Two weeks after people first started sending it to me, let me respond to the infamous Nina Plancke op-ed in the New York Times, Death by Veganism. Commenting on the report of vegan parents in Georgia arrested after the death of their infant son, Plancke opines:
I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.
Indigenous cuisines offer clues about what humans, naturally omnivorous, need to survive, reproduce and grow: traditional vegetarian diets, as in India, invariably include dairy and eggs for complete protein, essential fats and vitamins. There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run.
The breathtaking lack of logic in the last sentence reminds me of classic anti-feminist arguments: there are no truly egalitarian societies (and never will be) because women are, in the long run, inferior to men.
Who is this Nina Planck person with her sweeping arguments about nutrition? Well, she has no medical degree or nutrition degree. Here’s her website, and there’s no mention of any professional certification in any health field. She writes cookbooks and advocates for farmer’s markets, both worthy activities — but she writes with the authority of someone who ought to have initials after her name. She doesn’t.
Who does say you can have a healthy vegan pregnancy? The medical advisory team at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which includes pediatricians, nutritionists, and gynecologists on its board. Here’s a letter to the Times from vegan nutritionist Dr. Amy Joy Lanou. An excerpt:
I am a nutritionist who testified as an expert witness for the prosecution in the criminal trial of the parents of Crown Shakur. As the lead prosecutor in this case told the jury, this poor infant was not killed by a vegan diet. He was starved to death by parents who did not give him breast milk, soy-based infant formula or enough food of any kind.
Well-planned vegan diets are healthful for pregnant mothers and their infants, as well as for older children, according to a large body of scientific research. Contrary to Ms. Planck’s assertions, there are healthy plant-based sources of docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA; calcium can be absorbed about as readily from soy milk as from cow’s milk; and soy does not inhibit growth.
Studies have found that vegan children are within the normal ranges for weight and height, and I personally know vegan mothers and vegan children who are healthier than many of their omnivorous peers.
When my wife and I attended PCRM’s gala fundraiser in D.C. in April, we met several couples with young children who are being raised vegan. The children laughed and played and ran around, looking slender and healthy and cheerful. One woman we talked to had been vegan throughout her two pregnancies, with smashing success. Though I may not know as many folks as Dr. Lanou, I can certainly — anecdotally — think of many kids who are growing up vegan and healthy and happy and fine.
I assume Nina Planck is not a shill for Big Ag. But her misrepresentations of the vegan lifestyle (which she suggests is fine for adults but irresponsible for children) has already done serious harm. Those who are committed to veganism as a multi-generational way of living, those who are committed to raising children from conception without food sourced from any animal other than a human mother, deserve to have the full story told.
My wife is committed to a vegan pregnancy. We are committed to raising vegan kids, with careful medical supervision from doctors and nutritionists who are committed to the welfare of children and the well-being of the earth they will inherit.
For more on vegan pregnancy and children, go here.
Veganism still isn’t for everyone. If you choose to make it your way and make it work for you, more power to you.
I can never make up my mind about this Hugo. Fortunately, I’m not going to have to, in this context. Ms. Planck’s writings on nutrition are mentioned here. Don’t know if you know of this site, but it’s an interesting read through. For review I once received a copy of Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions, which exemplifies the Weston A. Price Foundation’s ideas about food, which seem to be similar to Ms. Plancks if not where Ms. Planck got her ideas. There’s lots here I agree with, who wouldn’t especially about factory farmed animals, but also lots to drop your jaw. Not to mention I found WAPFoundation’s ideas about hunter gatherer cultures pretty damned racist. I don’t have the book anymore (one of my kids does). I really think you should read it, because it carries on from where Planck left off. This site confuses me so much, because there’s a lot here I agree with, and a lot of the recipes in Planck’s book and Fallon’s book I grew up with, as would anyone eating at a Polish, Dutch, German or Ukrainian table.
http://www.westonaprice.org/splash_2.htm
http://www.westonaprice.org/bookreviews/real-food-review.html
P.S. I’m not a vegetarian or vegan, but have nothing against that way of eating, although I don’t think I would have done it while pregnant or for some years. I won’t eat soy or drink soy though (can you think of a more highly processed food?) because I have had an estrogen sensitive pre-cancerous condition. WAP Foundation really hammers soy.
