Does a Plant-Based Diet = Peak Performance and Recovery?
The Ever-Evolving question around the best diet for optimizing overall output.
The Game Changers documentary, which features notable figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, and ex-NFL player Brian Orakpo came out 8 years ago now.
Still, the question remains about how much of the documentary is based in truth and how much of the studies have been cherry-picked to support vegan ideals.
There are many layers to the diet you choose in today’s society.
If you’re a vegan, you’re not just someone who chooses plant-based foods — you’re also anti-animal cruelty and pro-sustainability. If you’re a carnivore, you don’t just eat animal meat and products — you’re also pro-farmer and more “ancestral/primal.”
Ask either person in those camps about their counterpart, though, and you’ll find a ton of insults tossed the other way.
“Vegans are soft.”
”Carnivores are assholes.”
The list could go on.
The truth is that both approaches have nuances in their health benefits, and there’s no way to discern whether one diet is better than the other when considering the whole picture of health.
Considering factors like endothelial (blood vessel) function, digestive strength, muscle repair, cognitive function, and inflammatory response, it’s hard to make a case for or against either.
For the sake of today’s newsletter, though, I want to dive into the inflammatory (or anti-inflammatory) response of a plant-based approach.
For individuals who train hard and often (runners, ultra-endurance athletes, hybrid fitness competitors, or cyclists), I want to see how likely it is that plant-based protein/diets could facilitate accumulating a lot of hard days without fatigue.
A recent post from Science Blog positing the question about plant-based diets accelerating recovery has me wondering whether or not there could be some weight to plant-based diets temporarily lowering the inflammation response from hard training sessions.
I wanted to look into what the research says, what research around carnivore diets with the same athletic output shows, and whether or not you should have a vegan protein powder if you’re looking to increase the intensity of your training without feeling like sh*t.
What The Research Says About Plant-Based Eating, Inflammation, and Performing
If you’re interested in training hard and not letting the hard training derail you for the following day (which I hope is most of you reading), you’d be wise to try any pathway to allow you to recover faster, provided you have the time.
Regularly sitting in a sauna, ice bath, or getting weekly massages is just not feasible for everyone. So the lowest hanging fruit for accelerating recovery would be a dietary change. So how does your diet help with this?
While studies like the above provide valuable data on people switching diets for a short period of time, what they don’t necessarily show is how a healthier, more active person might benefit from a slight shift in diet.
One could use the data above and potentially incorporate some very, very valuable nutritional insights into their diet.
But it would also take careful counting of micronutrient intake to account for what is usually missing in a plant-based diet — nutrients like vitamin B12, zinc, and omega-3s, which can immensely help with inflammation and recovery.
Main Takeaways from Examining Plant-Based Diets and Inflammation
As I mentioned before, changing what you eat may or may not be the lowest-hanging fruit (yes, pun intended) for improving some metrics of your health (beyond sleeping and exercising more, but the balance is different for everyone).
Short of breathing, eating is the most important thing you’ll do throughout the day, so remember that while making a change to better your health might not seem easy at first, it could be worth it if your last blood test showed some biomarkers that are out-of-whack.
But, then again, if you’re not already tracking food and different food group intake, none of this matters. Taking stock of your diet might be step 0 before acting on anything in this newsletter, plant-based or not.
That said, I’m fairly confident after (literally) hundreds of conversations with strangers that people probably don’t eat enough plants throughout the week.
So, here are the things you want to be most wary of when you’re looking to incorporate more plant-based products are as follows:
How processed is the food in question? Is it truly an organic, leafy green that will have some immediate nutritional value? Or is it processed slop that is only going to weigh you down?
Is the option to incorporate more plants solely for nutritional value? Or do you have a moral stake in it, too? Rich Roll talks about the slippery slope of morality in vegan vs. animal food choice here.
Is it a full switch to veganism/vegetarianism, or are you still going to be an omnivore? Do enough research in either direction, and you’ll be torn — my advice: Stay omnivorous but incorporate a slew of plants for missed micronutrients.
Inflammation is a necessary part of the training and recovery cycle, so don’t think the goal is eliminating it altogether. You just want to minimize its stay in your body if you’re training hard regularly, and that’s a BIG if.
If you’re serious about improving performance in a given area (running, racing, competing at something), diet will be just one part of the equation. You won’t solve all the problems of training with just eating certain foods, but you can solve about 70% of it (this is where I come in, potentially, as your coach).
Have a great Tuesday, y’all.