This headline must be some sort of basic intelligence test, that sadly a number of poster are not passing.
Why do I say that?
The animal-product-free diet isn’t technically prohibited, and the ruling doesn’t necessarily equate veganism with child neglect. However, it will make it easier to prosecute parents who impose the strict diet and whose children have health problems.
and
However, opinions on this matter vary worldwide. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, is not opposed to vegan diets. "Although there have been case reports of children failing to thrive or developing cobalamin deficiency on vegan diets, these are rare exceptions," the academy notes on its website. "Multiple experts have concluded independently that vegan diets can be followed safely by infants and children without compromise of nutrition or growth and with some notable health benefits."
So if a kid in Belgium is visibly malnourished - ie, abused - and the mechanism of abuse is a restrictive diet that is not being applied correct, then the parents can go to jail. In general, the diet is not illegal in Belgium and one of the largest associations of childrens' doctors in the world (AAP) is not opposed to that restrictive diet (and comes close to endorsing it).
Cobalamin deficiency is a result of our prewashed food in wester society. Vitamin B12 is only created by bacteria on the surface of plants and excessive washing removes it.
Eat more dirt ;)
(I sometimes inject B12 IM due quite low blood levels detected last year. Regular intake of supplements should also do the trick).
The headline is somewhat misleading, unsurprisingly. Child neglect can lead to jail time. The ruling in question will make it easier to prosecute for child neglect in cases where children develop health problems due to a forced vegan diet without appropriate dietary supplements or medical follow-ups. The ruling itself is essentially a health authority stating that a vegan diet is not suitable for children unless properly supplemented - as far as I'm aware, it's generally accepted that vegans are at a high risk of certain deficiencies and need to pay particular attention to those.
Here in Sweden, there have been some relevant cases lately. In one case, a couple was convicted after keeping their baby on a strict vegan diet, and ignoring several warnings from doctors that the baby was malnourished and needed milk. In another case, which was national news earlier this year, a 17-month old infant was brought to the hospital, underdeveloped and so malnourished that, according to the trial, she would have died within hours and was only saved by intensive care. The parents, as it turned out, had only given the baby vegan food, and had never taken the baby for any checkups.
A step forward. Note this is the case in the USA also. If your child is malnurished for any reason, you are responsible. How people spin the protection of children as bad, because of their own bias, boggles the mind.
Nothing is wrong with feeding your kid veggies, but something IS wrong with denying your child nutrition based on your own philosophical hangups.
Parents necessarily experiment on their children. No one knows "the proper way" to raise children and if you trust psychologists, nutritionists, or the social sciences to "scientifically" tell you how to raise your child, I think you're far too credulous.
If a child's health is determined to be in danger and the medical authorities determine that the cause is dietary in nature and the parents refuse to address it, then rectify the problem using force. But the way to handle these things is on a case-by-case basis. Codifying this stuff in law (or making it "formal" in any way) is a mistake because abuse is defined by norms, not what a plurality of psychologists or nutrionists happen to think right now.
We can't stop parents from fucking up their kids. And if we try too hard, the cure will be worse than the disease.
There is no evidence (and actually evidence to the contrary) that a plant based diet can provide all essential nutrients.
Sounds like you watched Game Changers on Netflix and now that's your knowledge. None of that was scientific at all and full of inaccuracies.
All the athletes mentioned saw their performance go down after adopting a plant based diet.
There are virtual no athletes at the top of their sport who got there on a plant based diet (plenty who started on animal and then moved to plant, but you will see their performance drop).
Animals are needed to fight climate change. Without them the soils would have no nutrients. It's a symbiotic relationship. They eat plant matter we can't. Grown on areas that we couldn't grow stuff. So they are vital to supplement our food. Going plant based would be a huge ecological disaster.
> All the athletes mentioned saw their performance go down after adopting a plant based diet.
I'm sorry I must have watched a different film. The complete opposite of what you claim is portrayed in the film. Also my personal experience of regularly running and recovering from Ultramarathons suggests that you are wrong. My times and recovery rates are much much better on plant based diets.
Also the Amazon is being cleared for Beef and agribusiness to food humans. We don't need to do this and we don't need to eat meat. Please read some decent news and science and try and think things through.
Perhaps you did. The documentary does sound quite compelling. There is no doubt that switching to a vegan diet from a standard processed food diet will see improvements. But those athletes built themselves up as omnivores.
