For years, trying to get our children to eat better has been a nightmare. Not only is it hard to find affordable food which is healthy, but peer pressure and convenience also play a part in poor dietary choices. However, for years, some parents have wondered how useful it might be to put their child onto a vegan diet from a young age. With precious few studies on the topic, though, it was hard to commit one way or another. However, an authoritative new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has shone a light on the pros – and cons – of such a diet.
Led by Jonathan Wells, the study was developed in the University College of London and has gained some useful insights. The study mainly looked at children aged 5 to 10 years old, and what kind of influence having a vegan diet would have versus eating meat as part of their diet. The findings were quite mixed.
For one, they found that vegans tended to have far more robust cardiovascular profiles compared to meat-eating children. However, they found they were typically shorter in height on average and also had some pretty concerning bone mineral deficiencies. As ever, there is no ‘winner’ here – only pros and cons that would have to be worked around regardless of what dietary path was chosen.
The study found that there was a pretty limited amount of data out there on the impact of plant-based diets on children. As such, the review was carried out to try and find a balance. Look around the web, and you can find all manner of all-for or all-against articles and ‘studies’ on such diets. Empirical scientific data, though, has so far been limited. Well, no more.
What does this mean?
Put simply, it means that the study found that cardiovascular profiles for these children were very impressive. They found that higher average fasting glucose, VLDL cholesterol, and triglyceride levels were common in the vegetarian section of the research party. This was even higher than was found within the vegan children, which was seen as surprising by the research team.
In total, around 60 vegetarian children, 50 vegan children, and 70 omnivore children were chosen as part of the group. They found that the vegan children had better cardiovascular profiles than the vegetarian and omnivore children. However, the vegetarians had a very similar level compared to the omnivores as opposed to the vegans – that was seen as odd.
However, the negatives also found that vegan children were deficient in things like Vitamin B12, as much as 4-6% lower, and were also as much as 1” shorter than the other children. That’s an intriguing discovery and one that shows us that the talk that one way of dietary living is 100% correct is not quite as solid as it first sounds.
However, vegan deficiencies could arguably be supplemented; the problems caused by the other lifestyle choices, though, might be harder to overcome without dietary change. As ever, more research and analysis is needed – for a first major study, though, the insights were intriguing, to say the least.