Isn’t for everyone in the sense that not everybody makes that choice, no. What’s your point?
Hugo,
As a biologist and chemist, with a decent background in evolutionary theory, I was going to speak to you about the diet humans and their ancestors had for most of their existence, and the implication it had for what humans are optimized for.
I’ve got nothing against vegan. I would argue that raising a healthy child on a vegan diet can be done, although with study and effort on the part of the parents.
But I decided to check out PCRM. I came across their diabetes section.
Dr. Barnard’s paper doesn’t say “reverse diabetes,” he says (pdf online) “A1c (shorthand for HbA1c, where the amount of non-enzymatic pathway glycosilation of the A hemoglobin protein serves as a measure of long-term glucose regulation) fell 1.23 points (pretty good, but nowhere near a cure).”
There’s a reason for not saying “reverse diabetes.” Improving HbA1c, even dramatically, is not a cure. Until recently, Type II diabetes was thought impossible with current medicines and technology. A paper on certain forms of gastric bypass indicates that some people lose all symptoms of Type II diabetes: is this a cure? Some are claiming yes, but others are pointing out the damage may still be there but not manifesting during the time the patients were studied.
That PCRM puts “Reverse Diabetes” in such big letters concerns me. Then they repeat it as you read on. There are no papers published in peer-reviewed journals demonstrating that diabetes can be reversed by a vegan diet. Improve? Certainly. Reverse? No. It’s a small distinction, but one that means, should I live long enough, my diabetes will eventually kill me.
I’m used to seeing claims of “reversing diabetes” come from the religious fanatics, the deluded, the gullible, and the scammers — mostly the last group. That someone at PCRM hasn’t said “Hey, guys, this makes us look suspicious — let’s fix it!” concerns me greatly.
You question the bonifides of Nina Plancke. I now do the same for PCRM. Having a M.D. or Ph.D. after one’s name is no guarantee of being correct or unbiased. My attitude may be harsh, but from what I’ve seen on their web site, they’re going to have to work extra hard to earn my trust.
I’ve given some thought to becoming vegetarian. I am even more serious about giving up beef within the near future. I’m not much of a beef fan, but I love chicken. And if I would be willing to kill a chicken or a fish, but never a cow. So I might become “semi vegetarian” if such a thing exists. No red meat.
Veganism, in my opinion, seems expensive and impractical. Much more so than vegetarianism. I am just curious - do you spend more money on food now than you did when you ate meat? I could be completely wrong on that, but I don’t think veganism is as much of an option for people with little money or time to work with. It seems to take a whole lot of time to cook vegan. Whole Foods is wonderful, but it’s very expensive. I’m not knocking veganism. I think it’s a great lifestyle and a worthy cause. I just don’t think I could ever do it.
Mermade, we spend about the same as we used to. We’re talking about trying to do veganism on a limited budget for a couple of weeks later this year and blogging about it. I am a great believer that “those that can, should”. It’s a corollary to the “to whom much is given, of whom much is expected” view.
Mermade, while we’re vegetarian, a lot of our meals are primarily vegan and they tend to work out cheaper and healthier than the meat based alternatives (at least until we add sour cream/cheese).
We also have a friend on a very low income who survives on a vegan diet quite happily.
Staples of a low cost vegan diet like lentils and TVP are quite quick to prepare .
Not for everyone in two senses - not a choice for everyone, and not everyone can be healthy on such a diet, regardless of doctrinaire propaganda.
What’s the paraphrase about abortion? “Don’t believe in having a steak? Don’t order one!”
The breathtaking lack of logic in the last sentence reminds me of classic anti-feminist arguments: there are no truly egalitarian societies (and never will be) because women are, in the long run, inferior to men.
While I completely agree about the potential healthiness of a vegan diet, I don’t think this is a very good analogy. The problem with the anti-feminist argument is that it attacks a group of people as being inferior, which violates our ethical principle of equality of all people. But the anti-vegan argument attacks a diet as inferior, and we have no comparable ethical principle about the equality of all diets — it’s trivially easy to come up with a diet that’s clearly inferior (say McDonald’s every day, or nothing but chocolate).
