For some people, meat tastes good, but they want to reduce meat intake or remove it from their diet for health or environmental reasons. The status of 'be a vegetarian' is irrelevant to the material effect.
Apologies, I think I used "health" in a misleading way.
My intention was not to suggest meat substitutes are strictly better than meat for losing weight, or reducing heart disease, general public health advice (I am not qualified to even make those comments!).
The scope I was hoping to address was situations where an individual needs to replace meat for their specific dietary requirements. In this case, meat substitutes may be useful if, say, there is something in meat causing inflammation for the individual.
This is largely "what-if" though, and would probably require a doctor's consult to confirm.
