Certain groups of kids are more likely to exclude meat than others --
and teens top the list.

In a 2009 poll by the Vegetarian Resource Group, an advocacy
organization, for example, 11% of girls ages 13 to 15 said they were
vegetarian. A 2001 survey of more than 4,700 middle school and high
school students in Minneapolis-St. Paul found that the typical young
vegetarian was a nonblack female who was self-conscious about her
weight.

When the newly declared vegetarian is a teenager, there may be a
special reason to pay attention and perhaps reason to worry, says
nutritionist and epidemiologist Dianne Neumark-Sztainer of the
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In her work, Neumark-Sztainer
has accumulated evidence that vegetarianism and adolescence can be a
complicated combination.

On the plus side, studies show that vegetarian teenagers eat more
fruits and vegetables and less saturated fat than non-vegetarian
teens. A 2002 University of Minnesota study found that 26% of
vegetarian kids ate the recommended number of servings of vegetables,
for example, compared to 14% of non-vegetarians.

But unlike adults and older teens, younger vegetarian teenagers aren't
necessarily thinner than meat-eaters. And as a group, they still have
a long way to go to be truly healthy: Even though they're doing better
than their peers, three-quarters of the vegetarians in the study still
weren't getting their recommended daily produce.

Vegetarian teens also are more likely to show signs of an eating
disorder. In a 2001 study, Neumark-Sztainer and colleagues found that
69% of vegetarian adolescents had used unhealthy weight control
behaviors in the previous year, compared with 44% of their
non-vegetarian peers. Nine percent of the vegetarians were told by a
doctor that they had an eating disorder, which was triple the number
of non-vegetarians who had been told the same thing.

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