Did your parents pack your lunch in middle school? I recall a classmate who led a vegetarian diet, while I ate school lunch. We held a daily barter—her fruit rollup for my fresh bread roll. Despite our tastebuds, are diets based on meat or plants better for kids?
Researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital of Unity Health in Toronto, Canada recently published a study of 9,000 children—aged 6 months to 8 years—showing kids who eat a vegetarian diet had similar measures of growth and nutrition compared to children who consume meat.
The TARGet Kids! study showed children who consumed meat maintained similar body mass index (BMI), vitamin D, iron, height and cholesterol levels when compared to vegetarian participants.
However, the study found children with a vegetarian diet had higher odds (1.87% increase) of being underweight compared to children who consumed meat.
According to Cleveland Clinic Pediatric Registered Dietitian Jennifer Hyland, children qualify as underweight if they’re in the bottom 5th percentile for weight compared to their height. She says children of the same age are compared on a height and weight basis to determine whether one child is proportionately underweight compared to another.
“This study demonstrates that Canadian children following vegetarian diets had similar growth and biochemical measures of nutrition compared to children consuming non-vegetarian diets,” says Dr. Jonathon Maguire, pediatrician and lead author of the study. “Vegetarian diet was associated with higher odds of underweight weight status, underscoring the need for careful dietary planning for children with underweight when considering vegetarian diets.”
TARGet Kids! suffered one limitation—researchers didn’t assess the quality of the vegetarian diets consumed by each child. Maguire acknowledges vegetarian diets come in different forms, yielding various growth and nutritional outcomes.
Maguire believes vegetarian diets appear to be “appropriate” among most children, but says further research is needed in vegetarian—as well as vegan—diets to quantify growth and nutrition outcomes.
More on dairy and meat:
> Nutrition Research Improves Public Perception of Beef
> 22 Reasons to Keep Dairy in Your Diet for 2022
> Dan Murphy: Doctor’s Orders - Eat Meat!
