Parents who force vegan diets on their kids face jail time under new Italian law

Why, on both of those points?

A diet is inadequate if it does not provide the body with the vitamins, proteins, etc, that it needs.

What makes vegans inadequate people?

What a stupid law.

Whats wrong with bringing your children up on a HEALTHY vegan diet.

Should parent who force a meat eating diet be prosecuted as well?

Is that why vegans are more likely to live longer than people who eat meat.

ffs do you even logic?

Listen just because yu don't like someones reasons for a diet it doesn't mean that the diet itself is inadequate. You idiot.

All of you are absolute morons.

Are they locking up people who over feed their kids on a diet of sugar and crap?

I just don't think vegans aren't trustworthy . And most are pompous asses.**
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Obviously not because eating meat is normal, for normal people.
* *Vegans are just weird. *


That's what they *want *you to think. And it is entirely inadequate. A vegan diet lacks meat, children should grow up with meat as part of a healthy diet. They shouldn't have their parents ridiculous vegan beliefs shoved down their throats from an early age, or be brainwashed to believe that being vegan is normal. It's not. *

Trololol

* *

They should, but first let's concentrate on the evil vegans.*

Lol. The way I see this is like forcing religion on your child.

Both are wrong x

Hey, it's cool that you're actually asking a valid question rather than slating vegans or vegetarians without any knowledge of their diets. In the most genuine way, thank you for asking this question.

Any diet is all about balance, right? It's what the Greeks prioritised in their medicine - Hippocrates (famous doctor-man, Father of Modern Medicine, no big deal) would treat his patients through 'controlled diet and exercise'. They even erected a bunch of buildings dedicated to bathing people and getting them exercised to try and cure their ills! I mean... they then left them in a room with a bunch of hallucinogenic drugs so the patients dreamed they were being cured by a God and his two daughters whilst priests rubbed snake venom in their eyes... where was I going with this?

Balance, okay got it. If you look at the food pyramid/food pie chart/whatever easy way the food groups can be presented, you'll notice that it comprises of several sections right? On the government website of stuff I found this (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/528193/Eatwell_guide_colour.pdf) which has the different groups: fruit and veg, carbs, oil, dairy and protein. On there, there's obviously a ton of non-vegan products, but I can hopefully go through each section with you so you can see the variety available to vegans, and to any child/adult on a vegan diet.

Fruit and veg: I think this one is pretty self explanatory... (hopefully), vegans can have pretty much any fruit or veg, although some would prefer eating fruit in season to reduce the impact on the environment, but the world is our (vegan) oyster as far as veg is concerned.

Carbs: pretty much every type of carb on that chart is vegan! I regularly eat pasta with vegan pesto, mashed potatoes with Flora vegan butter, bread (checking the ingredients, some have sneaky milk in them), bagels are vegan, couscous with chickpeas or veg oh my, sweet potatoes and baked potatoes with Heinz beans!, special K cereal... as long as you check the label and sometimes swap around bits and pieces, you can get all the carbs your body needs without animals suffering.

Oils: olive oil is all cool and groovy, but the problem would be "butter"; 10 or so years ago vegans would be utterly screwed, but due to the benefits of having a population becoming more aware of our environmental impact/the fact that being vegan is "trendy", Flora have released their dairy free butter and it's AMAZING. Literally none of my friends can tell the difference until I tell them! That butter can be put on toast, mashed potato, cookery and baking... it's wonderful.

Dairy: okay on that pie chart admittedly there's only one type of dairy listed (soya milk), but there's other things like almond milk which is low calorie and super yummy which you can have on cereal! There are alternative cheeses too and some of them are actually alright... dairy would be my only concern when raising a kid vegan, but if you carefully monitored their food for a little bit, you'd realise that there's actually a lot of calcium in things that you didn't realise: a glass of soya milk has basically all the calcium in it, tofu, loads of greens like spinach cabbage and rocket, ORANGES, and more. However, I'd recommend taking a calcium supplement just to be sure #take ur vitamins! Calcium fortified cereal like special K is also a really excellent source. You say "kids are supposed to drink milk" but we were supposed to drink our mothers' milk, not the milk made for baby cows? Are our kids baby cows? I mean... I don't judge... but seriously, a baby will get their vitamins/minerals from those baby formulae, they exist for the sole reason of giving babies what they might not get in their mothers' milk, and once the kid is old enough to get their daily calcium dose from other sources - a bowl of special K or anything for breakfast with soya milk would be pretty much enough! - they will be absolutely fine. There are now soya yoghurts, soya chocolate milk, vegan milk chocolate (I'm bleeding out my uterus right now and I'm scoffing down a ton of the vegan Dairy Milk, it's fantastic) and SOYA ICE CREAM COVERED WITH MELTED VEGAN CHOCOLATE AND CHOPPED UP OREOS. Whoever said vegans were healthy is so, so wrong...

