What Was The Andressohn Trial Really About?

by Storm Talifero - 12/26/05

The Andressohns

In reflecting on the Andressohn's trial I can't help but feel a huge fraud has been perpetrated on the Raw Food Movement in general and the Andressohns in particular.

The Andressohns a raw vegan couple were initially charged with the manslaughter by starvation of their six month old baby. The Andressohns are a Raw Vegan family. They have four older children. In the course of their recent trial it came out that the baby was born with a birth defect and most children born with this defect only live about 5 weeks. Their child lived six months on the raw vegan diet even though the baby could not nurse.

This whole ordeal started almost 2 and a half years ago and since then until last week the Andressohns were not allowed to even see their children and they were totally portrayed in the press as child abusers. This is all very heavy stuff and I'm still shifting through and trying to process all the facts.

I think that one of the things that happened is that this case received a lot of media attention and because of that the state of Florida was not able to railroad these people into jail as I'm sure they would have done had it not been front page news.

In the course of the trial it came out that the raw vegan diet is not an unhealthy diet. It also came out that the other children were not unhealthy they were just under weight when compared with the average American kid their age. You have to understand that the average is based upon a curve. In a nation in which one out of three children is overweight the average weight on the curve is not necessarily an ideal weight.

Now here is the part that I find really glaring. The Andressohns were found innocent of manslaughter by starvation; it was established that the Raw Vegan Diet is not an invalid diet, and yet they were still found guilty of neglect and sentenced to the following: They must take a year of parenting classes before getting their children back, they must put their children on a diet supervised by a State certified Nutritionist, they got 15 years probation with the state monitoring their parenting, their children must be vaccinated, they must take their children to the doctor regularly and they are not allowed to home-school them anymore. And at the end of the trial the prosecutor said "I think that they got off too light. I want to retry the case and give them twenty years in prison."

This is the way that it reads to me. The state had a vested interest in finding these people guilty. They had rushed in and arrested them for the murder of their child a crime of which it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they were not guilty of. They separated these parents from their children for over two years and thereby the state left themselves open to huge lawsuits when it came out that their case was totally unfounded.

But I want to try and be fair here. Although I watched the trial on Court TV, read all the related articles and spoke to many of the parties involved I still don't have all of the facts. The Raw Vegan Diet is a very hard diet to do long term for anyone. It is really hard to do as a family with young kids. I know that in the case of my own raw vegan kids sometimes they run a little under the national averages. But I think that all kids have growth spurts. Right now two of my kids are in the top 10 percent as far as height but they are average weight. One is average in both height and weight and my youngest is a little under but he is gaining weight which makes me think that he is having a growth spurt.

If the Andressohn family's trial is a case precedent then that means that they can come and get my children any time they are running a little under weight and put them under the care of the state. This is a totally terrifying scenario. We took our children to a doctor who said that being underweight is not a sign of ill health unless the child is sickly. According to the doctor you can be underweight and be perfectly healthy or in better than average health. We filmed this visit and the doctor's statement and you can see it in our film "Breakthrough". I think this is a very important point as it is a source of much misunderstanding. When the Andressohn children were taken from their parents they were a little underweight but perfectly healthy. After they were taken from their home they developed several health problems that were brought up in the trial as though they were the parents fault. However all the social workers that had visited them over the years testified that the children appeared bright and healthy.

If the Andressohns are guilty of gross child neglect as they were charged with then they belong in jail, but if the state rushed in to form a judgment and the only crime that these people are guilty of is just being a little off center of mainstream America then lets just leave them the heck alone.

You have to understand that there are millions and millions of dollars involved. There is the dairy industry, the cattle industry, the junk food industry, the fast food industry, and the pharmaceutical industry that are all going to totally crash if mainstream America accepts the concept of eating raw organic vegan food as a lifestyle. So in many ways the Andressohn family became a lightning rod for all of these industries, a test case so to speak.

We live in a time and place where over one thousand people a day are dying from obesity related diseases (according to the CDC, Centers for Disease Control). One out of three of America's children are obese. We have major corporations advertising junk food to kids almost before they can talk. If the state is going to come into our houses and start dictating how we feed and raise our kids if they are raw vegan and just a little under weight according to their bogus curve, then shouldn't the state also go into the houses of all of the children who are overweight and charge the parents with child endangerment and dictate to them? There are many more children dying from obesity related diseases than from raw vegan related diseases.

I think that I was totally influenced by this trial when we made "Breakthrough" our documentary film on the Raw Vegan Diet. I wanted to show how the diet really works for kids. Because I think that how we feed our kids is such an issue right now. And there is this huge question "DOES THE RAW VEGAN DIET REALLY WORK???"

And of course my answer is that yes it does without a doubt, which is the main theme of my film. Perhaps this trial will cause some controversy about the raw vegan diet. Perhaps it will raise awareness of this lifestyle. If so then perhaps the Andressohns' plight will not have been in vain. And we remain hopeful that an appeal will help lessen the state's interference in the life of this family. For if we do not have the right to raise our healthy children according to our beliefs then our freedom is a poor one indeed.

----LINKS----

"Breakthrough" a documentary on a raw vegan family

10 Raw Food eBooks including "Raising Raw Vegan Children"

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