 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and today we're going to be talking about whether or not going vegan could improve your cycling performance. This video is going to be chocked full of science going over performance, weight loss, recovery, and whether or not protein and other nutrient deficiencies are a concern on a vegan diet. At the end of the video I'll talk about my own experience with veganism so be sure to stick around for that. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training, racing, and gear related videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing and training experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general then be sure to subscribe and if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video be sure to leave it down in the comment section below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. People have many different reasons for going vegan ranging from ethical to environmental to personal health but in this video we're going to gloss over that because today we're going to be talking about how going vegan will affect your cycling performance. I will touch a little bit on the health side of veganism but only as it pertains to your cycling performance. Now the first question we need to ask is can you even be a high-level athlete on a vegan diet or will you constantly be struggling to meet your nutritional needs and therefore experience a decrease in performance? The position of the academy of nutrition and dietetics on vegetarian and vegan diets states that appropriately planned vegetarian including vegan diets are helpful nutritionally adequate and may provide health benefits for prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood and for athletes. Sure a vegan diet may be adequate for athletes but is it optimal? Adequate? Bro I'm the four-time Tuesday night ride stop sign sprint champion in the C group adequate is not going to cut it. Can you perform just as well on a vegan diet or better yet can you improve your performance? One study testing the difference in maximal oxygen uptake between subjects on a traditional or vegetarian diet had subjects perform a treadmill test on their normal diet and then tested again after four days of not eating meat. They found no significant difference in maximal oxygen uptake but the vegetarians did show superior time to exhaustion. However the study admits that there may be confounding factors like test familiarity or carbohydrate loading. This makes it hard to draw any clear conclusion from a study like this. Another study assessing the fitness of vegetarian and omnivorous athletes took 27 vegetarians and 43 omnivorous athletes and tested VO2 max strength using a dynamometer. The results showed that the vegetarians had greater cardio respiratory fitness however strength was not different between the groups. However again this could be because of confounding factors like the fact that the physical activity level was 20 percent higher for the vegetarians. Looking at many studies the performance gains from not eating meat or other animal products seems to be less clear. A review article on physical fitness and vegetarian diets stated that the available evidence supports neither a beneficial nor detrimental effect of a vegetarian diet on physical performance capacity. For those concerned with deficiency on a plant-based diet it is important to note that there is no convincing evidence that vegetarian athletes suffer impaired nutrient status. So it seems like a wash. If you enjoy eating meat it doesn't seem like it'll affect your performance. But what if we're not taking into account the whole picture here? For starters these studies I just mentioned looked at vegetarians. What could the effects of going fully plant-based be? And second what about the potential long-term effects of a diet influencing performance as we age? A vegan diet has been shown to have clear benefits to cardiovascular health even going as far as reversing heart disease. In this particular trial those who adhered the most to a plant-based diet saw regressions in their arterial plaque. In this study on how to reverse coronary artery disease 198 CAD patients were counseled on plant-based nutrition. Of those 198, 177 actually stuck to a plant-based diet. Of these subjects 0.6 percent experienced adverse cardiovascular events and of the patients that didn't adhere to the diet 62 percent had cardiovascular events like a heart attack or stroke. That's a 100-fold difference. It doesn't get more clear than that. Yeah great eating grass all day stopped heart disease in a bunch of old people. What does this have to do with me getting faster and finally taking that KOM on the bike path? Your cardiovascular system not only keeps you alive but is also the main limiting factor in aerobic sports like cycling. It stands to reason that a healthy cardiovascular system would equal increased performance especially as we age and our arteries slowly start to clog. A study on plant-based diets for cardiovascular safety and performance in endurance sports stated that surprisingly endurance athletes may have more advanced atherosclerosis and more myocardial damage compared with sedentary individuals particularly as they age. However plant-based diets address key contributors to atherosclerosis. Dislipidemia, elevated blood pressure, elevated body weight and diabetes. It's also worth noting that a key factor in oxygen delivery to the muscles is blood viscosity and individuals excluding meat entirely had significantly lower blood viscosity than those who ate meat occasionally. Reduced blood viscosity also improves tissue oxygenation potentially improving athletic performance. So potentially as we age a vegan diet may keep our cardiovascular system healthier leading to better performance. On top of that a vegan diet does have peripheral benefits such as weight loss. In a study on diet and weight loss with almost 38,000 subjects meat eaters had the highest BMI and vegetarians and pescatarians were lower but then vegans had significantly lower BMI. In this study on a whole food plant-based diet for the treatment of obesity heart disease and diabetes they took obese and overweight subjects and put them on a whole food plant-based diet. They concluded that to the best of our knowledge this research has achieved greater weight loss at 6 and 12 months than any other trial that does not limit energy intake or mandate regular exercise. