An adult can choose any diet they like, for any reason they like.

Mental development is a crucial area for child development from conception to adulthood. During that window it’s critical the child get proper nutrition.

We have research on childhood development and the value of meat - Paper - Meat supplementation improves growth, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes in Kenyan children - 2007

The references of Chapter 9 of the “Why Vegans have smaller brains” book is really illuminating here (I’m sorry for the title of the book, its a good book, but they went with sensationalism)

Select Article titles:

• Cerebral atrophy in 21 hypotonic infants with severe vitamin B12 deficiency
• Importance of animal-source foods for meeting global nutritional, educational and economic needs
• Vegetarian and Vegan Weaning of the Infant: How Common and How Evidence-Based? A Population-Based Survey and Narrative Review
• Maternal Docosahexaenoic Acid Status during Pregnancy and Its Impact on Infant Neurodevelopment
• Vitamin B12 Supplementation Adequacy in Australian Vegan Study Participants.
• Vitamin B12 status of pregnant Indian women and cognitive function in their 9-year-old children.
• Caring for infants and children following alternative dietary patterns
• Vitamin B-12 from algae appears not to be bioavailable.
• Vitamin B12 treatment normalizes metabolic markers but has limited Clinical effect: a randomized placebo-controlled study.
• Prevalence of vitamin B12 deficiency among exclusively breast fed term infants in South India

it goes on and on… Basically, even in adults who ARE supplementing there are bioavailability issues, and micronutrient availability issues in substitute food. This is fine for adults, but for child development I wouldn’t encourage a friend to stay on a vegan diet until they are done breastfeeding, and the child has stopped growing.

Childhood is messy, busy, and its hard to be perfect even in the best of circumstances, being on a diet that requires perfection or the child will have irreversible loss in brain development isn’t something I can endorse.

I don’t like to under cut other people’s dietary choices on lemmy, everyone here (should) is an adult, they can make their own choices. But it is critical information that needs to be known for raising children.

Let’s not forget the PRIVILEGE that westerns have in supplementing a diet, it has cost, to do it properly requires access to healthcare to monitor effectiveness. The western version of a vegan diet REQUIRES global logistics and shipping, it cannot be done (to my knowledge) using ONLY locally sourced foods (i.e. within walking distance). Many people globally don’t have access to ASF, and their development suffers. They have to eat local foods, they can’t buy out of season super foods sailed across the world. This is why we see the outsized impact of giving children one egg per day has on their mental development. These are the real victims of the war on ASF, having proper nutrition should be a human right with special focus being made on the global south.

Well, it can when not done right.

But, as vegans will be glad to tell you, it’s not a problem once a person gets up to speed in balancing their diet.

That being said, since not everyone that goes vegan does their research and learns how to do that, it is definitely a thing.

It isn’t just vegans though. Vegetarians can and do run into it, but they tend to be less exclusionary of dairy and eggs, so you don’t run into it as often.

I’ll also say that the effects aren’t severe unless the person is just eating poorly, which is also true of people that aren’t purely plant based. Eating shitty causes decreases in function, period. This includes mental slowdowns. Yeah, you get the iron and b12 eating meat, but if that’s all you eat, that has its own drawbacks. And when you’re eating plants and meat, but aren’t eating a diverse, varied diet, you run into problems.

Hell, you can be eating a varied diet and run into deficiencies anyway, if you aren’t paying attention. It’s harder, but it’s not impossible.

In other words, the headline is clickbait. It just isn’t unfounded clickbait.

Out here in meat space, the vegans I know have no issues because they’ve been vegan for a long time and have learned how to keep things balanced.

Is this a legitimate question (rule number 2), when there has been a history of drama regarding this topic on the platform?

• https://lemmy.world/post/19136453
• https://lemmy.world/post/19264848
• https://feddit.org/post/2807078?scrollToComments=true
• https://sopuli.xyz/post/21265293

Removed by mod