Posted on 06/21/2012 7:44:38 PM PDT by nickcarraway
With the publication this month of "Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness," by the vegan distance runner Scott Jurek, vegan diets have become a wildly popular topic on running-related Web sites. But is going totally meatless and, as in Mr. Jurek's case, dairy-free advisable for other serious athletes, or for the rest of us who just want to be healthy and fit?
To find out, I talked with three experts about why, and whether, those of us who are active should consider giving up meat or more. None of the experts are themselves vegan, though two are vegetarian: David C. Nieman, a professor of health and exercise science at Appalachian State University, who's run 58 marathons or ultramarathons and has studied runners at extreme events; and D. Enette Larson-Meyer, an associate professor of human nutrition at the University of Wyoming, as well as a longtime competitive athlete and author of "Vegetarian Sports Nutrition." A third expert, Nancy Clark, who describes herself as "two-thirds vegetarian" -- she doesn't have meat at breakfast or lunch, but does at dinner -- is a sports nutrition expert in Massachusetts and the author of "Nancy Clark's Food Guide for Marathoners."
Q.
Will a vegan diet make someone a better athlete?
A.
Nancy Clark: I was just at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual meeting in San Francisco, and there was a presentation about vegetarian athletes that basically concluded that there's not enough research to know how vegetarian -- let alone vegan -- diets affect athletes. But anecdotally, people do fine. It's possible that some vegan athletes are low on creatine, a nutrient that you get only from meat and that can help during short bouts of intense exercise, like sprinting, though supplementation isn't necessary.
(Excerpt) Read more at well.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Probably the healthiest looking Vegan I have ever seen is Carrie Underwood. And man is she healthly looking. :)
There was a reason why Medieval peasants were not allowed to hunt, and the nobles ate lots of meat.
Didn’t the founder of Vegetarian Times magazine call a press conference a number of years ago to announce that he was giving up vegetarianism and that he enjoyed eating meat?
We have ripping and tearing teeth as well as grinding teeth. As humans we have the ability to adapt which included eating meat that has been cooked and killing instruments. We don’t need to kill prey with our teeth.
As they say, correlation is not causation. But I remember Bill Walton’s very brief career punctuated by a series of unending broken bones and other injuries. Walton was a vegan or vegetarian and swore off meat and dairy products. One doctor who examined x-rays of Walton’s often broken foot said it clearly looked to him like a case of insufficient calcium. Of course, many people will state that Walton might just have been an injury-prone athlete who would have had the same problems if he had eaten meat and dairy products. We may never know about the effects of a vegan vs. an omnivorous diet, but I do know what happened to Walton.
Well? Sure. Optimally? No.
Also, talking to two vegetarians and one “almost-vegetarian” about whether vegetarianism or veganism is healthy is about like predicting the winner of the presidential election based on polling three zip codes in Berkeley.
I recall that the once-great basketball player Bill “the Mountain Man” Walton was a vegetarian. After early success, he broke his foot. Itnever healed very well, and some experts blamed the vegetarianism.
We started life off as prey for things like big cats. Most of the teeth we have aren’t the kind predators have.
Yes they did fight and that is something I tell vegans. Point is though we not true meat-eaters in the sense that other predator animals are.
My experience is nearly all from training and no long tours but still relevant (never “beeped” in fire and maneuver in six years with a light combat unit...in for seven but with a “heavy,” not-so-combat unit for the last year). Someone else here might offer more from experience about needs for endurance and strength in actual combat. I can’t even imagine some of the real battles that some soldier and Marine friends have been though (days).
All I can say here is that assaulting light soldiers must move often and fast in fire-and-maneuver (with gear) in most scenarios to avoid being hit by contemporary, efficient weapons. Rough, too (e.g. flying from a run onto rocky terrain on one’s belly). And in combat, that could go on for hours...or days. As physical as in the distant past, probably not, for some tasks (e.g., transportation). But very physical, sometimes with much mobility. Wounds, probably just as nasty (disembowelments, etc.) but with much better medi-vac and medical now.
I’ve been fed an authorized diet of well over 9,000 calories per day, BTW. Most people don’t realize what a man’s body is capable of.
Combat with edged weapons seems to me to be much like being a lineman in American football. Direct contact with opposing forces armed much the same. Man against man, with the stronger, more determined or more skilled winning.
Modern light infantry seems like soccer. No direct force on force combat, since anybody who tries it is immediately killed, more evasion and misdirection.
But don’t intend to portray myself as an expert. I’ve never been in any type of combat.
I’ve done a fair amount of winter mountaineering and that’s roughly the diet required. It takes a lot of fuel to generate enough heat.
Carry butter by the stick and eat it like a candy bar.
LOL
Yes. I live in such a place (spraying ice, high winds, etc.). For combat soldiers, heavy nutrition is also required to avoid stress fractures. I carried one for about a half a mile near the end of an 18-mile run.
Will be fencing for yaks during the next couple of weeks. Even they will need to be fed hay in winter here (over 9,000 feet, ice sprays off of 14-ers just to the west). I’m hoping that we’re done with this dryer, solar max weather in another year or two (return to wetter, colder fluctuations).
Just finished backfilling around 300 cubic yards of earth by hand with my daughter, just to see if we could do it (and learn a few more things about ourselves) and toughen-up a little more. Part of the water system is gravity-fed from a cistern. No injuries. We’re learning kung fu. Tai chi was too slow for most of the cold year. ;-)
Where are you?
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