A recent news story says at least 1 in 200 kids are vegetarian for health reasons.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

Sam Silverman is co-captain of his high school football team — a safety accustomed to bruising collisions. But that’s nothing compared with the abuse he gets for being a vegetarian.

“I get a lot of flak for it in the locker room,” said the 16-year-old junior at Westborough High School in Massachusetts.

[...] according to a recent study that provides the government’s first estimate of how many children avoid meat. That’s about 1 in 200. [If the numbers are the same for all people, that translates to about 1.5 million vegetarian people in the US. However, there are likely more. Keep reading...]

Other surveys suggest the rate could be four to six times that among older teens who have more control over what they eat than young children do.

My reactions:

• The article used the word “abuse” to describe the nonvegans bullying of vegetarian and vegan kids. I don’t think that’s a stretch. “Abuse” is an accurate term in this instance. It’s a form of bullying often overlooked by teachers and school administrators. They think about bullies stealing lunch money, not bullies ruining lunches.
• Speaking of lunches, these kids deserve vegan lunches. Please vote for them >>
• Elsewhere in the article it suggests children most often go vegetarian (or vegan) for ethical reasons, not for health or environmental. That makes perfect sense to me, as someone who went vegetarian in childhood. and in fact, research on vegetarian children shows that ALL vegetarian children cite ethics as a core reason for vegetarianism.
• This number seems a little low, compared to other estimates. For example, “Three percent of 8- to 18-year-olds in America are vegetarians, according to a 2005 survey by the Vegetarian Resource Group.”

Thoughts?

[*This post has been edited.]

589 views
Sections: Vegan News
Topics: children, teens, veg, Vegan