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Once again, a vegan diet is being used as a scapegoat for health problems in children. A UK case of a child diagnosed with rickets, is being automatically assumed to be caused by a vegan diet in the media. Adding insult to injury, the Telegraph article ends with reference to a 2001 case of a vegan couple who actually admitted to starving their child to death, as if veganism and starvation were somehow equivalent.
As Neal Barnard of the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine points out, there are many sources of vitamin D in the diet, and many nondairy products are as fortified as milk is. Perhaps the most important “source” of vitamin D, however, is adequate sunlight.In this most recent case, there is a whole host of issues that have not been adequately fleshed out. For instance, the child has several broken bones; it’s not clear how that happened. It’s also not clear how much sunlight the child has been getting. Finally, the details of the child’s diet - other than its lack of animal products - are not clear.
There are many vegan families and children in the world - they don’t all have rickets. We need to get all the facts, before we jump to the knee-jerk conclusion of blaming veganism.
