http://instapundit.com/archives2/005476.php

Glenn weighs in on the affects of a vegan diet – namely the starvation of babies forced to abandon the protein sources most easily used by their growing bodies. He also points us to a fairly enlightened commentary at the – believe it or not – the New York Times by former vegan Nina Planck:

WHEN Crown Shakur died of starvation, he was 6 weeks old and weighed 3.5 pounds. His vegan parents, who fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice, were convicted in Atlanta recently of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty.

This particular calamity — at least the third such conviction of vegan parents in four years — may be largely due to ignorance. But it should prompt frank discussion about nutrition.

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

The best line, though, came from a reader of Planck’s book on the subject at Amazon.com: Politics and PETA won’t keep a baby alive when it’s deprived of the essential amino acids that can only be found in animal protein.

Don’t expect the anti-agriculture wacktivists in the vegan camps to get the correlation any time soon. Many of the nutrients necessary for brain development and function are found in beef, pork, and poultry…