Italian Lawmaker Wants to Jail Parents Who Feed Children a Vegan Diet
Parents could receive ONE year in prison!
Italian Member of Parliament Elvira Savino wants the government to jail parents who feed their children a vegan diet. She claims she has nothing against the vegan diet, which requires absolutely NO animal products:
“I just find it absurd that some parents are allowed to impose their will on children in an almost fanatical, religious way, often without proper scientific knowledge or medical consultation,” she said.
Most pediatricians have nothing against a vegan diet for children as long as they receive nutrients in other ways, especially vitamin B12. But numerous cases of malnourished children in Italy inspired Savino, especially since at least four only had a vegan diet:
Last month in the northern city of Milan, doctors determined that a one-year-old boy who was taken to a hospital had the weight of a three-month-old because of a vegan diet.
In 2015, an Italian court ordered a divorced mother to stop raising her 12-year-old son on a vegan diet after the boy’s father filed a complaint that it was stunting his growth.
In her bill, she wrote:
“There is no objection if the person making this choice is an informed adult. The problem arises when children are involved… The vegetarian or vegan diet is, in fact, deficient in zinc, iron, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and omega-3”.
Her draft bill aims to “stigmatise the reckless and dangerous eating behaviour imposed by parents” who pursue a vegan diet, “to the detriment of minors”.
Offenders would face up to a year in jail – rising to a maximum of four years where the child suffers illness or permanent injury and six years in the case of death.
Savino also said she wants pediatricians “to report vegan parents to authorities just as they would if they noticed signs of physical abuse on a child.”
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Comments
I am glad you included the background on this below the fold. There was actually a case where a vegan nursing mother had a child die of malnutrition.
It’s not really vegan diet per se. Anybody who tries to feed a young child nothing buy soy milk and apple juice deserves to go to jail.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/vegan-couple-serve-life-sentences-starving-baby-death-court-rules-article-1.957707
The vegan diet is not just unhealthy for a human but dangerous to the environment as well due to agriculture. All those eco-terrorist…I mean environmentalist, who want more and more people to eat vegan are simultaneously supporting the destruction of the very thing they claim to protect.
I’m torn between my disdain for the nanny state and my disdain for vegan idiocy.
when the parents are idiots, and immediate family can’t/won’t step in, it is a reasonable exercise in governmental power to intervene on the child’s behalf, if only to ensure that the kid has a chance to grow up to be a healthy, productive member of society, rather than permanently disabled due to diet related issues.
Something tells me that our own Child Protective Services can get pretty mean on this issue.
This could result in an education for (mostly left of center) vegans when leftist legislators decide to remove their parental rights.
this is no different than vegan cat owners trying to feed their pets a vegan diet…
cats need protein and kids need nutrients.
I’ve always believed that if we were meant to be ‘vegan’, we’d be ruminants.
Imagine, sitting around, chewing your cud with your friends…
🙂
They should also imprison those vegans who keep annoying the rest of us with their constant inane accusations.
Oh, wait … That’s ALL of them !
Our dentition tells us we are omnivores.
Always go by your dentition…
Plant-based diets are healthy and prevent obesity, heart disease and cancer (China Study by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., and also see work by Dr. Cauldwell Esselstyn, M.D. Of Cleveland Clinic). Junk food diets are the opposite. A “vegan” diet can be healthy or harmful depending upon which category one follows. Education is key to good nutrition.
A vegan diet can be healthy, but it requires a good deal of knowledge and careful planning to provide all necessary nutrients, and that goes double for small children. My Hindu friends in India who were vegetarian used milk and milk products, which helps a lot.
There are many uninformed comments in the article above. Of Course, all of the vitamins and minerals of concern listed above with the exception of B12 which is produced by bacteria, come from plants. There are no nutrients including protein which are not more easily and healthfully obtained from plant foods. Many people mistakenly think that a well planned Vegan or plant based diet is unhealthy for children, it is not. A Whole foods plant based diet is the most nutrient dense diet available.
