French vegan parents on trial over baby's death

Imagine what the baby looked like...

To parent question. YES!

To parent question, absolutely NOT, assuming that the mother is getting all the nutrition she needs.

11 months is definitely NOT too long to feed breast milk only.

a diet of only breast milk would be fine though IF the mother was eating correctly. vegans are always always at risk of b12 deficiency because some of the only places to get it is from animals and animal products. this lady is just an idiot for not know a) how true veganism works, the risks, the precautions, ect and b) how babies develop

It’s sad that we have gotten to the point where we have to tell people to feed their damn kids. Goodness gracious!

*Good post by the way.

It is sad, I whole heartedly agree!

*Thanks BTW

The child did not die from bronchitis. It died from lack of nutrients, thus the mother being a vegan caused the child's death.

I don't find that funny. Sure, being vegan is a lot of work, what diet isn't? I was vegan for about two years in college and it wasn't nearly as challenging as my gluten free diet is now.

Agreed.

Agreed

Babies that age generally need nothing other than breast milk. Studies prove that exclusively breast milk for the first year is the best option for most babies. What the mother needed was the proper nutrition. Mothers need more than just prenatal vitamins, they need a full and balanced diet while breastfeeding too, not just for the health of the baby, but for the health of the mother as well. The first year of life is so vitally important to the development of a human baby.

An 11 month old isn't an infant.

These parents were neglectful of their child and the result was death; not a case of death due to a freak accident. They avoided clear telling signs that the child was not in good health; non-weight gain was not the only issue here.

This is a difficult one to form an opinion on...I feel for the parents, but still think they should be held accountable.

Neglecting her was exactly what these parents did (allegedly) to the point that she died. :(

Their is lots of debate about how long to just feed a child breast milk. The common consensus is that babies should be fed only breast-milk until they are 6 months old. While this baby is 11 months old, I wouldn't necessarily say common sense should tell a person that breast milk is not enough.

I do agree that they should not have ignored the doctors instructions and that if the baby was sick they should have looked at the diet as a possibility. The mother should have been taking vitamin b12 supplements, but I don't see how a vegan could not have plenty of vitamin A. This makes me think the deficiency was caused by something other than the mom's diet.

I am sure French Law mandates that special diets be respected in prison. I know the US does. Though, when I was in jail for a weekend, being a vegetarian, I ate better than most inmates. I could trade my meat dish for two or three sides.

Baby louise was only 11 months had her mother been getting the right nutrition , it would have been fine for a child that age or older to live on breastmilk.

Actually, breast milk alone should be plenty for at least the first year of life and this baby was only 11 months old. My first son wouldn't eat anything other than breast milk for over a year and he's a healthy 5 year old now. In most cases, breast milk alone WILL provide all the wholesome nutrition a baby needs. The problem is that the mother was extremely deficient and didn't follow doctors advice.

"The couple did not follow the doctor's advice to hospitalise the baby who was suffering from bronchitis and was losing weight when they went for the nine-month check-up," Daquo said.

Ive heard of mothers going as long till the child was 3 years plus with nothing but breastmilk

I doubt going that long on exclusively breast milk could be healthy for baby or mom. Breastfeeding for that long, or longer, would be great for the baby's/child's health, but somewhere around a year or so, babies need whole foods in addition to breast milk.

Standard dietary requirements for babies are pretty much universal and many healthy parents with healthy children can decide to breastfeed up to three years of age. That is not the argument here. The child and mother were both deficient in necessary vitamins and as the article states the child more than likely became deficient in these vitamins because of the diet of the mother. To claim that she was deficient because of another reason is far-fetched at best.

Many vegan parents choose to feed their children a vegan diet. That is fine but this isn’t the first nor will it be the last time that a child dies because of insufficient vitamins, minerals, and proteins from their vegan diet. In this particular case, the parents chose to only feed their daughter breast milk. That’s not even a standard diet for a typical baby vegan diet. Ideally, breast milk is a superior choice but the reality is that solely feeding a baby breast milk can have it’s consequences because it is lacking in DHA and that is a requirement for brain and eye development. Breast milk alone is not suitable if the mother is deficient in vitamins. A trip to a doctor to run tests to determine if you are healthy enough to breast-feed and impart necessary nutrition to you baby could have been done to determine this but it wasn’t. Commonsense should tell you at the very least get that checked out.

You mention supplements but supplements are poor substitutes for sustenance.

All in all, these parents ignored the medical advice of a doctor when he or she informed the parents that they should check the baby into the hospital due to illness and weight-loss but they refused as many vegan parents do because of fear that the medicine and treatments prescribed are tested on animals.

