately malnourishing their child, and they clearly were monitoring her nutritional intake. However, what they probably did was just wing it when it came to veganism. There's lots of other parents who wing it when it comes to the nutritional needs of their children, but for non-vegans the results are likely to not be as dire (except for extreme cases, like living on McDonald's).

I have a 10 month old at home. I do not count calories for him, or count servings of fruits and vegeatables or anything like that. However, since we are offering him all types of food, he is likely getting a balanced diet and I don't worry about it. Yesterday alone, Jack ate three things this girl never would have eaten: chicken (cut into small pieces of course), cheese, and yogurt (not all at the same time, but throughout the day). Now if that's ALL he ate, his diet would have been just as unhealthy as the girl's diet, but it wasn't. He also, during the course of the day, ate some banana, squash, and mashed up strawberries. And lest I forget, when you're 10 months old, Cheerios are about the most fun food in the world, and he eats them every day (dry, with no milk). That probably isn't a fully balanced diet, but because it will vary again tomorrow, it's no big deal.

I have no doubt that it is possible, even relatively easy, for someone to eat a balanced vegan diet as Drew suggests. However, given how dumb the average person is, not everyone is going to be as well read and educated about the subject as Drew is and is bound to screw it up (although I can't believe they would be so uninformed as to not give soy milk). What we have here is child abuse through malnutrition - albeit likely unintentional.

 

Aldeth, the point from the ADA position paper (to which I linked) is that it is just as difficult - and just as easy - to provide a balanced, meat based diet as it is to provide a balanced vegan diet. Meat provides you with Iron, protein, B12, and essential fats. An increased legume intake will take care of the Iron and protein and it is actually quite hard not to take in enough fat, even as a vegan. The only thing that remains is B12 (which is really only an issue because of how sanitary our living conditions are). There are far more vegan kids out there than you think (a little under 1% of the US population is vegan), and most of them are perfectly healthy.

 

The vegan part has nothing to do with this; incompentence as parents is everything here.

 

These "parents" aren't even vegans. Idiots would be the right term. Bleeding-hearted idiots would be even more accurate. When and if they'd die of malnutrition, they'd deserve a Darwin award...

 

I find myself agreeing with Drew once more. If you are going to follow a diet that is non-mainstream, it makes sense for you to do a bit of reading before jumping in. Especially so if there is a child involved. The child was malnourished- but the problem is not that she was vegan, the problem was that the parents were ignorant. This is on the same level as child-obesity- an example of a poor diet based on more 'normal' foods. We seem to be getting upset over one example here of a poor diet when there are many more examples walking (or waddling in this case) around.

If the diet is healthy (and as Drew showed, it can be), then I would argue it is in fact none of the above. It makes just as much sense to claim the above for a meat-based diet as a vegan one. The problem is not the diet itself, it is how parents apply it. Claiming that all vegan diets are ignorant, neglectful or stupid would be exceedingly ignorant of those that work fine.

 

Agreed Decados. Raising a kid to be a vegan can be extremely good for them, just like vegetarian and carnivorian, if it is done correctly. It's not neglect, stupidity, or ignorance; if anything saying so is either ignorance or stupidity.

 

And that was the part that I agreed with you. My point is that if people do not take the time to do some research on this subject before deciding to become vegans (and that is apparently what happened) then they are setting themselves up for trouble. I called it child abuse not because they were vegans, but because they were malnourishing their child. I even went so far as to imply that if they were as well-versed in the subject as you were, then this wouldn't have happened.

 

I would probably term it neglect, rather than abuse. Either way, the parents are responsible. May God help the girl.

 

Whatever the reasons these idiots have for what they did, they need to be punished -- and severely. Not for being vegans -- I don't give a crap what other people eat as long as it isn't other human beings -- but for malnourishing their child. Didn't they bloody well notice her condition? They are extremist fools and the whole story disgusts me. Oh, and this line here:

I can't express sufficiently how little I care about this moron's feelings. Will her feelings heal her child from the suffering SHE inflicted on the child? Her feelings should be written down carefully on a large sheet of paper, rolled into a tight tube, and rammed forcefully up her butt.

 

Ah. It appears I still haven't articulated my point well enough. My real point is that there are just as many (if not more) ill-informed meat consuming parents out there who's kids are malnourished due to ignorance. Most Americans sadly do not follow the food pyramid and the average vegan tends to do a better job of monitoring his children's nutrition than the average Joe - primarily because becoming vegan isn't exactly a minor lifestyle change. Most people don't wake up one morning and decide to stop eating any animal products, and the same sources that would have led them to become vegan also tend to be great sources of nutritional information out of simple necessity (since the most frequently asked questions from would-be vegans tend to center around nutrition).

