Regulating meat consumption appears as a relevant public policy to limit food-related carbon footprint. The existing literature in public health also suggests that a decrease in meat intake, due to a tax implementation for instance, might be beneficial for human health and nutrition, decreasing the risk of obesity and related chronic diseases, and so on to reduce public health expenditures. Nonetheless, recent experiments based on randomized control trials cast doubt about the validity of these results. In fact, most of previous cohort studies observing a link between meat consumption and nutritional outcomes focused on specific subpopulations characterized by higher levels of education, higher incomes, and higher rates of women. This lack of representativeness in the data justifies therefore the need to reexamine the association through the prism of economics by exploring potential effects specific to household socioeconomic status (SES). Focusing on the French adult population in 2015, we thus performed multivariate linear regressions estimating potential trend differences in the association between meat consumption and nutritional outcomes according to educational achievement. We found that among low-educated households, one kilogram less of meat consumption per month was significantly associated with a higher individual BMI (0.87±0.04 kg/m²), a higher risk of overweight (0.95±0.38 percentage point), and higher intakes of ultra-processed food (4.10±1.57 percentage points), sweet drinks (58.42±20.46 g), and sugar (12.60±4.18 g). By contrast, the association was positive for the most educated individuals. These results are robust to several measurements of educational attainment and SES, including household income, occupation, and financial insecurity perception. We conclude that individuals with higher SES may be more prone to replace meat by healthy alternatives, whereas those with lower SES may tend to replace meat by ultracaloric food and beverage, especially dense in sugars. In terms of contribution for science and society, this study is the first to show that SES changes the relationship between the amount of meat consumption and nutritional outcomes in a nationally representative sample. Our findings call for future research on this topic to provide actionable recommendations for implementing a fair and healthy protein transition.