There has been a lot of buzz surrounding going all-in vegan aka plant-based. A popular Netflix doc was made showing how athletes reported greater endurance, performance and so forth when switching over to a plant-based diet.
And this totally makes sense.
However, this led non-athletes to believe that they should copy the eating pattern of athletes, because “obviously” this was showing to be the ideal way to eat.
Now this totally does not make sense.
Athletes typically have an energy demand of around 8000-10000 calories daily and require 1-1.5g of protein pr. kg. bodyweight. An average Joe might have an energy demand of around 2000-3000 calories daily and still require 1-1.5g of protein for optimal appetite control, bone health and muscle growth.
The athlete is thus needing to eat 3-5 x as many calories to meet their energy demand, yet their protein demand is about the same as your average Joe. This means the athlete is going to benefit from eating more plant-based food because they can easily reach their protein requirements from plants alone due to the high volume they are taking in daily.
Now if you downsize that food to about a quarter which meets the energy demand for the average Joe, you’re going to have great difficulty meeting your protein needs. And this will affect your overall health negatively: often weightloss resistance, cravings, muscle-loss, bone-loss and sagging skin even.
A small 100g chicken breast contains around 27g of protein and approx. 160 calories. A 100g serving of cooked beans contains around 9g of protein and 130 calories.
This means you need to eat 3 x as many beans to get that same amount of protein going - and this is going to add 2.5 x the amount of calories - and this is just one meal!
Now this is totally fine if you are an athlete, but for the rest of us, this math easily translates into weight gain and nutrient deficiency in time.
Another reason why the vegan diet works well for specifically athletes is that plant-based foods are very easily digested - whereas red meat can take up to 72 hours to digest! However, that does not mean red meat is only bad - it just means, it is not ideal in large quantities for athletes needing to perform physically at another level. Red meat is indeed very useful to calm a stressed nervous system, give long-lasting satiety and to recover post surgery - things that many of us non-athletes struggle with!
This is not ideal for athletic performance, simply because they need the blood supply going to the muscles, not the digestion.
So before we start to eat like people, who have a lifestyle totally different from ours, we need to understand why it is working for them - because that does not mean that it will work for us and our current lifestyle. On the contrary: we could end up getting less fit and fatter by following something not right for our body and lifestyle.