Some examples from athletes in the film:
-Griff Whalen: went vegan 2014 out of the league 2016
-Bryant Jennings: went vegan end of 2013 (17-0 before vegan, 5-2 after vegan)
-Mischa Janiec: went vegan fall of 2015 - no wins 2 years after
-Kendrick Farris: went vegan 2014 -performed poorly in the 2016 Olympics
-Patrik Baboumian went vegan 2011 - 5'-7" and never ever part of the World Strong Men competition.
-Morgan Mitchell went vegan 2014... in 2017 finished 26th place world championships
-James Brett Wilks went vegan 2011, retired from MMA in 2012
- Lewis Hamiliton suffered depressive breakdown on twitter
Typically within 2 years after going vegan, performance goes down. So veganism based on many of the athletes in the film is a sub-optimal diet for athletic performance.
As to your comment about the Amazon, we aren't eating Amazon beef. You're right it's being cleared, to make way for soy and other processed food. When you buy a steak from the butcher it's not coming from the Amazon, it comes from your local butcher, from a grass fed field, using less carbon then your bananas from Panama.
In many countries, it's darn near impossible to achieve an omnivore diet that isn't supplemented. There's direct supplementation in things like vitamin D milk, folate fortified wheat, and iodized salt, but, also, supplements added to animal feed serve to increase the levels of some nutrients in their meat. Notably, B12.
What's interesting to me is the level of overlap between the list of things that vegetarians are advised to take pills for, and the list of nutrients for which fortification is typically applied to animal products. The big gap is calcium, which people are often advised to get from milk, but that also seems like a kind of crap piece of public health advice given that ~75% of the world population is lactose intolerant.
My sense is that vegetarians and vegans do have a higher need to voluntarily supplement their diets, but this is as much about public policy around fortification assuming that everyone eats an omnivorous diet as it is about the vegetarian or vegan diet itself.
You're stat is technically close to correct, but the implication is wrong for many HN readers.
Around 68% of the global pollution have lactose malabsorbtion, but only 36% of people in the US have lactose malabsorbtion. Not everyone with lactose malabsorbtion is lactose intolerant.
> You are more likely to have lactose intolerance if you are from, or your family is from, a part of the world where lactose malabsorption is more common. In the United States, the following ethnic and racial groups are more likely to have lactose malabsorption:
Are the later two usually neccessary? I recall vitamins usually ending in just very expensive piss.
Admittedly I am /very/ emotionally biased due to personal phobia - having unneccessary suffering imposed over the complete lack of agency because of someone else's convenience of just box checking is a very traumatic thing given the grudges and resentment over even inconveniences like the bullshit bomb drills or mythical under 29 minutes wait swimming cramps. Not saying never but look carefully at actual need instead of just shallow unthinking "we should do this because it is good" attitude which has had all sorts of backfires.
bioavailability of nutrients is a very neglected topic when people discuss nutrition.
Most Dr. I've spoken to aren't even aware that iron from animal sources is far more available than from plants (the consequence being that my wife was able to avoid the iron containing pre-natal vitamin, which causes her nausea, after blood work confirmed her iron levels were great)
1. heme vs non-heme absorption is different 1. vegetarians and vegans do not have a high incidence of iron-deficiency induced anemia 3. plant base sources of food often have higher iron density that animal sources (tofu vs lean ground beef - it surprises people that tofu has substantially more iron) 4. too much iron can be harmful and the body lacks means of excreting excess: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4839665/
3. " have higher iron density "
Actually, it doesn't surprise me in the least. Very many foods contain much more Fe than meat. But density is, largely, irrelevant. Stainless steel is 98% Fe but, if you swallow a small bar of it, you'd poop it right out without absorbing mg of Fe.
What matters is the "effective density" or, for a given gm of food, how many mg of Fe does your body take from it?
4. " too much iron can be harmful"
Indeed. And very many fascinating studies are coming out associating Fe with very many modern ailments (the modern post-industrial age fellow eating meat in excess).
Women do excrete quite a bit of it though and they, and growing kids, need iron.
2. I'm not doubting that vegans can be healthy, but its not universally true. There are people who cannot absorb non animal sourced iron. these people don't stay vegans for very long (they either die, or quit). Either way, those who cannot absorb iron don't stay in in the vegan pool [0].
I'm guessing your link refers to this point. The study is culturally dependent (a study on healthy Chinese men eating real Chinese food).
