A Belgian court of law recently convicted the parents of a small child for homicide.
The couple had decided to raise their son with one where the main ingredients were non-dairy milk substitutes for cow’s milk, rice, quinoa and buckwheat.
The child died. The medical experts ruled that the death was due to severe malnutrition.
In Italy a court ruled that a young child be separated from his parents and handed over to social services.
The reason was that they had decided to raise him on a vegan diet which ended with a serious little hospital stay, with such low levels of some essential nutrients that he barely managed to survive.
Of course these examples are extreme cases. But unfortunately they are not the only ones, far from it.
What does science say about vegans or vegetarians?
The reality with which we live today is that the number of vegans continues to increase significantly from year to year in modern societies.
That is why we must ask ourselves if changing an omnivorous diet for a vegetarian or vegan one can be dangerous, especially for younger children.
But science, which can give correct answers to a series of problems, needs time to investigate.
And numerous investigations are still underway to answer the question of whether a vegan, vegetarian or omnivorous diet is better, so that in the coming years more will be known about the problem and we will be able to fine-tune the answer.
But there are already a number of scientific work carried out with the utmost rigor that has begun to provide results of interest.
Advantages of vegan or vegetarian children
The good news for vegans is that children raised on this diet show no problems with obesity or being overweight, a growing scourge among those who follow omnivorous diets in wealthier modern societies.
Their cholesterol levels are also significantly lower than those among omnivorous children.
And something similar, although at a lower level, happens with vegetarian children.
But here the good ends.
Vegan or vegetarian children problems
On average, children who follow a vegan diet are significantly shorter than omnivores.
It was observed that only between 5 and 10 years of age, vegan children lost an average of almost one centimeter per year compared to omnivores.
More serious turned out to be his loss of bone mass.
The bones of vegan children have a significantly lower density than that of children who follow an omnivorous diet.
And also the vegan children experienced a significant delay in puberty.
In this sense, vegetarian children also have a significantly lower height and weight than children who follow omnivorous diets.
And the intellectual development?
It is, without a doubt, the question that worries many experts the most: Does a vegan or vegetarian diet reduce to any extent the intellectual development of children?
This is a topic in which a lot of research is still being done. But there are already a number of worrying signs.
A vegan or vegetarian diet never improves a child’s intellectual development and in several cases significantly worsens it.
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Of course, not all children who follow a vegan diet will suffer from severe malnutrition, become dwarfs, or suffer from mental retardation. But many of them will be shorter and less intelligent than if they had been on an omnivorous diet.
Complete, balanced and vegan diet. Is it possible?
Part of the problem is that not all vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous diets are the same.
For example, although grains predominate in certain vegan diets, a “new fad” attempts to replace them with turnips and radishes, based on the assumption that ancient Europeans ate primarily radishes and turnips for centuries.
And it is that, although it is relatively easy to eat a complete and balanced diet following an omnivorous diet, achieving this with a vegan diet is much more difficult, since a vegan needs to eat a wide variety of plants in their proper proportions.
That is why doctors usually recommend that those who want to become vegans go to a good specialist in this type of diet.
Because there is no doubt that to ration a healthy and complete vegan diet for an adult you need to know a lot. And, in addition, vegans will need to take certain supplements.
But it is still much more difficult to hit on a suitable vegan diet for a child.
Are we genetically carnivorous?
At this point it is important to ask ourselves why we have so many problems following a vegan diet and so few with an omnivorous diet.
The key is who we are.
Some facts are worth remembering:
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Cereals such as wheat and barley, as well as legumes such as lentils and chickpeas, began to be cultivated in the fertile crescent region about 9,500 years ago.
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Rice and soybeans were domesticated in China just over 7,000 years ago.
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Maize began to be cultivated in Mesoamerica about 10,000 years ago.
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Potatoes and broad beans in South America about 6,000 years ago.
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Sugarcane was domesticated in New Guinea about 7,000 years ago.
However, humans of our species (Homo sapiens) made a living as hunter-gatherers for most of their history. And there was already Homo sapiens more than 250,000 years ago.
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