Veganism - Diet that kills?

There have been a spate of reports lately of Vegan parents in Atlanta, GA being charged with murder for the death of their new born who they had tried raising as Vegan. This was very disturbing when I first read this. The media has been sensationalizing the case with headlines like 'Death by Veganism' (in recent NYTimes Op-ed) and seem to be pointing the finger at the Vegan movement as a whole.

Was it really Vegan diet that caused the baby's death, or were there other factors. Even if it was Vegan diet that really caused the death, is it right to charge the parents of murder.

Reading through the articles on this story on the web, it does not appear that the baby died simply because of Vegan diet. There seems to be a larger case of neglect. The baby was born in a bathtub, the baby was never taken to a hospital by its parents for the fear of the hospital being 'infested with germs'. And most importantly, the baby seems to have been under-fed. Insufficient diet seems to be the problem here rather than Vegan diet. Its not a case of 'Vegan' parents causing their baby's death, instead 'stupid' parents leading to their baby's demise.

Now this brings to the other concern I have with the story - that of the harsh verdict. Since when is stupidity a capital crime. The first-time parents in this case clearly were negligent & irresponsible but do they deserve to spend the rest of the life in prison for ignorance? They clearly were not intending to cause harm to their child and were doing what they felt was best for the kid.

One can extend this verdict to sentence low-income parents whose children may die of malnourishment. This logic if applied in many of the third world nations will see their prisons swell with 'poor' parents. A not so extreme extrapoloation of this verdict would be in the case of children who grow up as religious fanatics. Will parents be charged for raising their children with strict religious dogma if the child grows up to be an extremist and hurts others!! One can make a case that the parents should have known better.

The Atlanta verdict is clearly a flawed one and hope it is overturned soon.

For another post ...
There seem to be articles online, not very objective going by the source, indicating that Vegan diet is fine for babies of all ages. But is it really the case. For that matter, is it even good for adults. Veganism is a relatively new way of life and we don't have enough information to judge long-term impacts of such a diet.

Learning to walk

OK.. so this is it. I finally have created a blog. This was not as hard as I thought. Now the tough part would be to maintain this and to write posts regularly that interest others.

Let me start off with some musings on the need for blogs. Why has it become so popular? Is it that sharing ones thoughts with the world is a deeply held desire for so many people. Or is it to show-off your knowledge/ideas? Or is it just to see your thoughts published on a web-page? I wonder how many blogs just fall by the wayside after just a couple of posts (I should find that out).. vast majority of them would be my guess. Most people just want to get on the bandwagon and lose stream after just a few posts. Most are average joes without having a lot of interesting ideas to share. I hope this blog survives to have a few more posts than just a couple.

I don't think the blog is going to have a theme. It seems hard enough to think of ideas to write about that are random, let alone be able to do that for a focused theme/topic. So thats it.. my first post. It sure is not going to set the blogosphere alight. But I had to start somewhere, sometime.