Also, non-healthy people didn't get recruited to the study (therefore selecting the sample for people who can absorb vegetable iron)
[0] This point is important. Let's say you have a group of people which includes people with weak-ish livers. These people feel sick when their livers are stressed.
Now you do a study on the effects of moderate alcohol consumption vs. total abstinence. The people who feel ill when their livers are stressed are, all else being equal, more likely to be teetotalers.
Well your sample of moderate drinkers now, on the whole, are being drawn from a healthier population. This skews your result.
My understanding is absorption of heme iron is only twice non-heme sources. I think that is why, on the balance, vegans have adequate iron levels. Hemochromatosis seems separate from this subject, but perhaps you can help me here - I don't know if hemochromatis leads to differential heme/non-heme absorption or if it's linear. Point taken on menses, however.
I think I will go back to a prior comment and just say this submission is bad and didn't teach anybody any useful new information. Vegans can be healthy, and kids raised on a vegan diet can be healthy. Non vegans can be healthy.
Bad parents are going to be bad parents and that is the real problem here. It would be nice to treat the root causes of that (poor access to medical care, poor education, poorly curated information online, poor social support networks) that worry about 2ary manifestations of that (people given infants almond milk because they are ignorant of nutrition, people not vaccinating their children).
Agreed.
I don't think it'd be unreasonable to do blood testing as part of a kid's regular checkup cycle. Doctors use metrics to determine whether kids are growing properly (height + weight, as well as a general visual check), but are those the best metrics? It's likely they're just "good enough".
Actually, weight and height are very good indicators of general health. Anyway, the information it gives is already more than appears to be in use.
There's no need for blood work to spot the obese three year old kid at day care who is well on the road to juvenile Type II diabetes. The poor girl is wider than she is tall. A simple BMI metric and the Dr. should be able to tell the parents they need to lay off the carbs.
> This implies higher requirements for protein and essential fatty acids. The body does not produce them, it must be brought in via animal proteins.
This is not true. Proteins and fatty acids are found in many common vegetables and it's not difficult to get a healthy balance of the above. Harvard's school of public health, recommends, "Get your protein from plants when possible" [1], and it's not hard to find many other sources suggesting the same.
It's well known that plants can't/don't provide all essential nutrients without supplementing. B12 is a major one amongst others.
Yet the reverse is true.
Sidenote: I wouldn't put much stock in Harvard school of "nutrition". They have massive conflicts of interest with companies like Monsanto and also numerous problems with their methodology like oversimplification of the issues. https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2013/05/27/to...
Summary: Yes, eating solely one food may eventually cause an issue. For instance, eating only rice would eventually cause a lysine deficiency -- on the order of ~88% of required amounts. Eating pretty much any other food that is not lysine-limited would likely be enough to make up the ~12% gap.
Vegan diets are much more destructive to children than candy and pop. If a child was only eating candy and pop, then yes, it would be harmful. But usually, kids eat junk as a supplement to otherwise stable meals.
You need protein and iron to grow, you just can’t get a kid to eat the vegan versions of foods that provide this.
I'd love to see a source demonstrating that vegan diets are more destructive to children than candy and pop.
As to your assertions around protein and iron, this is a commonly-held belief that is partially correct, but based on a fundamental misconception about how diet works.
Your body doesn't make protein directly using dietary protein. It digests protein in the diet into amino acids, which are transported through the bloodstream and used those amino acids to make protein. As long as you have a balance of all the essential amino acids in your diet it doesn't matter where they come from.
Animal protein sources are "complete proteins" (ie they contain all essential amino acids). Although there are complete protein sources that are vegan (eg soy), most vegan protein sources are incomplete (they contain some essential amino acids but not others), so vegans need to be more careful than non-vegans. However as long as they have some grains and some legumes they are getting all the amino acids and will be fine from a developmental standpoint. For example, see https://www.verywellfit.com/vegan-protein-combinations-25063...
Likewise, there's also no reason for a vegan diet to be deficient in iron or anything else, but again, it's necessary for vegans to be a little more thoughtful than meat-eaters to ensure this. See for example https://www.everydayhealth.com/anemia/anemia-risk-for-vegans...
Didn’t say that, I said that it’s hard to get kids to eat vegetables that provide protein and iron at the same levels that chicken fingers do. Good luck getting a kid to eat a plate of spinach.
