Is it really safe to raise a child on a vegan diet?
system, unable to accept a modern approach to weaning. Rather, the paediatrician who treated the little boy said: “Making a different nutritional choice is not a problem. But a child must have his diet integrated with calcium and iron from birth onwards.”
Nor is it a problem exclusive to Italy: in 2010 a vegan couple in Lewisham, south London, had to fight a legal battle to prevent social services taking away their five-year-old son, who appeared to have rickets.
Specialist NHS dietician Sandra Hood, who is a vegan, says the diet can be a healthy choice for anyone – during pregnancy, childhood and adulthood – as long as it is balanced and carefully planned.
“My experience is that vegan parents provide their children with a wider variety of foods than their omnivorous peers,” says Hood, the author of
She says that reports of vegan children suffering deficiencies are rare, and these children have often been weaned on to extreme and poorly planned fruitarian or macrobiotic regimes, rather than vegan diets.
“Fewer parents are now asking me whether a vegan diet is suitable for children,” she says. “Instead, they are eagerly asking for ideas for suitable child-friendly vegan recipes.” However, dietician Helen Bond warns that vegan parents must
ensure their children get the vitamins they could otherwise miss out on with no meat, fish or dairy in their diet.
“For instance, are they going to get enough protein and vitamin B12, which are predominantly only in animal foods?
“Parents also need to be aware of omega fats – found in fish, nuts and plant-based oils, and important for maintaining healthy eyes and healthy brain function – and selenium, important for immunity, which we tend to get from meat and fish.
“Calcium is crucial as children need to build up healthy, strong bones. If they’re not going to get it from dairy products such as milk, they need to make sure their plant-based milk is fortified with calcium.” Vitamin D, which we get from sunlight but is also present in foods such as eggs, is also vital to increase the absorption of calcium, says Bond.
Laura Pierson, a vegan for three years and a vegetarian all her life, is raising her three-month-old daughter Seren on a vegan diet. She feels the diet helped keep her strong during pregnancy and she simply took vitamins supplemented with B12.
Laura, 26, who lives with her partner Jimmy in West Yorkshire, adds: “After a long labour, I ended up having to have a caesearean. I lost double the amount of blood that is normal, which would usually mean you would need a transfusion, but because my iron levels were so high I didn’t need one.”
Laura says the key is to eat lots of colourful vegetables, spinach and lentils, all of which are packed with iron, along with food rich in vitamin C, such as citrus fruits, as this helps with the absorption of iron.
She says her health visitor and midwife support her and Jimmy’s vegan lifestyle. “Most breastfed babies lose weight within the first 10 days and then start to gain it again. Seren never lost any weight, she just went straight on and gained it, so they were really impressed and really happy with her progress.
“I’m hungry all the time now so I have lots of carbohydrates like vegetarian shepherd’s pie and pasta to give me lots of calories. We cook everything from scratch and eat well – Seren seems to be thriving.”