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise because a lot of what vegans eat is lower in calorie density meaning for the same amount of food you're getting less calories. As we can see from this calorie density graph cutting out animal products means cutting out foods that are higher in calorie density and the calorie density method to losing weight has a lot of science to back up its effectiveness. A systematic review on dietary energy density and body weight looking at many studies concluded that their findings highlight the growing body of scientific evidence suggesting a relationship between energy density and body weight and that consuming diets low in energy density may be an effective strategy for managing body weight. I made a whole video on losing weight by lowering the calorie density of your diet and I'll link that in the description below if you're interested. Another potential benefit of a vegan diet is improved recovery by reducing oxidative stress. Whole plant foods are high in antioxidants which reduce oxidative stress. A study on lemon juice and exercise-induced oxidative stress concluded that the lemon did not block the cellular adaptive response but also reduced cellular oxidative damage. Cherry juice has been shown to increase antioxidant capacity after a marathon leading to aided recovery and in another study reduced symptoms of exercise-induced muscle damage. That study showed that strength loss after eccentric exercise was 22% with a placebo but only 4% when subjects consume cherry juice. Blueberries are another rich source of antioxidants and have been shown to reduce inflammation after two and a half hours of running and similar results have been found with tomato juice. If most of what you're eating consists of these high antioxidant plant foods you better believe that you're getting a boost in recovery. Going back to the study on plant-based diets for endurance athletes they stated that compared with omnivores people following vegan and vegetarian diets have increased antioxidant activity due to their higher intakes of vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, and other antioxidants. Now it's important to note here that you don't have to be vegan to consume high antioxidant fruits and vegetables and on the same note just because you're a vegan doesn't mean you're actually consuming these foods either. Yeah man I just went vegan but you know I'm not really a big fan of vegetables so I've been sticking mostly to potato chips and fake meat. More on that in a bit. Alright let's touch on the topic of protein. This is one of the biggest concerns when going vegan. After all don't you need protein to recover? The studies that I mentioned earlier in this video talking about vegan athletes did address this topic. One stated that although there has been some concern about protein intake for vegetarian athletes data indicates that all essential and non-essential amino acids can be supplied by plant food sources alone as long as a variety of foods is consumed and another stated that while protein adequacy is a frequently raised question surveys show that virtually all endurance athletes meet recommended protein intakes and a varied diet of plant foods easily provides adequate amounts of all essential amino acids for athletes. From this review article on fueling a vegan athlete they stated that supplemental protein is an option but not needed for most athletes who carefully construct their diet paying attention to higher protein plant foods. Alright that was a lot of information so let's break down the important bits. First will you see a noticeable difference in performance after going vegan? Probably not especially if your diet already consists of high amounts of whole plant foods. However in the long term the cardio respiratory benefits of a vegan diet may lead to better performance and protect you from adverse cardiovascular events that you may be putting yourself at increased risk for by being an endurance athlete. Vegans do tend to be lighter than their omnivore counterparts so if weight loss is a struggle for you this may be worth trying. Vegans also tend to have higher antioxidant levels which has been shown to aid in recovery. Protein isn't an issue on a vegan diet as long as you're eating a variety of unprocessed plant foods. Now an important point to make here is that even though vegans do tend to be healthier veganism isn't synonymous with health. You could eat nothing but french fries and coca-cola and technically be a vegan. Wait so you're saying that dairy-free ice cream isn't healthy just because it's vegan? What's important is that your diet consists primarily of whole plant foods and this goes for whether you follow a vegan diet or not. From the article on how to fuel a vegan athlete to maximize performance recovery endurance and resistance to illness enhance intake of beans grains seeds nuts whole grains and other colorful plant products are recommended. These same suggestions are also important for non-vegan athletes and omnivorous diet that is 90% whole plant foods with small portions of meat is vastly better than a junk food vegan diet. One doesn't have to be fully vegan to experience some of the benefits I mentioned in this video but if there's one thing that we can learn from vegans and the studies done on them it's this. The more we center our diet around whole plant foods the better. Your recovery will improve your weight will likely go down and you'll be overall healthier. I myself have been vegan for coming up on four years now and in the beginning I did it mainly to find a performance edge. Did I see a noticeable difference in performance after I went vegan? I can't say that I did probably because my diet already consisted of high amounts of whole plant foods. I've always been a healthy eater. I stayed vegan though because of the long list of reasons to go vegan and because I'd gotten used to it and I preferred it. Hey man it's not a diet it's a lifestyle okay. If you've seen my videos you know the amount of research that I put into training for cycling. I don't just accept something to be true because my buddy told me or because everyone else does it. I research and come to my own conclusion based on evidence. I would say that just as much research went into my decision to go vegan. You know man it's pretty impressive that you waited until the end of the video to tell people that you're a vegan. That must have been pretty hard considering as well you know you're a vegan. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys found this information helpful. Have you ever tried going on a vegetarian or vegan diet? What was your experience? Let me know down in the comments section below. If you like this video be sure to give it a like, share with a friend, and subscribe. If you want to see more training and racing content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you want to check out my training be sure to follow me on Strava. And finally if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djohnsonatrainright.com