Impact of being vegan from birth

[Notcontent]

I could be wrong but it seems to me that there haven’t been any studies on the impact of being vegan all your life, from birth. I have been doing a bit of research into this lately (just internet research!) as my dd decided to stop eating meat (although she is not vegan) and I think part of her reason (as a young teen) was the fact that quite a few of her friends have become vegan.

It seems to me that you have to be incredibly disciplined to make sure you get all the right nutrients...

I think if you breastfed your vegan baby until they were 3 or 4, then gave them a really healthy diet plus B12 supplements they'd be fine.

I think if they were fussy eaters or had food allergies it might be nearly impossible to do healthily.

OTOH I read on here that German and Italian health advice is that veganism isn't healthy for growing children.

Google the news.
I'm fairly certain their was a couple done for abuse for having their child on a vegan diet. I think the child was found seriously malnourished or something hence they were convicted.

I don't know but I know of twins one born slightly bigger than the other. Throughout childhood the size difference became less noticeable. The bigger one became vegetarian in his teens and now in adulthood is about an inch shorter than his twin brother. It is just harder to get the right nutrients.

I’m an almost vegan from birth, no meat, no eggs, and only a small amount of ghee in the first three years. I started eating eggs when I moved out at 17, I still have never eaten meat and I haven’t consumed dairy since the age of about 3/4 when my Great Grandma died.

I’m six foot, weigh around 95kg, I have 11% body fat and was a semi professional prop until fairly recently. I’m also Pakistani the average height for an Pakistani man is about five foot six I think.

It isn’t about being vegan, veggie or an omnivore, it’s about having a balanced diet.

Exactly it's about having a balanced diet
U can buy vegan growing up milk for 1-3 years olds
Alot of food is fortified so it makes it even easier
Some people have good diets some have poor diets that's meat eaters and veges so it really depends on the person/parents they need to educate themselves before changing diets

if you breastfeed your vegan baby

Eh? How does that work?

That is exactly what I struggle with finding. Information about. Being a vegan a whole life vs what impact it's got on your health. I'm a vegetarian and wanting to have a better picture of what it really means to be a vegan for a long long time. My MD is a vegan and she's been a vegan all her life. She is 50 and has got a lot of health problems (stomach, liver, kidneys, also her bones are weak and teeth are in a very bad condition). She's been told by her doctors that's very likely all related to her lifetime veganism. It's scary. It got to the point that she's on a very strict diet and can't really eat much (she can't even have apples). Plus unfortunately she looks much older than she is (she's very skinny and just simply her skin doesn't look healthy).It seems that everyone is becoming a vegan because it's trendy and cool but nobody really have studied the consequences of being a vegan for a life time. I'd love to learn more about it too.

@MrsGrindah because although breastmilk is technically an animal product unlike pretty much every other one it can be freely given with informed consent of the producer, therefore the majority of vegans wouldn’t have an ethical issue with it. I think of it similar to donated blood, a technical animal product that I would accept without question as (at least in this country) it is willingly donated by people who have given informed consent.

My friends kids were brought up vegan (now 24&20) they were breastfed until they were 4 years old each.

I'd worry most about teeth and bones, seen a few recent posts on twitter of vegans that have had to abandon the diet because their vegan children (from birth) have decaying milk teeth. And other posters on here saying 'nearly' vegan, well no, you're a vegetarian if you consume butter, milk or cheese even in small amounts and don't have the same risk of deficiency that a vegan would.

I don't understand about the teeth? My daughter has no eggs & dairy due to allergies but we obviously compensate for calcium in other ways... Don't vegans do this?

Depends on the plant based diet. A lot of Indian Hindus who describe themselves as vegetarian are mostly vegan (milk is often only consumed in childhood and via the rare pudding during festivals, and eggs / honey etc is considered non-veg, butter / ghee often only during special occasions). Appreciate this is anecdotal but I didn’t really notice any major health differences between the people I knew with this kind of diet and people with a more western vegetarian based diet except for height. The mostly vegan kids I knew in India (particularly boys) were often up to a foot shorter.

There were news stories in Glasgow about ten years ago of a couple prosecuted for child abuse for giving their baby an inadequate vegan diet and the child’s spine didn’t develop/grow properly. IIRC, the poor child’s back was described as basically being so brittle it crumbled.

So I think you’d have to really know what you were doing nutrition wise otherwise fraught with danger.

And in those circumstances, who’s going to feel comfortable framing a study? There was that study on not inducing babies who went beyond term that was recently abandoned as six babies died at 43 weeks of pregnancy, so it was considered unsafe and unethical to continue.

From the Times at the time joyfullittlehippo
Parents of ill vegan girl may face police
Mark Macaskill

A 12-YEAR-OLD girl in Scotland brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old woman.

Doctors are under pressure to report the couple to police and social workers amid concerns that her health and welfare may have been neglected in pursuit of their dietary beliefs.

The girl, who has been fed on a strict meat and dairy-free diet from birth, is said to have a severe form of rickets and to have suffered a number of fractured bones.

The condition is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which is needed to absorb calcium and is found in liver, oily fish and dairy produce. Decalcification leads to the bones becoming brittle and can cause curvature of the spine.

Dr Faisal Ahmed, the consultant paediatrician treating the child at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, declined to discuss the specific case. He said, however, that he believed the dangers of forcing children to follow a strict vegan diet needed to be highlighted.

One leading nutritionist, who asked not to be named, said: “In most instances, the parents who are imposing this very restrictive and potentially hazardous diet are not themselves brought up as vegans. They are imposing on their children something . . . which we do not know enough about to know it is safe.”

