Strict vegetarians ‘are harming their children’

STRICT vegetarians who insist their children live by the maxim “meat is murder” are doing them permanent damage, a leading nutrition expert said yesterday.

Denying growing children animal products in their diet during the critical first few years of life was "unethical" and could do permanent damage, said Professor Lindsay Allen, from the University of California at Davis. She conducted a study which showed that adding just two spoonfuls of meat to the diet of poverty-stricken children in Africa transformed them both physically and mentally.

Over a period of two years the children almost doubled their muscle development, and showed dramatic improvements in mental skills. They also became more active, talkative and playful at school.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, Prof Allen said: "Animal source foods have some nutrients which are not found anywhere else. If you're talking about feeding young children and pregnant women and lactating women I would go as far as to say it is unethical to withhold these foods during that period of life."

She was especially critical of parents who imposed a vegan lifestyle on their children which denied them milk, cheese and butter as well as meat.

"There's absolutely no question that it's unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans," she said.

Meat provides a concentrated source of essential micronutrients such as zinc, vitamin B12, calcium, iron and vitamin A which cannot easily be obtained solely from plant foods.

The study involved 544 children in Kenya, typically aged about seven, whose diet chiefly consists of starchy, low-nutrition corn and bean staples lacking these micronutrients.

Over a period of two years, one group of the children was given a daily supplement of two ounces of meat equivalent to about two spoonfuls of mince.

Two other groups received either a cup of milk a day or an oil supplement containing the same amount of energy. The diet of a fourth group was unaltered.

The changes seen in the children given the meat, and to a lesser extent the milk or oil, were dramatic.

Prof Allen, who is director of the US Agricultural Research Service's Western Human Nutrition Research Centre at Davis, said: "It was found that compared with controls that had no intervention, the meat group had 80% more increase in muscle mass over the two years of the study, and the milk and energy group had 40% more increase in muscle mass."