Meat meal effect on vegetarians

I think the closest scolarly article to your question is the following:



"Effect of protein-restricted diet on renal response to a meat meal in humans" by G. Viberti, E. Bognetti, M. J. Wiseman, R. Dodds, J. L. Gross and H. Keen, published in American Journal of Physiology, Renal Physiology 253: F388-F393, 1987.



It's too technical to quote from it for your family, but the bottom line is, the meat meal seemed to slow down important parts of kidney function of vegetarians comparing with the group eating "balanced" non-vegetarian diet.



To get technical, here's what they wrote:



To study the influence of preceding dietary protein intake on the renal response to a protein meal we examined renal hemodynamic and excretory responses to a meat meal in six normal human subjects either taking their normal-protein diet (NPD, 75 +/- 5 g/day) or after 3 wk of a low-protein diet (LPD, 43 +/- 3 g/day; P less than 0.005). Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was lower on LPD than on NPD (107 +/- 7 vs. 124 +/- 5 ml X min-1 X 1.73 M-2, respectively; P less than 0.01), as was renal plasma flow (RPF) (NPD, 666 +/- 44; LPD, 605 +/- 43 ml X min-1 X 1.73 M-2; P less than 0.05). Filtration fraction (FF) was not different (NPD, 0.19 +/- 0.01; LPD, 0.18 +/- 0.01). Urinary excretion of albumin was also lower after LPD than NPD (2.1 +/- 0.5 vs. 4.2 +/- 0.8 micrograms/min; P less than 0.05). After an 80-g protein meat meal, GFR rose to a ceiling significantly higher on NPD than on LPD (132 +/- 4.8 vs. 120 +/- 5.2 ml X min-1 X 1.73 M-2; P less than 0.02), even though the percent changes were greater on LPD than on NPD (12.7 +/- 3.3 vs. 6.6 +/- 1.5%, respectively; P less than 0.05). There was a rise in RPF that was entirely attributable to a fall in renal vascular resistance, and FF did not change. On both diets, oral protein loading produced a 200-300% increase in the urinary excretion and fractional clearance of albumin and IgG, but failed to alter that of beta 2-microglobulin.