What’s the paraphrase about abortion? “Don’t believe in having a steak? Don’t order one!”
I think this is a bad argument with respect to both abortion and veganism. After all, you wouldn’t say “Don’t believe in murder? Don’t kill anyone!”
I think this is a bad argument with respect to both abortion and veganism. After all, you wouldn’t say “Don’t believe in murder? Don’t kill anyone!”
Well, you can’t very well subscribe to one without subscribing to the other, I’ll say that.
At least without being so logically and philosophically inconsistent that you can’t be taken seriously.
Mermade -
A few years ago, my flatmate was vegan, and involved in one of the largest vegan organisations in Chicago (EarthSave). We had a few parties in which non-vegetarian neighbours got into friendly arguments with vegans, and the specific argument that veganism is expensive (because Whole Foods is expensive, because it takes so much time, etc.) came up a few times.
So let me just paraphrase the counterexample: one couple who had been vegan for years, living in Chicago off a combined income of somewhere between $15k and $25k (I don’t recall the exact number). Now, Chicago isn’t as expensive as LA, and they lived in a fairly poor neighbourhood where rent was cheap, but $25k is still a pretty tight budget. They rarely shopped at Whole Foods (too expensive) or farmer’s markets (only sporadically open in the middle of the city). Most of their groceries came from the local supermarket.
If you’re going to eat a healthy diet in this country, your only real options are to prepare most of your food at home or eat at moderately expensive restaurants. Generally speaking, any inexpensive, commercially prepared food isn’t going to be something you should really be living off of. So, unless you’re upper middle class or wealthy, someone is going to have to do the unpaid labour of shopping, cooking, and cleaning up afterwards, whether the average household diet is vegan, carnivorous, or in between. The time factor, as Hugo says is the case for him and his wife, is generally a wash.
Where veganism comes out ahead, economically, is that the year-round staples of a vegan diet are much less expensive than the year-round staples of a healthy carnivorous diet. Bulk legumes and cereals (including pasta products) simply cost less per calorie than fish and poultry.
Hugo, I’ve recently become a mostly-vegan again, partly for health reasons and partly for moral reasons. I think reading your blog was a factor in that, though it didn’t do it all by itself.
The “mostly” part is this:
I still eat seafood. I am kind of paranoid about protein (and despite the general consensus that a vegan diet easily provides enough protein, that’s really not true for me unless I go to somewhat extreme lengths, like having seitan at every meal - I need to eat about 76 grams of protein a day in ~ 1600 calories.), which is why I’ve made that exception - that and that I almost never overeat seafood.
I’ll eat eggs (as free range as I can get them) and dairy (organic) at home, though I rarely do, and occasionally I slip and have dairy at a restaurant.
I’m still working on this and I haven’t achieved perfect adherence even to these limited goals.
By the way, I said “mostly vegan” but I never use the term “vegan” or “vegetarian” in real life because I know that eating fish strongly disqualifies me, and of course I am not a vegan when I do occasionally eat dairy or eggs. I actually call what I’m trying to do “coastal villager,” which is basically a tongue-in-cheek name - it may be that “vegan + fish” is what some poor coastal people eat, but I have access to an incredible range of foods not found in “villages”, coastal or not.
Tam, I’m not hung up on nomenclature — I like “coastal villager” quite a bit!
I’ve never quite understood the ‘vegetarian or vegan diet is expensive’ argument. I and my 2 kids are omnivores (I’ll eat anything so long as it’s stopped moving), my partner, their step-dad, is a vegetarian, so we eat veggie most of the time. Thinking about it about half our main meals will be vegan simply because we vary the protein part of meals so that means lots of beans and lentils (of many different types) as well as eggs and dairy. Anyway, my eldest son left home to go to college last year and now lives in a shared house so is cooking for himself (and his housemates - he gets them to do the washing-up). After about a month he rang me in panic asking for my dahl recipes and ‘things to do with beans’. Why? He was spending too much on food, as he said ‘I don’t know how people can afford to eat meat every day!’. Oh and he *hated* living in dorms as the food was meat-based with a low vegetable and fibre content and the poor sod felt really rather ill and then got constipated for the first time in his life.
