"Vegetarian Muscle Power, Strength, and Endurance"
Historical examples of successful plant-based athletes range from
the gladiators in ancient Rome to the Tarahumara Indians
who run 160-mile races for the fun of it, six back-to-back marathons.
But they weren't put to the test until the last century or so,
purporting to show beyond a reasonable doubt that athletes
who regularly ate meat showed
very far inferior endurance to even sedentary vegetarians,
meaning it's not like the veg athletes just won because
they were training harder or something.
There are certainly advantages to plant-based eating,
like more antioxidants to combat exercise-induced oxidative stress,
the anti-inflammatory nature of many plant foods
that may accelerate muscle repair and strength recovery.
But do you have to eat this way for years
or decades or your whole life to get these apparent benefits?
What if you took a couple guys in Texas, eating their regular Texan diet,
put them through a maximal exercise test,
then asked them to cut out the meat for four days?
Told them about the existence of bean burritos,
then after four days tested again,
measuring time to exhaustion, ramping up the treadmill
to see how many minutes could they go without collapsing?
And there was a significant difference favoring the vegetarian diet,
boosting the time to exhaustion by about 13 percent.
Each of the subjects, all five, had a higher time to exhaustion
following the vegetarian diet.
But who can tell me the fatal flaw in this study? Anyone catch it?
They were all in the same sequence: meat first then veg.
And any time you do a test a second time, you may do better
just because you're more familiar with it.
If they then went back to eating meat and their performance
tanked during the third test, then you might be onto something,
but this isn't very convincing.
And even if the effect is real, it may not be the meat reduction per se, but
a function of improved glycogen stores from eating more carbs or something.
If you put athletes to a vegetarian versus omnivorous diet
for a 621-mile race—you've heard of a 5k? This is a 1000k!—
and you make sure to design the two diets so they get about the same percentage
of carbs, the finishing rates are identical,
and total times within just a few hours of each other.
Same thing with sprinting.
Randomize people into veg or mixed diet groups,
and no significant difference in sprint power between the two groups.
They conclude that "acute" vegetarianism has no apparent adverse effects,
but no apparent performance benefits either.
Same with strength training.
Measure maximum voluntary contraction of both biceps and quads
before and after each dietary period, and no significant difference either way.
Put all the studies together comparing physical performance
in these kinds of randomized, controlled trials,
where you have folks eat more plant- based for just a few days or weeks
and there appears to be no difference—at least acutely—
between a vegetarian-based diet and an omnivorous diet
in muscular power, muscular strength, or aerobic performance.
Long-term, though, a plant- based diet can be conducive
to both endurance performance and health.
Whereas athletes are most often concerned with performance,
more plant-based diets also provide long-term health benefits
and a reduction in the risk of chronic disease,
associated with a reduced risk of developing coronary heart disease—
the number one killer of men and women—
breast cancer, colorectal cancers, prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes,
insulin resistance, hypertension, cataracts, and dementia.
Doesn't matter how shred, if you're dead.