You bring up good points and I agree. After six months a baby should be given other foods. (http://www.who.int/features/qa/21/en/index.html) The only thing I was questioning was if it really is commonsense when there are compelling arguments on both sides of this issue.

Also, when I said supplements I was also referring to food fortified with the vitamin. While it could be argued that vitamins in supplements are not adsorbed as well as when a person eats a food with that vitamin, to my knowledge, eating grains fortified with vitamins is no different than eating a food product that naturally has the vitamin. As for vitamin A, it seems really odd that the baby would be deficient when so many common vegan staples contain it. So if the deficiency was caused by diet, it has nothing to do with the mom being vegan is what I was getting at.

But that’s the thing there aren’t any compelling arguments on both sides for the implementation of a vegan diet in babies. Adults… perhaps but not babies.

For a vegan baby to meet the daily requirements of vitamins and minerals, even before the age of 1, he or she is often given several supplements on a regularly basis. Vitamin B-12, Vitamin D, Iron, and even fluoride just to name a few are given. As I have already stated supplements are poor substitutes for sustenance especially in the case of children under the age of five whose development is greatly dependent upon their nutritional intake.

“So if the deficiency was caused by diet, it has nothing to do with the mom being vegan is what I was getting at.”

This is double-talk. The deficiency was caused by the diet… the vegan diet that the mother chose for her child. How and why you are you separating the fact that the mother was a vegan from her implementing a vegan diet upon her baby is beyond me.

Furthermore, as I have already stated the mother was not even following a standard baby vegan diet but even if she did that does not mean that this tragedy could not happen if she did follow that standard. There are several cases where vegan parents fed their babies a relatively standard vegan diet and the child still died from starvation, malnutrition and other ailments all due to an improper diet. Caleb Moorhead, Areni Maneulyan*, Crown Shakur, Woyah Andressohns, and IIce Swinton (nearly died) are all dead because of the vegan diets that their parents decided that they should have.

*In the case of Maneulyan, her mom saw a pediatrician who informed her that her breast milk was deficient in much needed vitamins and nutrients because of her strict vegan diet and in turn her baby was not getting enough nutrients and she also chose to ignore the advice of the physician to change her diet. In fact, she not only ignored the advice, she relocated to a vegetarian commune in Spain.

"But that’s the thing there aren’t any compelling arguments on both sides for the implementation of a vegan diet in babies. Adults… perhaps but not babies. "

I was talking about arguments for feeding a baby only breast milk. Many people are compelled to either side of this debate. The fact that you or I may not find an argument compelling does not mean that others won't, as this story proves.

"The deficiency was caused by the diet… the vegan diet "

I was separating vegan diets from the mother's diet which happened to be vegan. You can't blame a vegan diet for vitamin A deficiency when there are plenty of vegan sources of it. If the mother choose not to eat foods with vitamin A it had nothing to do with her being vegan. I am not excusing a vegan diet from causing any other deficiencies.

On everything else, don't be so defensive. I said I agree with you! See:

"You bring up good points and I agree. "

and

"I do agree that they should not have ignored the doctors instructions and that if the baby was sick they should have looked at the diet as a possibility. "

Don’t tell that to a vegan. They will rip your head off.

Who are you to have complete knowledge of the "nature" of man? I don't think anybody is qualified to say what man naturally should be. As Plutarch wrote of meat-eaters: "If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax."

While I don't think their are strong arguments for humans being naturally vegan, the arguments for man being natural vegetarian, to me, seem to outweigh any argument that men are "made" to eat meat. Though, I would be curious to what objective evidence you have that men are not naturally vegan.

Vegans are usually all about non-violence, so I think your comment is completely false, even figuratively speaking.

case in point, see just below.

an what eat it?

So questioning someone is ripping their head off? I even used the disjunct "to me" so not to invalidate your opinion. Also, I am not a vegan.

Are you really that daft that you thought I literally meant that a vegan would remove the head of a human being? Kahahaha… that was hilarious!

Oh and please do not spread the falsehood that vegans are usually all about non-violence when a blogger has been and is still receiving death threats on her life and the life of her family because she is no longer a vegan. I mean really death threats on her life and the life of her family all because she had no choice but to re-introduce meat and meat products into her diet.

http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/19/a-vegan-no-more/

http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/22/vegan-defector-talks-back/

Exactly...

No. Displaying an irascible disposition and unnecessary emotionalism at the very thought of someone having a different opinion is ripping someone’s head off.

Hmmm... Why unaided by any cleaver or cudgel? I'm pretty sure when ancient man sharpened his first wooden spear, there was no turning back to using bare hands.