Good, economical eating, means learning how, when and where to shop and cooking. From scratch. Regularly. It’s not as bad as people make out, we usually have dinner on the table within an hour. And if you do this then a veggie diet is waaaay cheaper than a meat-based diet, and if you use dried rather than tinned beans vegan is even cheaper as cheese can be pretty expensive. Most traditional omnivore diets actually use meat sparingly, often more as a flavouring or supplement rather than a centerpiece because meat is damm expensive - in ecological as well as monetary grounds.
The easiest way to learn some cheap vegetarian/vegan recipes is to check out a cookbook from a cuisine that already includes many kinds of beans/veggies/etc. in their diet. Indian cooking is especially good for this, of course, because there are already religious ties to vegetarian (or non beef or pork) cooking for many people there. And if you check out books from the library then its even cheaper!
Finding the right spices can be more expensive for Indian cooking, but if you are able to visit an “ethnic” grocery store you’ll usually find things are much cheaper than if you shop in the “ethnic” aisles at a supermarket. Cardamom costs over $15 for a small jar at Jewel-Osco here in Chicago (if you can find it) but is $3-5 for a good size bag that’s at least 5x as much in “Little India”.
He was starved to death by parents who did not give him breast milk, soy-based infant formula or enough food of any kind.
I suppose they were worried about him being “too fat”. Or was it plain old abuse?
I believe it was plain old ignorance and stupidity, a clueless couple who weren’t as ready to be parents as they thought, overwhelmed, flailing blindly and failing tragically and spectacularly with no ill intent, just trying their best as they thought and were counselled by people they looked to for guidance.
And going to be hung out to dry by the same mentality that hangs people like the “pray for healing” parents.
Hugo - there’s something left out of this discussion: would vegans breastfeed their infants? Or, conversely, is human breast milk acceptable in an otherwise vegan diet for an infant?
In the Shakur case, the parents apparently answered “no”. (I haven’t followed the case in detail, so I don’t know if breastfeeding was available as an option for those parents.) Combined with that “no” was a starvation diet for the baby. It’s pretty obvious that the parents are culpable for killing their baby, but in that case, the root cause appears to be ignorance and stupidity, not strictly veganism.
A lot of women, especially first time mothers, have breastfeeding problems - not breastfeeding isn’t a Vegan thing, in fact, I can’t think of a single Vegan I know that objects to mother’s milk, and I know some extreme ones.
The second somebody mentions breastfeeding not being vegan, I realise they don’t have a clue about what veganism is. It’s a pretty accurate indicator. Of course breast milk is vegan. Vegans believe in not taking breast milk from other animals, and that breast feeding is the most natural and best thing anybody can possibly do for their baby.
I honestly wish people would get over their fear of other people’s dietary choices. Who gives a damn what other people eat? I know people who despise the taste of milk and meat. I know others (meat eaters) who can’t stand any form of seafood. I find it completely bizarre that some people take offense in something so unoffensive as a daily meal. Perhaps it’s the ethical reasoning which offends and scares some, either way it doesn’t change the fact that some people (Myself included) just find this diet to be great.
I don’t personally like harming other creatures, I don’t do a lot of exercise so at least I know I eat healthily. I don’t worry about protein, never have and every medical I do says I’m in top top shape (apart from having withered lungs, I’m somewhat sedentary), the only thing I miss is cheese. I dislike milk and butter (nasty sour aftertaste). I feel the same as I did when I ate meat and cheese. Perhaps a bad example but a poor friend of mine survived for a year and a half on mac & cheese. The human body isn’t as fragile as people would make it out to be.
I do personally think that a LOT of people would never want to torture an animal, certainly not on a regular basis, and therefore I do feel a lot of people are being lazy when they stick to a diet which allows no personal responsibility for the treatment of animals. And how many times have you heard “but I buy organic and I visit the farms…”. Is that method of spending power really sustainable? Of course not. It’s fine for those with money and access to organic food but in the long-run, providing the same amount of meat that the populace requires would turn organic farms into the current industrialised farms that are so detestable.
I’ve gone off on a tangent, where was I. Ah yes. Breast milk is certainly vegan.