>Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here.
For sure, just like debating about meat consumption and pivoting to just dairy consumption as proof...
As to your second point--the issue under debate here is not meat consumption, but rather the CO2 emissions of animal agriculture. So we're talking about telling Bangladeshis to be vegans, not merely vegetarians.
Huh, these numbers really disagree in a couple places.
Nevertheless it seems like the most important way to minimize CO2 is to focus on grains, and that milk, eggs, poultry, pork, and fish aren't all that bad compared to the average vegetable.
And milk's easy to budget for, two cups a day is only 10% of a kid's calories.
It is, however, closely linked to status, especially in the developing world. Telling Bangladeshis they shouldn’t eat meat because Westerners blew the global CO2 budget is... problematic.
Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here. You see the exact same phenomenon among the U.S.-raised kids of Bangladeshis/Indians/Pakistanis from very comfortable families. The kids are way taller than parents who did not suffer any malnourishment back home. Just because it is theoretically possible to construct a vegan diet that results in the same growth as a diet including meat and dairy doesn't mean it's easy to do so with the kinds of foods readily available in the developing world.