Protein: "uh muh GAWD where do you get your PROTEIN from?!" is the question asked by meat-eaters who don't quite get how vegan diets work. From the items listed on the pie chart in the "meat" section, 4/10 (or 2/5 if you like your simplified fractions) are vegan: lentils, beans/baked beans, chickpeas and nuts. Heck, almonds have a huge amount of calcium AND protein?! Granted, a lot of the foods there are more "sophisticated", but if a kid grows up with quinoa (which is tasty and protein full by the way), they'll like it and they'll get used to it. Also, there are a load of chickpea and black bean burgers so if they wanted, they could live off ketchup and vegan proteiny burgers if they wanted! Vegan cooking doesn't have to require effort, just heating up an oven and shoving in some oven chips and a burger.

For junk food, I've already mentioned ice cream, burgers, oreos and vegan chocolate. There are also Pringles, party rings, custard, curries, digestive biscuits, rich teas, some brands of bourbons, vodka (less suited to kids though) and a million other ways I cope with periods. Seriously, I'm spoiled for choice, and if you do veganism right, so will the kids.

If you're an a-hole and just feed your kids lettuce and tomato salad for every meal, your kids will grow up sick and deficient not because of their vegan diet but because you're a terrible parent.

Thank you for the detailed reply!
I'm a vegeterian myself so I understand that most things can be replaced. However that is not always the case. Let's take me for an example. When I ate meat my blood iron levels were just a bit over the lowest it should get and when I stopped eating meat it fell a bit more so it was below the normal minimum. Now, I can easily drink a nice glass of orange flavoured supplements every day but I would rather a kid didnt have to do that. I mean we're talking about babies here and while supplements are getting better ,youvare still feeding your kid chemistry. That's the way I see it at least.

My biggest concern would be dairy as well.
93% of soy is genetically modified so you'd either have to pay a lot to find the 7% that is not or again feed your baby something of questionable quality.

Since you mentioned the food pyramid which is basically the mediterranean diet, I believe that it would be the ideal diet for children and people in general. Not because I'm Greek but it's one of the things we got right ( and much like other thungs we chose to forget about it later on, although you could say they were reason for that at some points). In my ideal world everyone eats meat 2,3 times a month and we don't need to murder disgustingly big amounts of poor animals everyday. Unfortunately the world is ****ed...
If things were like that I might not have been a vegeterian cause things would not be as inhuman as theyvare now. My family would probably eat an animal every two months not one and their extented family within a week.

As you said the key to everything is balance. A diet full of meat is definetely not healthy ( if not a but disgusting) but I think that especially for a baby neither is a vegan one.

Is the government going to do something about all those little fat blobs waddling out of MacDonalds?

It's cool, I'm always up for talking about food and stuff, I'm seriously passionate about that.

Yeah, I can understand about the supplements - my mother was very close to dying because she wasn't eating enough of the right stuff, so I know the value of making sure you get enough iron. If I can give you any advice, it's to watch your B12 levels. It almost killed my mother and it sure as hell could affect anyone else.

I think we'd have a fundamental disagreement about chemicals and GMOs because I'm totally for genetically modified foods, I truly believe that synthetic food types are the future of nutrition, because if you can chemically engineer a food type which contains all the necessary vitamins and minerals for a person, there would be huge savings - land use would be drastically slashed depending on manufacturing methods, and the food supply wouldn't be dependent on weather conditions which can lead to famines where there's droughts and no plants grow. I'm all for whatever scientists can cook up in their labs if it helps people in countries affected by serious climate change issues.

I totally agree with you that being vegan/veggie shouldn't be a necessity if the meat and dairy industry was more humane, but unfortunately it's been shown that it's impossible to farm sustainably, even if everyone grew their own animals and ate that instead of factory meat. However, I totally get how a load of people can't fully get rid of meat from their diet like you due to complications with iron and other things. But our gross dependence upon meat and dairy is incredibly harmful to our bodies.

For a baby, I would feed my child with baby formula (packed with all the nutrients and minerals they would need, chemicals or not, because that's all formula really is? chemicals needed for growth?). When they're old enough to either take supplements or eat a balanced diet, I'd introduce them to a lot of vegan versions of their favourite meals, and if they don't like it I wouldn't stop them eating meat and dairy, I'd just try and balance their diet say, half vegan half... not. As you said, it's all about balance.