To the extent that’s true, it also demonstrates the false causality in your own claim: poverty, not the absence of meat per se, is the cause of all the things you’re blaming vegetarian diets for.

Obviously the people I’m comparing against each other are in the same social-economic stratum. Even after conditioning for other factors, the costs of bad (vegetable-based) diets are significant.

And, of course, there is a bidirectional causality with poor people getting bad food, which stunts their development, which keeps them poor.