Monday, May 16, 2005

Vegans Starve their Children

Why don't we ever get these kind of headlines when meat eating Parents are caught sending their kids to school with a packet of bacon crisps and a can of coke for breakfast? or dinner ladies who serve turkey twizzlers to our children?

Hopefully stories like these will encourage vegetarians and vegans to fully research what they eat and what they feed their children.

yes it's simple but not 'rice and beans' simple.

East Valley Tribune | Daily Arizona news for Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale

Kids of vegan parents still
By Irene Hsiao, Tribune
A Scottsdale couple’s three children were still hospitalized Thursday after police said they were malnourished on a vegan diet.

Blair Parker, 34, and Kimu Parker, 35, were indicted on felony child abuse charges as their 11-year-old daughter, 9-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter recover in a hospital.

The Parkers, who are being held in a Maricopa County jail, could face 10 to 24 years in prison on each count, said Bill FitzGerald, spokesman for the county attorney’s office.

"It’s appalling to me what human beings do to children at times," said Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. "This case really strikes home to me because I have children in the same age bracket. It was very hard to review the evidence and the photographs in the case, but we will be pursuing this case very aggressively."

Blair Parker brought the 3-year-old girl to the hospital when she suffered symptoms of seizures April 23, police said. Doctors discovered the girl weighed 12 pounds and called police. Police found two other children who were malnourished and underweight. The 11-year-old was 36.5 pounds and the 9-year-old was 29 pounds, police said.

The Parkers told police they don’t believe in consuming animal products and ate vegetables, rice and beans, a police report states.

"We continue to see cases in which there’s been horrific mistreatment of children either left in cages, closets or not nourished, and it’s a very troubling trend," Thomas said. "It’s incumbent on people in law enforcement positions in particular get a better sense as to why this is happening."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is absolutely absurd. It is along the same lines as the "study" in Africa funded by the Beef industry that "proved" that not feeding children meat was unethical. The basis of the conclusion? The children’s health improved after being fed beef. One flaw: they were starving. They were living off corn and rice. Both are vegan products, definitely, but nowhere did anyone say that that was a balanced vegan diet. Chewing gum would have improved their health, for goodness sake. Malnourishing your children is unacceptable. This can include feeding them trash that comes from animals as well, though. Everyone is so quick to jump on vegans for this or that but will happily shove pig anus into their mouths. I am sick of magazines or media telling half of the story. These two stories imply that a vegan or even vegetarian diet is unacceptable, when it was in one case simply a horrible parent, and in the other it was a matter of not having food available.

Anonymous said...

I agree with what this person just said. It seems there is a lot of slanted journalism going on. I actually read an article that was dated months ago that stated that the children possibly suffered from "malabsorption syndrome" . However, I have heard nothing else mentioned about it since then. It's interesting to note that children that suffer from "malabsortion syndrome" actually look like a child suffering from malnutrion due to the fact that they cannot absorb nutrients like other children. If this is true, the parents were not starving their children and this should be determined before the media attacks all vegans. It's poor and unethical journalism I feel. Vey unprofessional. But unfortunately, a very common practice today. We need to check things out first before we make a judgment because we don't always get ALL the facts and that is just PART of the problem

Unknown said...

There is a great story in the Phoenix New Times that goes into the details of the family's diet and compares their habits to those of healthy vegan families with young children. They admit that they limited calorie intake, sometimes limiting the diet to only 1 meal a day with a small snack for lunch. There is no way that any vegan child can survive and thrive on that limited a diet. The claim that the children suffered from malabsorption syndrome is absurd since none of the children had ever seen a doctor, or even seen a nutritionist in person!

As for the seriousness of the prosecution, and their subsequent sentances, the fact is that they willfully ignored their children's desperate situation, despite repeated seizures, fevers, etc. and sought the help of a vegan "nutritionist" rather than a doctor while their three year old was suffering grand-mal seizures and vomiting over the course of several days. She evenutally died as a result, but the other children were so young at the time that no one realized that it was from malnutrition, because it wasn't yet apparent.

Whatever your dietary convictions - that is inexcusible. Whatever caused them to become so extreme, they did so knowing that their children were suffering, and yet they didn't seek help. They deserve whatever punishment they receive.