All depends how you're raised. My sisters and I devoured vegetables. My mother would have a plate of cut-up turnips waiting for us when we got home from middle school. Yum. I still eat raw cabbage and turnips as snacks into my 30s because of that while everyone around me asks me how I could eat that.
You're thinking of a kid who has been raised on ketchup and chicken fingers suddenly encountering a plate of spinach leaves for dinner. Sure, I'd expect problems in the short term. But let's take a little bit of responsibility as parents.
I had a neighbor who was fed so much candy at her house that when she slept over at my house (slumber party) she would throw tantrums because my parents didn't pair candy with dinner. I'm sure her parents thought the same as you: heh, good luck getting children to eat chicken fingers without their side of candy, it's the only thing that works for us!
I’m sure the evidence is out there, but I have so many first hand experiences of people having health issues from vegan diets, that I’m not terribly motivated to go out and look for it.
When I was in high school, I had a few friends who tried to go vegan. One fainted in the shower, another fainted during track and field, one was falling asleep in class all the time. As soon as they went back to their normal diet, everything went back to normal for them. In first year university, a friend lost 30lbs and became very emaciated from their vegan diet.
You could say “they were doing vegan diets wrong” and I would agree. That’s the point. It’s extremely hard to do vegan diets “right”.
Ok, one more anecdote for you: I've been vegan for about five years, for ethical reasons. (Which is to say, I basically have eaten a similar diet to what I did before, only vegan -- so vegan ice cream in lieu of dairy ice cream, sofritas Chipotle burritos rather than steak Chipotle burritos, Beyond burgers rather than cow burgers.) I've taken the occasional multivitamin but nothing special -- I get B12 and all that from fortified soy milk and other foods. I'm physically larger -- at six foot, my weight has ranged from 202 to 185 lbs as a vegan rather than 185 to 170 lbs as it did when I was omnivorous -- and run (my main form of exercise) faster, farther, and more frequently than when I ate omnivorously (I.e. it's not that I've gotten fat). Blood work has always been perfect, recovery times much lower, energy levels fine, etc. Zero health issues.
Your friends were doing it wrong. Probably, they were eating nothing but salads, or stacking dietary restrictions (e.g. gluten-free or raw).
I know many many, very healthy plant based people and athletes. I regularly run ultramarathons and I cycle 30 miles a day to work (2000 ft of climbing) and I'm plant based.
Would you say I'm doing it right? I don't do anything especially difficult with my diet.
How? On a whole food, plant based, diet it's easy to get EVERYTHING with the exceptions of B12 and vitamin D which can easily be supplemented either as pill or by fortifying foods (fortified nutritional yeast, fortified grains).
Since going plant based I get far more vitamins/minerals/micronutrients than I EVER did eating a largely meat-based diet.
Go take everything you'd eat in a day and plug it into Cronometer (or a typical standard american diet) . Then take a whole food plant based diet that comes close to (or does) hit the daily dozen [1] with the kcals within 5% of your typical diet and look at the differences.
Purely subjectively I feel incredibly better eating plant based. Last year I was eating 1-1.5lbs of meat a day and a bunch of processed foods as a strength athlete with vit a in limited quantities from the occasional organ meat and some vitmain c from the occasional sweet pepper with minimal fiber. Now I'm eating a fraction of the protein I was (yet my strength keeps going up, my recovery is far better and DOMS severity is way down).
Yesterday in 2086 kcals I had:
- 182% of my daily fiber (pre-plant based I'd hit 20-30% and poop something the consistency of modelling clay)
- 71% calcium (which I further supplement with a pill)
- 0% b12 (which I supplement via pill once a week)
- 100% folate
- 349% vitamin A
- 48% B1, 76% B2, 49% B3, 55% B5, 268% B6
- 466% vitamin C
- 0% D (which I get daily in my calcium supplement)
- 36% Vitamin e
- 157% Vitamin k
- 68% copper
- 261% iron
- 62% magnesium (which I supplement 100% RDA at sleep anyway because it helps me fall asleep fast)
- 87% manganese
- 41% phosphorous
- 201% potassium (before plant based I'd rarely hit 100%)
- 13% selenium (was travelling last weekend so didn't get to the health food store to buy more brazil nuts)
- 69% sodium (pre-plant based I would hit several hundred % to over 1000% daily)
- 19% zinc
- 108% protein (77.7g with via cystine, histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, tyrosine and valine)
I ate 65g mixed greens, 536g bananas, 11g of carrots, 28g of dates, 1g of turmeric, a great value 'keep it green fruit & vegetable smoothie' pack I found in the bottom of the chest freezer, 544g of yellow potatoes, a single serving bag of quest protein chips I had leftover from going pre-whole food, 1 g ground cinnamon, 432g of black beans, 285g of drained sweet corn, 174g of sweet peppers.
