Vegetarianism – a form of child abuse
All the nutrients that the body needs other than vitamin B-12 can be obtained from vegetable sources if extreme care is taken. Something most vegetarian and vegan parents absolutely do not do.

The availability of some of these essential nutrients is adversely affected by the special characteristics of a strictly vegetarian diet. Nutrients so affected include:

• iron
• calcium
• zinc
• copper
• manganese
• selenium
• riboflavin
• fat soluble vitamins, particularly vitamin D

The best sources of these are meat, poultry and seafood, which vegetarians avoid. But not only does the vegan diet consist of foods which are poorer sources of these nutrients, it necessarily contains high levels of fibre, phytic acid and oxalate, all of which are known both to bind with the nutrients in such a way as to inhibit their absorption in the gut and also to deplete the body of the minerals it has. The vegetarian ends up with a negative balance whereby the more he or she eats, the worse it gets.

This applies both to adults and to children. In the case of children, however, the situation can be far more serious. Children brought up by vegetarian parents are usually breast fed, often for long periods. Where the mother has a good nutrient-rich diet, this is normally a good thing. But the nutritional condition of the mother affects the nutrients passed in breast milk to the infant. If the mother is deficient in vitamin B-12, for example, this deficiency is passed onto the breast-fed child with unfortunate consequences.

With extreme macrobiotic diets the serious brain damage is seen in children where it was found that " Vitamin B-12 is sufficiently low as to have psychological consequences that also raise legitimate concerns about neurological development".

Mental development of four- to five-year-old children on macrobiotic diets (almost devoid of animal foods and fat) with long-term growth deficits, was studied. In addition food consumption and behavioural style of the children, and family and parent characteristics were assessed. Children had only seventy percent of the energy and forty percent of the calcium intake of that reported for children on conventional diets. Thirty three percent of the children studied failed to finish IQ tests due to an inability to concentrate.

Long standing mild to moderate malnutrition may not affect mental development if the children grow up in a stimulating social environment.

Infants and growing children have relatively small stomachs but large requirements for energy and the proteins and other materials with which to grow. As they can only eat small meals, they, most of all, need a diet high in energy and rich in nutrients – needs that simply cannot be met from a vegetable-based diet. When weaned, children of vegetarian parents receive a diet where their small stomachs are filled with relatively nutrient-poor foods. This can lead to grave nutritional disorders such as suppressed growth and nutritional dwarfing , as well as diseases such as kwashiorkor, a protein-calorie deficiency disease usually seen only in severely malnourished African children, vitamin D deficiency rickets, severe iron deficiency anaemia and learning difficulties.

The children of strict vegetarian parents tend to have lower birth weights which studies have shown increase ill-health later in life. Smaller babies suffer more heart disease , obstructive lung diseases and asthma. Under-nutrition in infancy has also been shown to inhibit brain growth and to have a dramatically adverse effect on intellectual development. This last is a disaster as, not only is it irreversible in those children, studies have shown that their eventual offspring also suffer lower intelligence quotients.

Dr. I.F. Roberts, senior registrar at the Department of Child Health, St George's Hospital in London, and colleagues suggest that these vegetarian type fad diets must be regarded as a form of child abuse.

Examples of this, when vegetarianism is taken the the extreme, can be seen in recent news articles about the damage vegans do to thier own children.

Many of these vegetarians and vegans are what are referred to as "Moral Vegetarians", that is, they do not eat meat because they believe that it is wrong to animals. By doing so, they are selfishly putting the interests of animals ahead of the interests of their own children.

Damage done to children by a strict vegetarian diet will extend beyond the lifetime of the children affected, but will also be manifested in the next generation - the grandchildren of these misguided fools.

Animals are spared and can continue eating one another, while the children and even the grandchildren of these evil vegetarians and vegans are damaged irreparably.

Since they care so much for animals, and so little for their own offspring, they might as well just feed their children to the lions at the zoo.

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