Children who eat meat and vegetarian meal have similar growth and nutrition but not weight

Children eating a vegetarian diet and children who ate meat were similar in terms of growth, height and nutritional measures, but vegetarian children had higher odds of being underweight, according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Plant-based diets became very popular in last decade but here is no research into the nutritional outcomes of children following vegetarian diets.

The authors used data from nearly 9,000 children who were between 6 months and 8 years old and had participated in the TARGet Kids! Cohort between 2008 and 2019.

248 children (including 25 vegans) were vegetarian, and 338 more children had become vegetarian sometime later during the study. However, vegetarian children were nearly twice as likely to be underweight than non-vegetarian children.

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