Should I feed my baby a vegan diet?

Exploring the health impacts of vegan diets for children

My wife and I are expecting our first baby in July. We’re a long way from having a kid that eats solid foods, but I say it’s never too early to go down a research rabbit hole. So, I recently looked into whether it’s healthy for kids to eat vegan.

Here’s the bottom line up front after my research:

If you can get your kid to eat a well rounded diet with proper supplementation of vitamin B12, veganism should be fine for kids. If you can’t, you are probably harming them. It’s very similar to eating vegan as an adult except with higher stakes since a child’s brain is growing so fast.

My findings from hours of research were corroborated by the report I made with Open AI’s Deep Research tool. It concluded the same thing as me in roughly 15 minutes. If you prefer to trust the AI and read its detailed report, go for it! It’s more thorough and less silly than mine, that’s for sure.

All in all, this is great news for the animal lovers. Still, I gotta be honest and acknowledge that my baby will eat some animal products. This is based on some lingering worries around the bioavailability of vitamins and nutrients from supplements, the fact that other caretakers will be feeding him quite often, and sheer convenience. Because of this, I recently started a $25 monthly donation to FarmKind to offset the future meat consumption of baby boy. Shoutout to

Bentham's Bulldog

for his post which put that charity, and the concept of offsetting, on my radar.

If we do ever go the full vegan route, I would need to be ready to defend my choices from highly skeptical friends and family. People who raise vegan kids, even otherwise mild-mannered Canadians, sometimes get backed into saying outlandish things to satisfy their critics:

People often ask me what I would do if Holden needed meat to survive. I tell them if he needed the last cow on earth, I would kill it with my bare hands. The health of my family is my utmost priority.

While that guy might be underestimating how difficult it would be to kill a cow with his bare hands, you can’t say he doesn’t care about doing what’s right for his kid. People who feed their kids vegan are mostly like that. Far from being negligent, they are conscientious and values-driven parents who argue that their approach will lead to a healthier child. Or at the very least, a child that isn’t at a deficit compared to it’s meat eating peers. I tried to find out if that’s the case.

What does the scientific establishment say about feeding kids vegan?

Going into this project, I was sure that vegan diets were unhealthy for children and pregnant women. I was surprised to learn that, according to the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, it’s perfectly healthy to feed a child vegan from birth provided you supplement properly:

It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.

Of course, theory and practice are different things. Kids are picky, and most parents aren’t nutritionists with tons of time on their hands to craft the perfect diets. Which is probably why the German Department of Health both recognizes that kids can be healthy on a vegan diet without actually encouraging parents to withhold meat. Their thinking is that the downside if something goes wrong is really bad, and some parents aren’t willing or able to carefully supplement with everything a vegan baby needs. Plant Based News, reporting on Germany’s approach, says the following:

Previously, DGE (German Nutrition Society) said that plant-based diets were “not recommended” for vulnerable populations (infants, seniors, pregnant people, and so on), whereas now it neither recommends nor rejects a vegan diet for these demographics.

Also, in case you were wondering, yes, human breast milk is vegan. As the site healthline puts it, “Although breast milk is technically an animal product, because it is human milk made for human babies, it poses no ethical conflict.” I can’t believe that even has to be said. We wonder why vegans get a bad rap sometimes.

Speaking of milk, I was very curious to learn about babies who are not breast fed, have a dairy allergy, and thus have to consume a plant based baby formula. (Soy based baby formula has been around since the 70’s.) If veganism was bad for babies, the ones on soy baby formula should be less healthy than those fed a standard diet.

From what I can tell, babies fed soy formula do just fine. For example, a 2022 study said:

Growth patterns, bone health, and metabolic, reproductive, endocrinological, immune, and neurological outcomes of soy formula fed infants are similar to those observed in children fed with cows milk formulas.

So, the basic medical guidelines say you should feel fine about feeding a baby vegan. Others vehemently disagree.

What do the skeptics of feeding kids vegan say?

The best anti-vegan research paper I found was published in 2019 and is called “Is Vegetarianism Healthy for Children?”

The author thinks the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is being way too cavalier about the health risks of children foregoing all meat. He’s suspect not just of vegans — he thinks even vegetarianism is way too restrictive. He worries especially about vegetarians not getting enough taurine, creatine, fatty acids, iron, and zinc. The argument he makes is that while you can get those things without meat, are you really absorbing them optimally? And are there unknown unknowns from such a new diet, evolutionarily speaking? Do you want to take that gamble with your kids?

The author does not come out and say vegan kids will be unhealthy, though it’s strongly implied. He just says that there’s no good long-term studies proving meatless diets are healthy for developing kids, so we should err on the side of caution. Like all people on this side of the argument, he seems to have very little faith that parents of vegan kids will properly supplement their children.

Nutrition writer and GiveWell researcher Stephan Guyenet looked into the importance of meat for childhood growth and development and also came away convinced feeding kids vegan is not a good idea. He says, amongst other things, that all cultures throughout history have prized meat eating for fertility and child growth. We should be cautious of going against that ancient wisdom.

Guyenet also puts a lot of weight on a study featuring kids in Ethiopia. [describe study]

Do vegan diets affect a kid’s height?

Guyenet notes that some of the data on vegan diets is not clear one way or the other, such as whether they affect a kid’s height:

There is some evidence that non-macrobiotic vegan children tend to be a bit shorter than their omnivorous peers, but the studies have not all been consistent (5, 6, 7). Vegetarian children tend to be similar in stature to omnivorous children (8, 9, 10).

