It Wasn't Veganism That Killed That Kid in Atlanta
It wasn't. At all. However.
When we first heard about the Vegan parents who starved their kid to death by feeding him only apple juice and soy milk we weren't really convinced of the murder charge they'd been convicted of. We were also pretty quick to dismiss Vegan parenting as one of the lesser ideas we'd come across lately, and these particular parents as not the most complex proteins, but murderers? Then we actually read a news blurb about it, and it made it clear that the jury, at least, had been convinced that the couple intentionally starved their child to death and were using Veganism as cover. Murder, in that light, made sense, and we cut a little slack to Vegans raising Vegan babies as well. This seemingly reasonable train of thought is apparently why Seattlest isn't writing editorials for the New York Times. Earlier this week Nina Planck published an Op-Ed in that paper (and here in the IHT) blasting Vegan parents, although for some reason we didn't come across it until today:
Protein deficiency is one danger of a vegan diet for babies. Nutritionists used to speak of proteins as "first class" (from meat, fish, eggs and milk) and "second class" (from plants), but today this is considered denigrating to vegetarians.The fact remains, though, that humans prefer animal proteins and fats to cereals and tubers, because they contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio. This is not true of plant proteins, which are inferior in quantity and quality -- even soy.
A vegan diet may lack vitamin B12, found only in animal foods; usable vitamins A and D, found in meat, fish, eggs and butter; and necessary minerals like calcium and zinc. When babies are deprived of all these nutrients, they will suffer from retarded growth, rickets and nerve damage.
This case is a tenuous peg for an editorial like this, because the court decided that Veganism was only a ruse and not the actual cause of the infant's death, but we're still inclined to believe that raising a baby Vegan isn't in the best interests of the baby. That's not to say that we believe a Vegan diet is capable of killing or inflicting life-long deficiencies on a child (which is neither here nor there because we're not Seattlest, MD) but it's very much not the way we'd go.
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