POINT OF VIEW. “Children need meat, even in the canteen”

The importance of meat for children does not boil down to protein intake, as the public debate says. Indeed, meat for children and for adults also provides 3 main and vital nutrients: vitamin B12, absorbable iron and zinc. Vitamin B12 is not produced by plants, but by microorganisms in ruminants. While B12 needs do not require eating red meat every day, a deficiency can lead to an extremely serious situation in adults and does not allow the growth of children, because eggs and fish will not compensate. To deprive yourself of it voluntarily when you are an adult is to take a major risk. The proof is that adults who cut off meat take pharmaceutical supplements to compensate.

Regarding proteins, yes the amino acid composition is just as correct in fish and eggs as in meat. But what matters most in growth is the amount ingested. However, to obtain the same protein content as in 100 g of chicken breast, you need 4 eggs or 130 g of fish. This notion of content is at the heart of nutrition (and not just for proteins), but is not taken into account in current debates. In addition, 4 eggs per day would provide too high a quantity of cholesterol. Finally, there are also allergies, which are more frequent to fish and eggs than to meat.

Eat everything, in adequate and moderate amounts

Depriving a child or teenager of meat during growth, and even in the presence of eggs and fish, is therefore creating a situation of undernutrition. If it only lasts a few days, it’s no big deal. But if this continues, it is a very important risk-taking, which is not ethically acceptable for growing beings. The protein requirement in children is specific. When expressed per kilogram of body weight, the child’s need is enormous, at least 3 times higher than that of adults (for 10-12 years old and even more for the youngest), and especially for essential amino acids, hence the advantage of not excluding meats, the richest foods and the most concentrated in essential amino acids.

In addition, the needs of children are higher if they practice sports, because proteins also participate in energy coverage in this case, with an even tighter flow to ensure muscle structures. By removing meat from the menu, we would expose some children to a deleterious deficit, depending on their size, age, musculature, physical activity or even their infectious fragility, also depending on the possible protein poverty of meals “outside the canteen”. For some children in a difficult nutritional situation, reducing the intake of certain amino acids by 10 to 20% can become very problematic.

Finally, more generally, research in nutrition is continuously discovering new interactions between nutrients that are positive for health and aging. Also, as a precautionary principle, to ensure optimal growth and later to age better, we should rather introduce variety and therefore new plant and animal foods, rather than eliminating them. It is only by eating everything, and in adequate and moderate amounts, that we are sure not to miss anything.

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