I have been a Stephen Guyenet fan for over a decade, and I love his book The Hungry Brain, so I feel that gives me leeway to say the following — this research feels kinda lazy! The vegan studies he cites are from 1981, 1988, and 1992. The three studies combined looked at a total of 43 kids. His blog post about meat eating for kids was written in 2015. That is well after the main dietitian groups in both Canada (2003) and America (2009) concluded that balanced vegan diets were healthy for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy and infancy. Seems like that would have been worth mentioning.

Research is ongoing, and maybe it’s my rose colored glasses, but it seems like the balance is tipping toward vegan diets not affecting height. Here’s a snippet about height from most recent (2023) meta-analysis of vegan diet studies I could find:

As mentioned by the scientists, the observed changes in height among vegan children could be due to the inclusion of younger vegan children in one study. The meta-analysis excluding this study found no significant differences in height between vegan and omnivorous children.

I’m not saying society has it all figured out, nutrition wise. There’s definitely a benefit to looking about how our ancestors did things, and your baby’s health is not something to take lightly. I just don’t think you should worry that if you feed your child vegan you’re dooming them to a life of asking other shoppers to grab items for them off the top shelf at the grocery store. There are just too many examples out there of healthy and thriving vegan kids.

Also, doesn’t it mean something that the meat eating hunter gatherers we have studied (e.g. the Hadza) are super short?According to GPT-o1, most male hunter gatherers are 4’11 to 5’5. And they are eating freshly hunted meat, which is theoretically the most healthy. I know there are a lot more factors that go into height than just diet, but it still does make me think that meat is not the magical growth elixir some make it out to be.

Yet, I’m kind of a hypocrite. Because despite all I’ve read, I still worry about feeding a baby strictly vegan. I am most convinced by the arguments around nutrients being more bioavailable from meat than they are from supplements. What if by the time you find out your kid isn’t absorbing something properly in supplement form, you’ve already done them some harm?

I know that sort of anxious thinking can be a slippery slope. I am not going to the kind of parent that makes my kid pad up like an NFL linebacker to ride his scooter. You gotta accept some risks. But it’s so easy to give them a little meat, and to offset that consumption with donations, that I think it’s worth it to do so. I also can’t be mad at the people who say I’m condemning animals to suffer so that I can avoid a very unlikely outcome. This stuff is complicated!

In the end, I find myself in a weird place where I don’t believe it would make a huge difference to our baby’s development if they ate vegan, but I am also too nervous to actually take the plunge.

Will raising a kid vegan hurt their IQ?

If you ask Google about veganism for kids and IQ, you will get extremely worried.

Then you take a deep breath, realize we are talking about 9 people out of thousands from a 53 year-old study that relied on notoriously unreliable self-reported diet data (many of the “vegetarians” said they eat chicken and fish), and you calm down. One weird outlier could have caused that result. If well-planned vegan diets were doing that much damage to kids, it would have almost certainly have been noticed by now. I couldn’t find any good studies saying vegan kids fed a balanced diet would have a lower IQ than their omnivore counterparts. All the fear mongering articles I checked out basically just said some version of “If you don’t give your kid B12 they will get brain damage!!!” Which, yes. Don’t do that.

One thing I’ll note on the IQ front is that we shouldn’t overlook creatine. A 2003 paper showed that vegetarian adults supplementing with creatine saw massive improvements on both working memory and intelligence tests. It was only a sample size of 45, and these were adults and not kids, but it’s an impressive result.

I take creatine because it’s cheap and easy, but I can’t say I feel a big difference in brain functioning.¹

Will the vegan kid feel normal? Would it be really hard for all involved?

I know how much friction it can cause to be vegan as an adult. Telling your social circle you have a vegan kid would introduce tons of new drama. Maybe there are pockets of certain cities where that’s not the case, but I live in a place where people buy bloody marys with an entire fried chicken on top. I would expect some pushback.

A real thing you can buy in Milwaukee

A strict vegan upbringing would mean the kid doesn’t get to eat cupcakes at the school birthday party, or most Halloween candy, or grandma’s favorite homemade meal. I imagine it would be like trying to eat kosher or halal but without the extensive kin network that also eats like that. Sounds tough.

That said, there are many thoughtful and inspiring people like Jessica Scott-Reid who write eloquently and honestly about how they are raising vegan children. She makes it sound challenging but also rewarding.

If you want to get into the more vitriol-laden areas of this debate, you can read any number of heated Reddit threads on feeding kids vegan. In this one, it seems like every other comment is either someone calling a vegan parent a child abuser or a happy parent saying their vegan kids are thriving.

Our tentative plan

We definitely don’t want to raise an orthorexic kid. We want a happy, healthy child that has all the tools they need to one day look around at the world on their own and decide how they want to interact with the industrial food system.

We will feed baby a wide variety of foods and try to get it to enjoy the same healthy, plant-based meals we eat. We’ll also give them animal products, preferably ethically sourced versions. I know “ethically sourced” is a loaded term, that’s something wrote all about recently. I just mean we’ll try to avoid the worst factory farmed products in our home. Hopefully baby likes bivalves.²

We will not fret too much about what happens outside the house. If grandma gives them ground beef casserole and ice cream bars while babysitting, so be it. If they get McDonald’s two days in a row with their friends, so be it. If they grow up and decide to buy a bloody mary with an entire fried chicken on top, so be — sorry, no. For that, they are getting kicked out of the will.

1. Humans do synthesize creatine out of other amino acids, so it’s not an essential supplement. When people cut out meat, the amount of creatine found in their brain remains the same, they just have less in their bloodstream. Also, Dr. Gregor from Nutrition Facts says that creatine synthesis creates homocysteine as a byproduct, so “if your homocysteine is elevated on a plant-based diet, meaning above 10, despite taking B12 supplements (and eating greens and beans to get enough folate), well then it might be worth experimenting with supplementing with a gram of creatine for a few weeks and see if your homocysteine comes down.”

2. Read more about bivalve veganism here