Meat is toxic to the human body and the epidemic of diet related chronic disease in western societies is proof of this. All nutrition comes from Plants period. Running plants through a Cow Pig or Chicken dilutes the nutrition available and the toxicity of the difficult to digest animal protein, saturated fat, cholesterol, free radicals, heim iron, bone weakening acidity, carcinogens, IGF-1, fecal bacteria, antibiotics, hormones, dioxins, and host of other toxins often result in disease and disability and even early death. Studies have shown that meat eating children have the beginnings of heart disease as early as age 10. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1619200) Meat is not a part of a healthy diet, and to the extent that it replaces nutrient dense whole plant foods, it contributes to malnutrition and sets the child up for a future of health problems.
As for B12, studies have shown that this nutrient, which is made by bacteria and has been removed from the human diet by modern sanitation, is not bioavailable from meat.http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2000/000802.htm Here is a quote from the article; “the researchers found no association between plasma B12 levels and meat, poultry, and fish intake, even though these foods supply the bulk of B12 in the diet. “It’s not because people aren’t eating enough meat,” Tucker said. “The vitamin isn’t getting absorbed.” So not even B12 can any longer be used as an excuse to eat meat.
As the parents of young children it is essential that good health habits be instilled from an early age. Providing a well balanced plant based diet (http://media.jamanetwork.com/news-item/eating-more-plant-protein-associated-with-lower-risk-of-death/) will set the child up for a long life of health and wellness. Just like it has for the healthiest longest lived populations on the planet, documented by the Blue Zones research. All the Blue Zones studied got the vast majority of their nutrition from plant foods.
Prof. Jacobson, I’d like to apologize for my tone in the following response to Vegan4Health. The studies he linked to are outdated and he flat out misrepresents the studies. He’s living in the 1970’s when the USDA Food Pyramid was king.
You claim the comments to the article are uniformed. With all due respect, your comment is full of malarkey.
“There are no nutrients including protein which are not more easily and healthfully obtained from plant foods.” I’m curious which plants you are eating to get enough DHA. Flax seeds and rapeseed oil contain ALA, but must be converted to DHA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947 “More specifically, most studies in humans have shown that whereas a certain, though restricted, conversion of high doses of ALA to EPA occurs, conversion to DHA is severely restricted.”
From the abstract of the linked study: “The vegetarian diet, with an average n-6/n-3 ratio of 10/1, promotes biochemical n-3 tissue decline. To ensure physical, mental and neurological health vegetarians have to reduce the n-6/n-3 ratio with an additional intake of direct sources of EPA and DHA, regardless of age and gender.” Those direct sources of DHA are from animals.
“Meat is toxic to the human body…” You link to a study from 1992 that said no such thing. It did say that high LDL and low HDL serum cholesterol increase the risk of alterosclerosis, but did not discuss diet. You know what raises LDL and lowers HDL? Grains. Want to fatten up a cow before slaughter… feed it grains. More and more research is showing that it’s the processed carbohydrates from grains that are causing a whole host of diseases, not animal protein or fats.
From your comment: “http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2000/000802.htm Here is a quote from the article; the researchers found no association between plasma B12 levels and meat, poultry, and fish intake, even though these foods supply the bulk of B12 in the diet. ‘It’s not because people aren’t eating enough meat,’ Tucker said. ‘The vitamin isn’t getting absorbed.'”
Later in the article: ”
Tucker can only speculate about the reasons for poor absorption of the vitamin from meat among younger adults or why B12 appears to be better absorbed from dairy products than from meats.
Fortified cereals are a different story. Tucker said the vitamin is sprayed on during processing and is ‘more like what we get in supplements.'”
FORTIFIED CEREALS: B12 is generally not found in plants, but must be added as part of the processing. You know, processed carbs… so healthy! /sarc
In regards to your third link, you left out a very important detail. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-08-protein-death.html
“More careful analysis revealed that the association of animal protein intake with an elevated mortality risk only applied to participants with at least one factor associated with an unhealthy lifestyle – being either obese or underweight, heavy alcohol consumption, a history of smoking, or physical inactivity. In fact, the association disappeared in participants with a healthy lifestyle. Analysis based on specific sources of protein indicated that the animal-protein-associated mortality risk applied primarily to processed and unprocessed red meats, which include both beef and pork products, and not to protein from fish or poultry.”
So what we all already knew, fish and poultry are better choices.
You have to turn in your man card to be vegan.