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Vegetarian Diets for Children:
Many parents are turning their children onto vegetarian diet plans early in
life, but raising your child as a vegetarian can be a challenge. In a society
saturated with fast food parents need to find alternative sources of protein,
like beans, tofu and soy products, to feed their children instead of meat. The
invention of meat substitutes may have made it easier to turn kids onto vegetarianism.
There are now soy-based substitutes for ground beef, hot dogs, cheese, hamburgers
and bologna- a lot of the foods children are drawn to.
The biggest problem with vegetarian diets for children is that kids need to
eat a lot of food to get enough calories, protein, and iron. Children need to
eat four to six times the volume of non-meat protein sources to get the amount
of protein found in a single serving of meat or cheese. Children who can't eat
that much won't get enough protein and as a result their intestines lose some
of the ability to absorb fat, which exaggerates a calorie deficiency and can
result in the failure to gain weight.
Children eating an ovo-vegetarian or lacto-ovo vegetarian diet will have less
difficulty meeting their nutrient needs because these diets are less restrictive.
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