Vegan Fridays are nutritionally risky

The mayor’s once-a-week vegan menu for New York City’s public schools might sound like a healthy idea, but it could put some of our most vulnerable children on the road to poor nutrition.

The mayor’s regimen of fruits and vegetables seems to keep him in good health. The dietary needs of an adult man, however, are different from those of children, whose brains and bodies are still growing. In fact, foods such as cheese, milk, meat, fish and eggs are widely recognized as important sources for the complete proteins and essential nutrients crucial to children’s health.

The American Academy of Dietetics states that “well-planned vegetarian and vegan eating patterns can be healthful and appropriate for all stages of the lifecycle”; but “well planned” usually means taking supplements or consuming fortified foods. By contrast, the German and Swiss nutrition societies do not recommend vegan diets for children. Adding supplements to school meals is one possibility, yet nutrients are always better absorbed when eaten in their naturally occurring form. And shouldn’t we be teaching our children to eat whole foods?

One vegan lunch a week may seem trivial, particularly if the point is to balance out processed foods consumed at other times. However, New York City schoolchildren already have Meatless Mondays, and while wealthier families can afford to supplement with healthy proteins, many children rely heavily on school meals for their nutrition. Further, with the mayor amplifying the vegan-for-all message, he may well inspire rich and poor families alike to go vegan, when it might not be ideal for children.

As we learned from Meatless Mondays, meat is typically replaced by starchy foods like pizza bagels and bean salads. These foods unfortunately deliver less nutrition for more calories. For instance, a bagel and cup of cooked beans deliver about 25 grams of incomplete protein, which is inefficient for muscle-building, plus 100 grams of starches and sugars, all of which become simple sugars upon digestion — for a total of 500 calories. Compare this to a quarter-pound hamburger patty with zero sugars or starches and 20 grams of complete protein, for 204 calories.

The high level of starches and sugars is especially concerning, since these elevate blood sugar, a principal driver of obesity and diabetes. A recent estimate found more than 45% of children aged 5-to-11 are overweight or obese, and 35% of youths under age 20 are diabetic. Rates for Black and Brown children are consistently even higher. This issue is one that Adams, who had type 2 diabetes (which he says he reversed through a plant-based diet), obviously and understandably cares about.

Another concern with vegan diets is that while some groups claim that nutrients like iron are equally available from plant and animal foods, the scientific literature tells a different story. Meat, for instance, contains a form of iron that humans can absorb three to 10 times more readily than the iron in spinach. Other essential nutrients either absent in plant foods or present in forms humans cannot absorb well include vitamins B12, A and D3, as well as calcium and omega-3 fats. Those omega-3s could be why the mayor eats fish — another item too pricey for many disadvantaged families

“This is the stuff that keeps me up at night,” Regan Bailey, professor of nutrition science at Purdue University, told the Wall Street Journal in discussing nutritional deficiencies in girls. “Going into reproductive age at nutrition risk can cause intergenerational effects.”

In one government-funded clinical trial on 555 school children in Kenya, a lack of meat was shown to affect mental acuity. Children given a daily meat supplement over nearly two years consistently scored better on a test of general intelligence and abstract reasoning compared to groups receiving milk or energy supplements or no supplements at all. Another experiment provided school breakfasts to Kenyan children for 21 months and found that “children given meat showed fewer periods of low activity and more leadership behaviors and initiative than did children provided entirely with vegetable source foods.”

People might reasonably think American children cannot be compared to Kenyans, yet the vigorous promotion of vegan and vegetarian diets by media influencers and nutrition authorities like the leaders of the Harvard School of Public Health has helped lead to about a quarter of Americans saying they eat less red meat.

Already in 2016, adolescent girls ages 9 to 14 had low intakes of “protein, iron, folate, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12, and girls and boys have low intakes of phosphorus, magnesium and choline,” according to a government analysis.

The belief that meat consumption must be reduced to save the planet is also a strong motivating factor. Yet given the many other ways we could reduce carbon emissions, doing so by compromising the health of our children is morally dubious.

For the future of our kids, pass on the pizza and keep the meat. Growing bodies and brains depend on it.