The obviously did notice, or they wouldn't have taken her to the doctor in the first place.

Thanks for pointing this one out. I didn't specifically address this issue because sometimes it is infeasible or impractical to get enough sun (light sensitivity, living in certain parts of Alaska...) and I wasn't sure of this couples specific circumstances. I specifically addressed the fact that milk is actually fortified with vitamin D because most kids refuse to eat liver and fatty fish. Milk is fortified with it because it is a staple in most American's diets (except for 25% or so of us who are lactose intolerant and get their calcium and vitamin D from plant sources, vitamins, or the sun). In theory, this whole thing could have been avoided with the use of a mult-vitamin, but we are also ignoring the possibility that the kid might just have problems absorbing vitamin D. It happens.

 

If that is the case, then the news stories of these parents are under-reported. Granted, there are very few cases as extreme as the one presented here, but I've seen far more reports (and seen with my own eyes) many more instances where parents who restirct* their own diet also restrict their children's diet, with occassional deleterious affects. One example is in my own neighborhood. A family decided to try out an Atkins-type diet, and thier child entered ketosis (which is a sign of starvation) from not getting enough glucose.

* By restricting one's diet I am talking about being a vegan, vegetarian, or following an Atkins program. I am not talking about people who are consciously trying to lose weight and thus eliminate things like nachos and Big Macs from their diet. While these could technically be described as dietary restrictions, I am talking about people who consciously decide to place further restrictions upon what would already be considered a healthy diet.

I am one of those people who do not follow the food pyramid. In fact, no one in my family or my wife's family does and none of us are malnourished. I would assert that it's much easier to get a balanced diet when you have a greater range of foods available to you - and having food from animal products would obviously increase your options.

Of course, I'm also someone who, through is own choice, eats a balanced diet. While I do eat some meat almost every day, I also eat fruits and vegetables every day. Also I'm not a frequent customer of McDonald's. In fact, in the past year I could probably count all my visits to fast food restaurants of any kind on one hand. To me eating a healthy diet is something I don't even think about - I do it automatically.

I'm not saying you can't eat a balanced vegan diet. You are living proof that it is possible, and relatively easy. However, your point that it is just as likely to be malnourished when including animal products is contradicted by cases like the one we see here (and I admit that other cases I have seen have been less severe than this one). The number of children I've seen who are malnourished due to dietary restirctions by their parents are very few. However "few" is a lot bigger number than "none" that I've heard about from people who do not restrict their diets.

 

They took too bloody long to notice it. They were too busy being sanctimonious nutjobs about the whole deal to notice their child had a serious health condition. I respect everyone's right to eat or not eat whatever the heck they want, but when their pretentious crap damages their own children because they are too stupid to do it properly, then they need to be set down HARD!

 

@Aldeth: All those kids with type 2 diabetes got it, for the most part, from improper diet. All those cases of morbidly obese kids likewise got there through improper diet. Why don't these cases make more headlines? Because they are that common.

Forgive me, but are you trying to imply that vegans are "sanctimonious nutjobs"? If you are, I take exception to that. I am neither a nut job nor am I particularly sanctimonious. Moreover, how exactly are you able to determine that you would have noticed the symptoms earlier than these parents from a single news article? How do you know that they hadn't taken their child to the doctor for those very symptoms on other occasions without attaining a proper diagnosis? The symptoms may well have not pointed to rickets until that final diagnosis was made, or the doctors may have made several incorrect diagnoses prior to finally getting it right. From the article, there is no way to know for sure.

My sister went to the hospital for what was thought to be appendix trouble when she was five. The first visit turned out to prove she didn't have appendicitis, and she was sent home. 2 months later, our 3 year old brother got angry and punched her in the stomach. She was in so much pain that she again had to be admitted to the hospital. After 3 days, they finally discovered that she had a stage 4 Wilms tumor which had already metastasized. Now, getting to stage 4 takes quite some time, meaning that my sister likely had Cancer for well over half a year. Does this failure to catch my sisters tumor before it hit stage 4 and before it metastasized constitute bad parenting?

 

Oh, no, I wasn't implying that. I did mean that the parents are neglectful and ignorant, etc, not vegans or vegan diet as a whole. It would be, I agree, exceedingly ignorant. Sorry if I inadvertently insulted anyone.