Jonathan Sher, head of policy at Children in Scotland, an umbrella group representing 400 organisations, said social workers should intervene where a vegan diet was putting children’s health at risk.

Last year, an American vegan couple were given a life sentence for starving their six-week-old baby to death. In 2001 two vegans from west London were sentenced to three years’ community rehabilitation after they admitted starving their baby to death.

Glasgow city council said the incident involving the 12-year-old girl had not been referred to its social work department.

Plus a link to a mumsnet thread about it at the time:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/in_the_news/545417-child-in-hospital-with-rickets

I was raised, and still am vegetarian. So not vegan.. no eggs (don't like them) just cheese and milk and Im healthy, never had fillings or broken a bone. My mom is very informed about nutrition though. She always got a lot of stick for not feeding me meat, so she made sure she knew what she was doing.
I really think children raised on chicken nuggets and chips, who take no supplements must be malnourished too. And there must be lots of them. It's just a good story to get people outraged when a vegan neglects their child.

Oh god this kind of stuff really worries me. DD is milk and egg free due to allergies and refuses all meat i offer. I hope the fact i still breastfeed her and give her a daily vitamin supplement will help

A friend went vegan after her first born had diabolical reflux ... a vegan diet calmed him which is brilliant. The whole family went vegan to help: Mum got pregnant again shortly after and the second child has really bad teeth and the dentist told her it's her vegan diet to blame.

Sorry, I got the details a bit wrong as was going from memory initially joyfullittlehippo.

She was fed that diet from birth, so was fed that diet as baby. So it does show what the long term effects can be if people don’t really know what they are doing. The parents were prominent in the vegan community in Glasgow, so did have access to information/knowledge on nutrition.

My point was not that vegan=neglectful. But that if the risks of getting it wrong can be so devastating, that it will be difficult for a researcher to frame a study in those circumstances beyond just following what happens in a traditionally vegan culture.

There are cultures/communities who have successfully raised vegan/near vegan children for many generations who could be studied, but that’s not the same as people from a generally omnivorous culture switching to being vegan. There is knowledge and practice in traditional vegan cultures around things like combining different plant proteins to form complete proteins, sprouting and fermenting of foods to improve nutritional availability.

Just adopting a facsimile of a traditional vegan diet could be difficult due to availability of foods/knowledge of techniques/transmission of the Microbiome between mother and child during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding which affects how the gut functions.

There are also matters like assessing the sufficiency of the mother’s diet during gestation and breastfeeding, as this will affect the composition of breast milk. If the mother’s nutrition is inadequate, so s the child’s.

So in those circumstances, conducting a study that say compared the diets of children raised within a traditionally vegan culture to the diets of children raised with an adopted vegan diet could pose risks and ethical difficulties for the researchers.

I think a balanced vegan diet plus supplements (esp B12 and Vit D) is basically fine, including for young kids or pregnant women.

Even then, I am not sure it is optimal. Especially for young kids or pregnant women! Although to be fair, plenty of omnivore's diets are not optimal either.

Recent research suggests that young children probably benefit from meat in their first year. There are certain things like cholesterol and arachidonic acid are absent or very hard to get in a vegan diet, and they are good for the growing brain. There are also concerns about choline in vegan diets. Again, implications for brain development. I wouldn't risk it, personally.

I usually eat meat only 2-3x a week for environmental reasons, but I ate more when I was pregnant and nursing, and my baby got meat puree or egg yolk pretty much every day unless they were getting meat from our table.

And in practice, babies and toddlers are often fussy eaters, meaning that the ideal balanced vegan diet often does not happen in practice. I think the real problems start when a parent is so fanatical about veganism (and you only have to look around online to see that a lot of vegans are really really fanatical and that there is a lot of very dodgy pseudoscience floating around in the vegan online world) that they insist on keeping a young child vegan when it is becoming apparent that the child is fussy. The combination of veganism AND picky eating habits is likely to lead to a very restricted diet. And yes, it is absolutely fine to say that the veganism IS connected with the malnourishment, in such cases.

The Unnatural Vegan is a very good YouTube vlogger and she has done a good job of discussing some of the poor science and fanaticism that can result in some vegan children becoming undernourished.

If parents want to raise children vegan, I think they need to show common sense and put their children' needs first--that means comprising and being flexible if their child is not a good eater who actually eats the whole range of foods recommended for a vegan diet to be healthy. (It still would not be my choice, for the reasons I outlined above.)

My point is that an adopted vegan diet from birth needs to be studied to show the extent of it’s safety, adequacy and potentially it’s advantages...but how do you ethically study something before it has been shown to be safe, when the subjects have not been fully informed of the risks and have given informed consent.

In cases of medical treatment or research parental consent is adequate. But having a medical condition isn’t a choice whereas what diet someone follows or makes their child is a (moral) choice.

If the researchers notice something going awry, say with the mother’s nutrition or the child’s development, when do they step in? What nutritional guidelines do they issue, if they issue guidelines that turn out to be inadequate then are they culpable for any consequences down the line? But they will have to issue guidelines/recommendations for the study to be worthwhile, otherwise how do they get a valid dataset?

I still hold that any 12 year old with that level of physical damage must have been subjected to an extreme level of abuse/neglect that goes far beyond being vegan.

No. All it requires is parents who don't give a Vit D supplement or animal foods.

We don't get enough sunlight these days. If you don'T give your child any animal foods or a supplement, there is a good chance they could end up with rickets.

It's happened in omnivorous families as well--however, the risk is higher if you don't give dairy foods or seafood.

And it’s unlikely you’d get enough Vit D from sunshine in Scotland.