On a typical weekday pre-plant based I'd have had 1lb of ground chicken, a #2 from McDonalds for breakfast (sausage egg cheese mcmuffin with a hash brown and a diet coke), about a half pound of chicken breast, 40-60g of protein powder and a pouch of Uncle Ben's microwave rice or some microwavable macaroni and cheese.
Using the rice pouch in the former meat-heavy diet instead of mac, and 40g of protein powder, I was getting:
2141 kcals
- 18% fiber (6.9g)
- 21% calcium
- 138% b12
- 12% folate
- 21% vitamin A
- 72% B1, 106% B2, 393% B3, 147% B5, 291% B6
- 6% vitamin C
- 2% D
- 20% Vitamin e
- 4% Vitamin k
- 51% copper
- 180% iron
- 40% magnesium (which I supplement 100% RDA at sleep anyway because it helps me fall asleep fast)
- 8% manganese
- 193% phosphorous
- 96% potassium (before plant based I'd rarely hit 50%)
- 185% selenium
- 140% sodium before hot sauce on the rice and ground chicken
- 88% zinc
Now, in which scenario do you think I'm getting better nutrition...
I was told (I believe by a doctor) that the iron you get from vegan sources isn't readily absorbed anyway. It id best to get heme-iron from meat as it is readily absorbed
This is true, however it's not as severe as people think and you can easily get several hundred % of the RDA of iron in a day on a whole food, plant based, diet.
Veganism can work, if you are knowledgable about your body's requirements. Realistically, most people are pretty crappy about what they put into their bodies. My opinion is that most people throwing stones against veganism aren't exactly paragons of health themselves. I know that I'm not, and I'm not vegan.
The bigger issue with veganism is that the rest of us non-vegans can eat whatever we want and still be somewhat healthy, purely by accident. In veganism, you do need to be aware of the balance of amino acids your body requires, and the various vitamins and minerals too. You can't haphazardly just eat whatever plant-based foods you want; you have to plan a bit more. I would hazard a guess that most new vegans are just jumping onto what's trendy, without doing adequate research. Just look at the swathes of vegan YouTubers that recently had to start eating meat again due to health problems.
With new products targeting vegans becoming available, this is getting to be a bit easier. I have an infant son that is currently intolerant to dairy and eggs, even when his mom ingests it and he gets it via nursing. We've had our share of frustrations with trying to find products that they both can eat that don't have milk, eggs, or milk-based ingredients. So I'm a fan of the new options available. My fear is that these products start to go down the path of gluten-free foods; that it becomes a marketing buzzword and makes it impossible for the actual target market (i.e. celiacs) to actually eat the foods.
Personally, if I ever decide to give up meat, I'd probably ease into it with pescatarianism (eating farmed instead of wild), or eventually, bivalve veganism [0].
>Veganism can work, if you are knowledgable about your body's requirements.
It can with minimal effort if you try to follow the daily dozen [1] which (for an adult) you can easily check off a significant portion of those in a single meal. In my breakfast smoothie alone I handle all of the fruit (and then some), 2-3x the berries, all of the cruciferous and greens the flax (and chia), the spice, most of the grain (I blend oats in because I'm not a fan of oatmeal), the spices (which I exceed just via turmeric and also add cloves and cinnamon most days).
A child will need lesser quantities, and should be comparably easy, but I'm wholly unfamiliar with RDAs for children given I haven't been one in a long time and have no offspring.
This is apparently a real issue even in the USA, not sure where the ideas came from but I have a direct experience.
While at a funeral for an older man at a church I attended, my wife and I met a younger lady that was our age and she was very talkative and wanted to go out and have lunch with us. She stated that her husband (who worked at a large tech hosting company) had a "computer job" (in reference to me) as well. We went out eat, I met her husband, all seemed normal. We were both newly married, and my wife and her both ended up pregnant just months apart. So it was feeling like this was going to be one of those "life long" friendships since we seemed to have so much in common... and then...
My wife and her both gave birth to healthy children though things quickly started to change in our friendships. I consider myself a christian fundamentalist and my wife and I started to think it was strange that our new friend seemed to be way more opinionated and strict with how she was going to raise her daughter. This was realized when we offered to help babysit since she was going to try to go back to her teacher's aid job.
