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A girl of 12 brought up by her parents on a strict vegan diet has been admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition said to have left her with the spine of an 80-year-old. Doctors are under pressure to report the couple, from Glasgow, to police and social workers amid concerns her health and welfare may have been neglected in pursuit of their beliefs. The youngster, fed on a strict meat- and dairy-free diet from birth, is being treated at the city’s Royal Hospital for Sick Children. She is said to have a severe form of rickets and to...

Feeling hair in her mouth, a 16-year-old vegan from Partille outside of Gothenburg looked down to discover a mouse cadaver in her bag of tortilla chips. “It was terrible. I went through the roof when I heard what happened,” said Thomas Sällström, the girl’s grandfather. He arrived at his daughter's house shortly after his granddaughter realized a mummified mouse was nestled among the chips. “They were just sitting eating chips like you would on any normal Saturday night and then this happened,” he told The Local. “She didn’t actually eat the mouse, but did get some hair in her mouth.”...

WELLINGTON (AFP) - They say you are what you eat, and growing numbers of vegans are shunning sex with meat-eaters because they see them as "a graveyard for animals", a New Zealand researcher says. These vegans not only refuse to eat meat or animal products but refuse to have sexual contact with meat-eaters because their bodies are made up of dead animals, the researcher was reported saying in The Press newspaper on Tuesday. Annie Potts, co-director of the New Zealand Centre of Human and Animal Studies at New Zealand's Canterbury University, said she coined the term vegansexuals during her research....

Hijabs a source of illness, doctors say Doctors have claimed that Muslim women wearing the hijab could be at risk of serious illness because they do not get enough sun. It has been claimed that women who cover their skin are could be suffering bone deficiencies over a lack of vitamin D. Most of the body’s vitamin D - which prevents rickets - is obtained through sunlight acting on the skin. Only a little comes from food. Doctors told a London conference on Wednesday that people with dark pigment oare at risk because of "cultural reasons" and because they are...

London (CNSNews.com) - A leaked e-mail message has led to speculation that the British government plans to promote vegetarianism as part of a broader strategy to fight climate change. In a message sent earlier this year to a vegetarian lobbying group, the Environment Agency -- a statutory body set up under a 1995 law -- said it was considering ways to deal with global warming, one of which was to encourage people to eat less meat. The agency said that it was unlikely that most people would swear off meat entirely and that the issue would have to be introduced...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Despite their healthy diets, vegetarian youth in Sweden and Norway do not practice other healthy lifestyle behaviors such as exercising more or using alcohol or tobacco less frequently than do their peers, according to recent study findings. "Contrary to findings from other studies, adherence to a low-meat diet may not correlate with other health promotion practices among adolescents in Sweden and Norway," write lead study author Dr. Christel L. Larsson of Umea University in Sweden and her colleagues. This finding is based on a survey of 2,041 Swedish and Norwegian 15- to 16-year-old students, 149...