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 Non-Profit Physicians group find Vegetarian Diets Ideal for Children
Source: PCRM (Physicians Committe for Responsible Medicine) Date: 8/12/08
Eating habits are set in early childhood. Choosing a vegetarian diet can give your child—and your whole family—the opportunity to learn to enjoy a variety of
wonderful, nutritious foods.
Children
raised on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes grow up to be
slimmer and healthier and even live longer than their meat-eating
friends.
It
is much easier to build a nutritious diet from plant foods than from
animal products, which contain saturated fat, cholesterol, and other
substances that growing children can do without. As for essential
nutrients, plant foods are the preferred source because they provide
sufficient energy and protein packaged with other health-promoting
nutrients such as fiber, antioxidant vitamins, minerals, and
phytochemicals.
Complete Nutrition for Children
Vegetarian
diets provide excellent nutrition for all stages of childhood, from
birth through adolescence. Of course, an infant’s nutritional needs are
best met by his or her mother’s breast milk. It’s nature’s way of
boosting the baby’s immunity as well as his or her psychological
well-being.
Doctors
recommend introducing solid foods in the middle of the first year of
life. The best weaning foods are soft plant foods such as ground,
cooked cereals, mashed fruits, and well-cooked vegetables. Given a
chance, toddlers and young children usually enjoy a wide variety
fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes—even more so if they are
involved in the preparation. School-aged children are often curious
about where their food comes from and delight in learning how to cook,
visiting farmers’ markets, and gardening. Adolescents raised on a
vegetarian diet often find they have an easy time maintaining a healthy
weight and have fewer problems with acne, allergies, and
gastrointestinal problems than their meat-eating peers.
Some
studies suggest that the growth of vegetarian children is more gradual
than that of non-vegetarians—in other words, vegetarian children grow a
bit more slowly at first, but they catch up later on. Final heights and
weights for vegetarian children are comparable to those of meat-eating
children. Interestingly, breast-fed babies also grow more slowly than
bottle-fed babies. Somewhat less rapid growth during the early years is
thought to decrease disease risk later in life.
On
the other hand, diets rich in animal protein, found in meat, eggs, and
dairy products, appear to reduce the age of puberty, as shown in a 2000
study from the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that girls
who consumed higher levels of animal protein compared to vegetable
protein between 3 and 8 years of age went through menarche earlier.
Nature may well have designed the human body to grow up more gradually,
to reach puberty later, and to last longer than most people raised on
omnivorous diets experience.
In
a 1980 study in Boston, researchers measured the IQs of vegetarian
children. Some of the children were following a macrobiotic diet, a few
were Seventh-day Adventists (many of whom follow a plant-based diet),
and the rest were from families that had simply decided to go
vegetarian. On intelligence testing, the kids were considerably above
average, with a mean IQ of 116. Now, the diet may have had nothing to
do with their intelligence. Rather, these vegetarian families were
better educated than the average meat-eating family, and it is probably
the parental education, rather than a dietary effect, that was
reflected in their children’s measured intelligence. However, this
study should reassure vegetarian parents who wonder whether animal
products contain something necessary for brain development. Clearly,
they do not.
Perhaps
the most important consideration for feeding children is this: Lifelong
dietary habits are established at a young age. Children who acquire a
taste for chicken nuggets, roast beef, and French fries today are the
cancer patients, heart patients, and diabetes patients of tomorrow.
Children who are raised on whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and
legumes will have a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes,
cancer, and many obesity-related illnesses compared to their
counterparts raised on the average American diet. Because of this, they
will also tend to live years longer.
Nutrient Needs
The
complex carbohydrates found in whole grains, beans, and vegetables
provide the ideal energy to fuel a child’s busy life. Cultivating a
taste for brown rice, whole wheat breads and pastas, rolled oats, and
corn, as well as the less
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