Dr. Spock recommends a vegan diet for children

Benjamin Spock M.D., the author of “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care”, recommended a vegan diet for children already back in 1998. Because optimal foods for kids are; fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and grains. These foods are rich in for instance minerals, fiber, vitamins, and protein, and they support great health for the rest of your life. Research has shown that those who eat vegetables and fruits as adults are the ones who also ate it during childhood.

It’s great for kids to eat berries and fruits

My family used to go out into the forest and pick lots of berries like blueberries, lingonberries, raspberries and cloudberries. That was fun! I loved when mother made jam of the raspberries because it was delicious to have on the pancakes! My mom knew some people who grew strawberries and blackcurrants so we also picked and ate those berries. But since we lived in a sparsely populated area there weren’t so many different fruits available. Sometimes during grand occasions, my parents bought a watermelon so we could share it. It tasted like heaven!

I do remember that I ate a lot of bananas as a child, I guess it was my favorite back then 🙂 but we also had apples, pears, and clementine. I think I was a teenager the first time I saw a kiwi fruit. I remember I thought it was exciting to eat it, it tasted better than candy to me! And when I got older my mother started making a dish that contained a lot of broccoli and that soon became one of my favorite meals!

The advantages of a vegan diet

Some benefits of a plant-based diet are that it’s reducing the risk to get cancer, heart diseases and type 2 diabetes, and it lowers your blood pressure and cholesterol.

And Dr. Neal Barnard, the president of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine, says that girls who drink soy milk and eat tofu and similar products daily during their youth have a considerable less risk to get breast cancer when they become adults, compared to people who not consume soy. A vegan diet may also encourage a later menarche which has been indicated to be connected with a reduced risk to get breast cancer.

All animals have feelings

And when you are a vegan you save over 100 animals each year from being killed, because when one choose to eat a plant-based diet, you reduce the demand for meat. And if more people adopt a vegan lifestyle the fewer animals have to be born and killed because of humans. There is no such thing as humane slaughter because every animal has a soul, every animal has feelings, meaning they feel pain, grief, sadness, anxiety, joy and happiness just like humans do. No animal wants to die to become food for people. Animals have the same right to live their life in peace just like you and I do.

A plant-based diet saves endangered species

And choosing a plant-based diet is also the best choice for our planet since it saves massive amounts of water. A vegan diet also reduces pollution, climate change and the destruction of endangered species, wildlife habitat, and tropical rainforest.