Teaching your teenager the importance of living a healthy lifestyle is critical if you want your child to grow up and be healthy. With all of the diet options out there, many parents wonder which would be the best way to go. Recently, many teens have decided to go vegan for many reasons. Some say it is for health reasons while others believe it is a fad or cool thing to do.

"A lot of young kids are seeing their friends follow this diet and then they jump on the bandwagon not knowing exactly what they are getting themselves into" says Sam Miller, a teen counselor at the Parenting Teenagers Academy. "While I applaud these kids for wanting to be healthy and be more conscious about what they are eating, I think many parents should be concerned about this because young kids need good cholesterol and protein to grow properly. The brain is made up of 40% fat and it is very difficult to obtain high quality amounts of this fat on a vegan diet. Just look at many vegans you will see how frail and weak their bone structure looks."

Many adults who have been vegan for years are now leaving the diet in droves as they have become sick and malnourished. While some argue they were not doing it right, ask any one of them and they will tell you they did everything they were told to do by the experts. Just listen to one story from this ex-vegan of 15 years...

"My husband and I have an acupuncture clinic.  The longer we were vegan, the more fatigued I got, and the less motivated.  This was very difficult for me personally, as I felt like I should be a better representative of vitality ~ esp. from eating all that so-called healthy plant food ~ only instead, I seemed to just accelerate my aging process.  I have actually had several clients tell me how much better I look now that I've been eating animal foods again.  

I felt bad for those I promoted the diet to as well.  But, my husband and I did  plenty of research.  Don and I both wrote several books.  We were not the militant types ever, but we did watch Earthlings and all those wretched videos of slaughter houses.  This process can really cause cognitive dissonance, as we begin to really believe that only vegans have compassion.  Only the irony is that many have very little compassion for anyone who leaves veganism because of their failing health.  We were attacked on our channel.  Since the channel we had previously was plant-based, we just finally deleted the entire account.  

While we did have that channel, I had actually trashed a lot of video footage because of our poor lighting.  I often had such puffy eyes in the morning, and my skin was aging, so I would trash the film b/c of not looking very well.  I see some of the aging, more prominent vegan Youtuber females relying on a lot of make up, or perhaps even getting injected, or getting surgery.   Such the ways we humans can go into denial!  

BTW, I also did the fruitarian thing for a bit.  Joined the BGD for a month out of curiosity.  Slurpping down 1000 calorie banana smoothies, drinking tons of water, and still perpetually thirsty.  And then there was the absolute urgency to urinate.  Started to have a lot of episodes of just about dropping, like the lights would go out, and I would have get on the ground to brace myself, and then I had what felt like mini seizures.  No doubt pre-diabetic.  My muscular development suffered to, and I had fat that wouldn't go away, despite how much I was working out doing calisthenics.  So glad to have woken up."

Suffice it to say, it is important that teens get the right nourishment. But is veganism the right way?