A Swedish couple are facing prosecution after nearly starving their two-year-old daughter to death on a strict vegan diet which resulted in her being hospitalised.
The young girl was taken to Queen Silvia’s children’s hospital in Gothenburg in mid-February severely malnourished to the point where she came close to death according to medical professionals, SVT reports.
Doctors said that the two-year-old showed signs of severe vitamin deficiency and one doctor claimed he had never seen such a case in his entire medical career saying, “You just do not get children with vitamin deficiency in Sweden today.”
The parents have since been brought up on charges of negligence and bodily harm with prosecutor Ximena Bene commenting, “I have never encountered this combination before in a case before. The parental couple is negligent when they give their child a one-sided diet, in connection with the removal of the child from social institutions that are there to check how the child is feeling.”
“The child has not received a proper vegan diet. The food has consisted of breast milk, brown rice, and fruit and vegetables,” the prosecutor added.
Both parents have denied any culpability in the incident claiming that the young girl had several allergies making food selection difficult and the father claiming the girl’s situation was caused by a sickness several days prior to her hospitalisation.
The incident comes after a 2014 study by the University of Graz in Austria determined that vegetarians and vegans had a much worse quality of life than meat eaters.
The study claimed vegans tend to be “less healthy (in terms of cancer, allergies, and mental health disorders), have a lower quality of life, and also require more medical treatment.”
Vegans have also become more militant in recent years in certain countries like the UK where counter-terror police were brought in to protect meat industry workers from vegan activist violence in December of last year.
In France, a group of militant vegans were jailed this month for a series of violent attacks against businesses dealing with meat, which included burning down butchers shops.