Product Description

PREGNANCY, CHILDREN, & THE VEGAN DIET By Michael Klaper, M.D.

A practical guide to creating good health without the use of animal products during pregnancy, lactation, and in growing children. A reading must for all parents to be!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #560009 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 109 pages

Review
"Pregnancy, Children and the Vegan Diet is a prescription that should be on the desk of every obstetrician and pediatrician and should be read by all new mothers and fathers, and anyone else interested in maximizing their health and longevity. It fills an important gap in nutrition information, and answers the questins of parents, and readers in general who want to do more than fumble with the powerful tools of nutrition." -- Neal Barnard, M.D., Chairman Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

About the Author
A practicing physician since 1972, Michael Klaper, M.D., is an internationally known educator on achieving optimal health through pure vegetarian (vegan) nutrition and lifestyle balance. He is the author of Vegan Nutrition; Pure and Simple. He is an honors graduate of the University of Illinois in Chicago, and has post graduate training in medicine, surgery, anesthesiology, and obstetrics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Thus, three balanced vegan meals daily, based upon grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, will provide ample amounts of all the above nutrients for adults (pregnant or not) and growing children. Women eating in a vegan style have been shown to have normal pregnancies (with less preeclampsia), and their children grow to be full-size adults, largely free of the degenerative diseases that plague their meat-eating peers.

Customer Reviews

Great nutritional mom info; Outdated, incomplete child info.
This book came very highly recommended so I had great expectations. Unfortunately, it fell a little short.

First, what is good about it... The sections on nutrition for pregnant or nursing mothers are excellent. It goes into great detail regarding nutritional requirements and dispels some myths that conventional thinking has generated. (i.e. dairy products help prevent osteoporosis, meat is the best protein source, etc.) It also provides detailed recommendations which I find tremendously helpful.

Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for nursing infants, the information is VERY outdated. For example, it recommends that nursing mothers switch sides "every 5 minutes" to avoid soreness. Anyone who has nursed knows that the "latching on" phase is the most uncomfortable so this would actually make soreness worse. Further, it is very unhealthy for the infant to switch that soon since the hindmilk (milk produced after 10 minutes)provides the greatest sustenance. It also recommends using a pin to enlarge the hole in bottle nipples to increase flow. (bad idea)

The recommendations for introducing first foods are no better. The book (pg 44 & 48) recommends introducing fruit juices at 2-3 months beginning with melon juice. Doctors, midwives, nutritionists and recent literature concur that that is too young to introduce juice. Further, melon juices are more likely to cause allergies then, say, apple juice.

Finally, the book intersperses pictures of 'healthy' vegan children as role models for the reader. Over 6 pages of photos and biographies are dedicated to River Phoenix and family, since they are vegan, "take no medications, have never been hospitalized and have not needed a physician's services." Oops. Another role model discussed and pictured is Ocean Robbins. (Do all old vegans name their kids after bodies of water?) Although Ocean is the son of John Robbins (whose book I would give 5 stars), his face looks gaunt and unhealthy and his eyes look cloudy and tired.

Last points: Another notable omission is how children can deal with peer pressure. While the book is not a psychology book, it should go beyond 'bake vegan cake' for your child's birthday party to address this important issue. The best thing about this book is the sample menus. I like the way it breaks down the content by calories, protein, calcium, etc. It's nice to know where the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are coming from in a vegan diet.

In short, this book is a good source for basic nutrition but a bad source for usable vegan child-raising techniques...

Inspiring, but some parts are a little out of date
Vegan parents-to-be will be inspired and reassured by Dr. Klapers compelling, well-documented arguments in support of veganism during pregnancy, lactation, and childhood. For me, the most valuable part of the book was the extensive collection of parents' stories and photographs of healthy, happy children. Dr. Klaper provides not only helpful food guides (to replace the omnivorous "4 Food Groups") but also details food sources of nutrients which may be of greater concern to vegans (protein, iron, calcium, B12). I would have liked to see a discussion of how to cope with "morning" sickness (for me it lasted all day) and finicky toddlers. Why do books for omnivores say "don't worry if all you eat is soda crackers for the first trimester" or "don't worry if your toddler eats nothing but Cheerios for a week" but books for vegans make it seem like we must always eat a widely varied, perfectly balanced diet? Because this is an older book, some of the advice (e.g. breastfeeding, use of juices, introduction of solids) does not reflect current knowledge. This book is still definitely worth having on hand, but I would suggest supplementing it with the more recent _Becoming_Vegetarian_ by Vesanto Melina et al. Thanks to Dr. Klaper's encouragement, I resisted pressure to feed my baby meat. He is now a tall, intelligent, healthy, sturdy, lively, loveable two-year-old, and vegan!

Good for basic nutrition info.
I thought this book is very informative in many ways and covers basic nutrition principles that many people have little or no knowledge of. I am working toward a degree in nutrition and feel this book is a very valuable source in my growing collection of books. As for the reveiwer who thinks vegan children do not grow healthy and strong he/she must have been doing something terribly wrong because I have not personally known a single vegan child who is small or sickly including my own. My children are vegan, have strong immune systems (not vaccinated either) and rarely ever get sick. My children are naturally slim and healthy but are not small for their ages and our family pediatrician comments on my children as being among the healthiest in his practice. I think a properly balanced vegan diet can benefit all persons from birth.