Generally, modern society is out of touch with all our food sources, not just meat.

I agree, but where do you draw the line from natural to unnatural? To me it seems that if you grant any made made tools as being natural than all things man made must then be considered natural.

I didn't mean to come off as emotional and I definitely wasn't and still am not angry or wish to give the false impression that I am angry. In fact, I was more agreeing than not. I merely wanted to point out the fallacy of taking a deterministic stance on an issue that I don't think can every be satisfactorily understood.

The quote isn't implying that people are out of touch from their found source, but rather that left to purely natural means people would not be able to easily, if at all, kill an animal and eat it.

Our natural abilities are a reflection of evolution, and are therefore ever changing. the fact that we now use tools (which is not even a human exclusive trait) when there was a time when we didn't is no more unnatural then the fact that our earliest ancestors were probably single celled organisms whereas we are now multicellular organisms.

"How can you scold someone for accurately stating the scientifically accepted nature of human beings"

You are correct. I see I was out of place to "scold" Nephwrack. Perhaps, his matter-of-fact period-after-every-word style did hit me wrong. Never-the-less, I opened the box so I might as well reply to you.

The difference between Nephwrack's and Plutarch's views is that the former is an affirmation of the nature of man and the latter does not make any affirmations but only questions the affirmations of others. Also, I wouldn't call Plutarch's opinion a fail just because some other species use tools. If anything it brings up an interesting philosophical question: What is the line between natural and unnatural? Or is there one? Philosophical undertones aside, somewhere down the evolutionary line humans or their ape ancestors learned to use tools, before this knowledge was gained, as Plutarch intends to point out, man's ancestors most likely did not eat meat. I concede this argument only works if a person maintains that tools (knives, guns, spears) are unnatural.

I would like to know what hardware a man has that is solely for eating meat? I know we have plenty of hardware for plant consumption. Lets, see flat molars for grinding; no sharp teeth ideal for meat. We have an intestine track twelve times the length of our body, like most herbivores, that is good for digesting plants but not so good for meat (decaying meat needs to be expelled quicker). Our stomach acid is weaker than other carnivores.Also, man's closest relatives chimps and/or orangutangs are, for the most part, vegetarian. These are a few of the non-subjective reasons I am vegetarian, but I am not bold enough to claim that it is mans nature to be vegetarian.

"Our natural abilities are a reflection of evolution, and are therefore ever changing."

Therefore you must understand my point that any affirmation of the nature of man is a fallacy because it is ever changing.

No you were trying to imply that human being would not eat meat if they were restricted to their “natural” abilities. This is false at any rate because it assumes using tools or anything outside of the subjects own tooth and claws is not a natural reflection of intelligence or simply convenience. This ignores the plethora of symbiotic relationships animals exploit for their own personal gain. For instance where I’m from gopher turtles and rattlesnakes have a tendency to inhabit the same burrows. The snake exploits the turtles natural ability to dig a good burrow and the turtle puts up with the snake because it will defend the burrow from other predators.

There is nothing unnatural about any of this.

Getting back to the original point I was trying to make though, just because life has a potential to evolve it does not mean that whatever behavior a life form might perform is inherently unnatural. If that was the case then nothing living could be natural because before life the “natural” order of the universe did not include living things. Therefore if that was the point you were trying to make in the first place then there would be no reason to define anything living as EVER doing anything “natural.”

"The difference between Nephwrack's and Plutarch's views is that the former is an affirmation of the nature of man and the latter does not make any affirmations but only questions the affirmations of others."

Actually he does by assuming intelligence can only be applied with the body and not to the world around the person.

"Also, I wouldn't call Plutarch's opinion a fail just because some other species use tools. If anything it brings up an interesting philosophical question: What is the line between natural and unnatural? Or is there one?"

So your proposing a philosophical rebuke of a scientific fact. You're now on par with the intelligent design folks.

"Philosophical undertones aside, somewhere down the evolutionary line humans or their ape ancestors learned to use tools, before this knowledge was gained, as Plutarch intends to point out, man's ancestors most likely did not eat meat."

You know what almost every primate, especially social primates do? They groom each other, and more importantly they eat all those little insects. They also tend to scavenge a a lot which favors an omnivorous diet.

"I would like to know what hardware a man has that is solely for eating meat? I know we have plenty of hardware for plant consumption. Lets, see flat molars for grinding; no sharp teeth ideal for meat. "

Humans have four relatively strong limbs but that doesn't mean we are supposed to walk on all fours.

"We have an intestine track twelve times the length of our body, like most herbivores, that is good for digesting plants but not so good for meat (decaying meat needs to be expelled quicker)."

