I’m the last person who would ever make excuses for a mother who hurts, let alone murders her children. But after 3.5 years and weeks of trial testimony, one thing that hasn’t been broached is Lindsay’s metabolic health and whether what she was suffering from had more to do with her quest to be “healthy” than with birthing three babies in five years.
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Before delving into complicated psychological questions, let’s remember that Mass General Brigham, where Clancy worked as a nurse, required employees to comply with its COVID-19 vaccination mandate by October 15, 2021.
Fifteen months later, Clancy’s three children were dead.
Published case reports and observational studies over the past six years have described psychiatric symptoms following the COVID-19 vaccination, including anxiety, insomnia, altered mental status, mania, depression, and psychosis. Whether vaccination played a role in Lindsay Clancy’s documented symptoms cannot be verified, but the similarities remain noteworthy.
But what is even more perplexing is that no one before or after the murders asked what Lindsay Clancy’s diet and metabolic panel revealed. In fact, diet wasn’t really addressed during the trial. There are a few clues, though.
We know that on the night of the murders, Lindsay ordered ThreeV’s Mediterranean Power Bowl, which contained plant-heavy foods. Testimony indicates that when asked whether she wanted protein with the meal, she politely declined. The trial also revealed that the nanny, Elaine Rossi, received detailed daily food-prep notes from Lindsay instructing her to feed the children sweet potatoes; in closing arguments, Reddington also mentioned beets. This is not surprising, given that the nanny said Lindsay appeared overly concerned with weight, fitness, food, and health.
Clancy’s litany of symptoms included: loss of appetite, “crazy brain fog,” disconnection, severe insomnia, anxiety, a diagnosis of being in a postpartum state, apparent preoccupation with food and health, plant-based food choices, detailed household food preparation, and obsession with food and sleep schedules for herself and her children.
The literature recognizes that apparent postpartum psychiatric syndromes can occasionally have metabolic or endocrine causes that should be ruled out, especially in a murder trial in which postpartum psychosis is blamed for the brutal strangulation deaths of three children.
There is even a published case of a woman initially diagnosed with postpartum psychosis whose symptoms were ultimately traced to a late-onset urea-cycle disorder.
of this disorder sound familiar: extreme tiredness (lethargy) and confusion. Psychiatric symptoms such as behavioral changes, hallucinations, delusions, or sudden combativeness are often mistaken for a mental health crisis. Gastrointestinal issues can also occur, including self-imposed avoidance of high-protein foods like meat, known as auto-selective vegetarianism.
This is interesting given Lindsay’s request that protein not be added to her power bowl.
Pregnancy depletes a woman’s nutrients because the female body uses nutrients to build the placenta and fetus, expand maternal blood volume, and support major metabolic changes. The effects of these processes on a woman can be more pronounced with closely spaced pregnancies, adherence to restricted diets, severe gastrointestinal upset, or low nutrient stores before conception.
Common nutrients that can become depleted or appear insufficient during pregnancy include iron, folate, vitamin B12, vitamin B6, iodine, vitamin D, calcium, zinc, magnesium, choline, and omega-3 fatty acids.
None of that establishes whether any of this applies to Lindsay’s horrendous actions, whether she was vegetarian or vegan, whether she was nutritionally deficient during pregnancy, or whether willful food deprivation drove her to such horror.
According to the testimony of Dr. Donald Condie, a highly credentialed child, adolescent, and adult clinical and forensic psychiatrist, neither Dr. Jennifer Tufts, a psychiatrist, nor nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta conducted blood tests on Lindsay Clancy before the murders. Condie testified that he believed it was an oversight, in part because blood tests could have screened for physiological causes, including thyroid and hormonal changes associated with pregnancy and childbirth.
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So, in other words, tests were performed to determine the levels of drugs Clancy was taking to address a problem that might have been revealed by blood tests that were never performed.
If that’s true, no evidence presented at trial shows that nutritional or metabolic testing for B6/PLP, B12, folate, iron/ferritin, zinc, and magnesium was conducted. How about testing calcium levels and other metabolic markers, such as kidney function and urinary oxalate? All of which would have been additional physiological variables worth examining in relation to her state of mind.
Lindsay lived in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Researchers studying Boston at approximately 42°N found that from November through February, sunlight did not produce measurable pre-vitamin D3 under the experimental conditions because of inadequate winter UVB. This phenomenon is commonly called a “vitamin D winter.”
A 2025 systematic review of 19 studies found that 9 of 13 vitamin-D studies reported a significant association between lower vitamin-D levels and postpartum depression symptoms. Why didn’t her doctors ever consider whether the seasonal decline in sunlight — and potentially vitamin-D status — had been an additional factor during the months when Lindsay’s physiological symptoms were exacerbated? This matters because the culmination of Lindsay’s symptoms occurred on January 24th, the date she killed her three babies.
While bringing up vitamins and sunlight as possible contributors to murder may seem silly to some, it’s not.
Because medicine itself has investigated the relationship between postpartum depression and micronutrient status, Lindsay’s nutritional state isn’t inherently outside the scientific conversation about symptoms attributed to postpartum illness.
There is no way to prove that Lindsay Clancy was vegetarian, but historically, vegetarians do struggle with low B12. Although several of the subjects were not anemic, the authors of a 1981 Biological Psychiatry review recommended that serum B12 testing be considered when patients present with the psychiatric symptoms described in the study.
We have covered a few possible scenarios that may have contributed to a mental state that cost three innocent babies their lives.
This has cultural context because plant-rich eating was rapidly increasing among younger Americans from 2019 to 2022, and Lindsay was a health- and fitness-conscious Millennial mother during that period.
In addition to vitamin B12, vitamin B6 deficiency has been associated with insomnia, irritability, depression, confusion, and neurological symptoms. Vitamin B6 helps the body process glyoxylate, a substance that can be converted to oxalate in the body. B6 has also been studied in relation to postpartum depression. This hypothesis could have been investigated by testing her B6/PLP status and urinary oxalate levels.
Let’s set Lindsay Clancy aside for a moment and move on to a woman named Jordan Younger, aka the Blonde Vegan blogger. Younger is a perfect example of why diet should never be excluded when psychiatric- and hormone-driven depression and anxiety appear to be present, let alone when it is central to a murder trial.
While vegan, Younger experienced severe anxiety, insomnia, loss of menses, nutritional deficiencies/malnutrition, and food-related OCD.
If Lindsay also ate a plant-heavy diet that included significant amounts of high-oxalate foods, such as sweet potatoes, beets, and the spinach in ThreeV’s Mediterranean Power Bowl, and if, in turn, her vitamin and nutrient status was compromised, could oxalate metabolism have been just another physiological variable worth examining to explain why a mother murdered her own babies?
The question here isn’t so much about mothers who cruelly kill their children, nor is it an attempt to excuse Clancy’s unspeakable crime. This is about the failure of forensic science to take food choices and metabolic conditions into account when investigating catastrophic behavioral and psychiatric deterioration that could lead to violence in a postpartum case.
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