It was the scheduling... she had everything scheduled for this 5 month old baby. We were to every 2 hours feed her x number of ounces of freshly pumped breast milk. Problem is, the kid sucked down the entire day's worth in just two feedings. On top of that, we were to write down how long the naps were (which also were "required" to happen every 2 hours or so) and when bowel movements happened and what they looked like. Then there was the smell. The kid was just plain filthy, the mom had already bragged about how they don't really do baths any more since its "bad" for the skin. The extra clothes she brought were nasty too. So baby got a bath and we washed the extra clothes. The mom returns 8 or so hour later. We informed her of how the kid sucked down the milk and acted like she was staving, but mom was disappointed in that we didn't follow the schedule. After all, if we followed the schedule, we would not have ran out of milk...
Something didn't seem right, but we were naive.
Then a few months later, while over at their house for dinner, they informed us that they had all gone vegan. So there was no meat or cheese to eat and they had taken their (now 8 month old) daughter off of milk as well. To eat, we were given some thin vegetable soup with some mashed cauliflower on the side. The daughter got a small handful of raw diced squash and some beans which she gulped down practically whole in a matter of minutes.
The irony is both parents were quite over weight (nearing 300lbs). The daughter was strictly forced vegan but they were not. Mom still got her Dr.Pepper while baby got water and squash. They at one time asked us to baby sit at 9pm so they could have a "parent's night out" which was explained as they were going to go get doughnuts followed by margaritas at a mexican restaurant. Not sure how you can even mix those two... Being christian fundamentalists, we declined since we weren't going to help someone get drunk and drive themselves home.
One of the last times we met, they had informed us CPS had been visiting them. Apparently their daughter was running a fever at night so they took her to the ER. The nurse of course noticed the under-height and underweight child and told the parents they should try upping the amount of milk she gets every day. The mom of course squawked back that they're "vegan". And I guess the rest is history.
I've never quite figured out where she got her weird ideas from. She had other friends and they all seemed to support each other's ideas. She was not anti-vax either (though I am). She went on to have a son (which she circumcised), and as far as I know, raised the same. Even though she is "vegan" she still pushes 300lbs. After her CPS story, we stopped hanging out and blocked her on facebook.
Good, this should be seen as a case of child abuse. It's not healthy for children. If adults want to take up that diet, then fine for them, they can make their own choices, but children have no choice but eat what is put on the table.
The other issue is that your kid is going to be "the vegan kid". In general, one should not try to paint a target on one's children if one can avoid it.
>The other issue is that your kid is going to be "the vegan kid". In general, one should not try to paint a target on one's children if one can avoid it.
There were plenty of vegetarian kids in my school with me (vegans were a rarity then), and they didn't get any particular stick for it. Besides, even if they aren't vegan they'll still get short/tall/pimply/ginger/nerd/.* of the same intensity, so I think this is a pretty weak argument.
Being ginger isn't such a pain in the neck for other people to make accomodations for if they want to include you. All of these competing quasi-religious food restrictions introduce unnecessary overhead. And people are often not reasonable about bowing to the demands of politeness or necessity, and insist on absolutism in their diets.
Frig trying to plan a birthday party when little Timmy's parents think he should be vegan, and little Billy's parents think he is gluten-intolerant, while Frankie's parents are enforcing paleo raw foods, and your kid just wants a regular Funfetti cake and real ice cream.
Why do I say that?
The animal-product-free diet isn’t technically prohibited, and the ruling doesn’t necessarily equate veganism with child neglect. However, it will make it easier to prosecute parents who impose the strict diet and whose children have health problems.
and
However, opinions on this matter vary worldwide. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, is not opposed to vegan diets. "Although there have been case reports of children failing to thrive or developing cobalamin deficiency on vegan diets, these are rare exceptions," the academy notes on its website. "Multiple experts have concluded independently that vegan diets can be followed safely by infants and children without compromise of nutrition or growth and with some notable health benefits."
So if a kid in Belgium is visibly malnourished - ie, abused - and the mechanism of abuse is a restrictive diet that is not being applied correct, then the parents can go to jail. In general, the diet is not illegal in Belgium and one of the largest associations of childrens' doctors in the world (AAP) is not opposed to that restrictive diet (and comes close to endorsing it).
This is a non-story.