Or just the right type of digestive system to be an omnivore.

"Our stomach acid is weaker than other carnivores"

Because true or obligate carnivores can't digest plants but still require the nutrients found in plants so their digestive systems are optimized to acquire those nutrients from what they can eat.

"Also, man's closest relatives chimps and/or orangutangs are, for the most part, vegetarian."

Yes but diet, nature and classification can on the surface imply completely different things. For instance a panda bear belongs to the carnivora group has a diet of bamboo leaves but it is at the same time is a natural omnivore. the same logic applies in reverse with a polar bear. It subsides mainly on meat but can and will eat plants if given the chance. All in all despite the conflicting evidence no one bothers to argue whether or not bears are actually omnivores.

Yeah, like I would really think that.

In my experience, with the vegans I know, they are vegan because of the violence against animals that eating them entails. I would say that the death threat person was extreme to say the least and they would not be representative of vegans as a whole.

I'm saying people are out of touch with most of their food and if people were more in touch with the meat they eat, they would be able to kill and eat the animals that they themselves raised. Or maybe they might just make cheese and drink milk.

Ding, ding, ding, ding! Correct. Our teeth are omnivore teeth. Not sharp and serrated enough to be 'only' carnivores, not flat enough to be only herbivores.

It was NOT a single person. There were dozens of people sending death and/or violent threats. On another note, she was harassed by the so-called average vegan and sent scathing correspondence talking about how much of bad person she was and how she could not possibly have been a real vegan to begin with and that she just didn’t try hard enough. You can read examples of that in the link I posted. But point taken. Moving on…

the fact that we have upper teeth at all discounts us as being vegan.

someone who has read origin of the species and studied biology.

naa plant a flower in it

AAh Shit if Ya gonna go to all the trouble of killing something You might as well eat it. Other wise there is no sense in killing it. Well unless it's trying to eat you. Then Ya have the right to defend yourself.

Oh, dear, I sure wish you hadn't generalized like that. Neither I, nor my many vegan friends, would even THINK of wanting to rip off someone's head (literally, obviously, and certainly figuratively, as well). In fact, that actually goes against WHY folks such as I ARE living a vegan lifestyle.

That actually hurt that you'd label all of us as violent when, in fact, more often than not, we vegans (at least the ones who do it for the sake of life, and not "only" for health reasons) are pacifists.

I hope you'll reconsider your statement. It just isn't true... really.

That is ONE case... and a really, really horrible one, to be sure.

But please try to get to know me a bit, won't you? I would/could never behave that way.

[By the way, just in case it starts going in this direction, I'll jump ahead and tell you that, despite my veganism, I am not a member of PETA or ALF.]

Nowhere in any of my statements did I claim or imply that “all” vegans were violent. I was simply stating that there is a violent element in the vegan community that is often ignored because ironically, as part of the vegan philosophy, vegans claim to not eat animals or animal products because they do not want to bring harm to another being but on the other hand, there are hundreds of cases where vegans actually harm and terrorize other human beings.

This was not just ONE isolated incident. I can list at least a dozen cases where vegans have threatened and/or terrorized other people all because of their choice to use and/or eat meat and meat products. It’s pretty ridiculous to pretend that this was some ‘once in a blue’ occurrence.

1) Volkert van der Graaf killed politician Pim Fortuyn. He was a member of terrorist group, “Furious Potatoes,” who often use illegal means, including violence, to “protect” animals.
2) In the US, six members of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA (SHAC-USA) group were charged and convicted of animal enterprise terrorism, stalking, and conspiracy of interstate stalking and many other crimes. These people were found to also have been threatening the lives of cancer researchers and their families. This group also boldly facilitated and encouraged members to use violence and firebomb the cars of their targets. All of this because of some vegan philosophy.
3) Two homemade bombs were planted and exploded at Chiron Corp. headquarters. The terrorist group, “Revolutionary Cells—animal liberation brigade” was the culprit.
4) The ALF, another terrorist group, planted two incendiary devices outside of a McDonalds. A McDonalds where innocent families eat.

I can go on but the Foundation for Biomedical Research group has been doing a good job of documenting illegal “activist” activity from 1997 to now. One commonality between each of the terrorist groups and the offenders are their vegan philosophy and their extremism. To pretend like there isn’t a connection between this philosophy and the actions of these terrorists is foolish.

http://fbresearch.wsol.net/OneColumnWireframe.aspx?pageid=169

Having said all of this, I know that not all vegans are lunatics but there is something about the ethics of veganism that many people use to justify terrorism.