Godot

Tara,
one thing I would add to Dr. Rick's advice above is iron. Adequate iron intake is difficult on a vegetarian diet, and requirements are higher in athletes than in non-athletes. The difficulty arises from the poor absorption of non-haem iron form plant sources(2%-20% non-haem vs. 15%-35% from haem sources). Apart from suggesting you eat meat to increase your absorption rate, you can also try to consume orange juice (citric acid) with iron-rich foods. Also, avoid teas and coffee while consuming these same foods as they contain substances that can further inhibit iron absorption. If you're really interested in iron, check out Fogelholm.

As for protein, I'd be more concerned about proper protein complementation than I would about quantity. There is no single plant food that contains all of the essential amino acids. As such, it is necessary to eat foods in conjunction with one another so that the AA's rich in one are those deficient in the other, and vice versa.
An approximate mean intake of protein in female endurance athletes (from Tarnopolsky 1999) is 1.2 g/kg/d. Assuming a 3500 kcal/d diet, 15% protein is ~1.6-1.9 g/kg/d, with female athletes requirements ~15% lower than male athletes. Lemon has done some pretty good work in this area as well.

From an athletic perspective, a CHO-limiting diet is counterproductive to performance. High-fat diets have been demonstrated to increase FA oxidation, but this limits the intensity at which exercise can be performed. Glycogen is the main fuel for exercising muscles (in fact, the ONLY fuel at high intensities) and it is replenished most efficiently through sufficient CHO intake. A low CHO diet for an athlete over the long run will result in glycogen depletion which you do not want to have happen to you. CHO restricted diets have shown impaired endurance performance when compared to high CHO diets (Helge et al. 1996, 1998).
The ratio you mentioned sounds like the zone diet. For my opinion regarding that, read my earlier posts in this thread. On such a diet, CHO intake is far, far less then what is currently recommended by sports nutritionists and exercise physiologists. The zone diet suggests that eating in this ratio will promote FA oxidation, but there is no scientific evidence to support these claims (Hawley & Burke 1998).

An excellent book on sports nutrition that I highly recommend to anyone is Clinical Sports Nutrition (2000)(2nd Ed.) Burke & Deakin Eds. While not geared for the general public, it's still an excellent read. You'll find it here.
Specific resources for vegetarians:
The international Vegetarian Union
The Vegetarian Resource Group
Vegan Society

Gurdur

So was I till then.

Perhaps, *cough* *cough*, living in Canberra has robbed you of a sense of recognising irony/teasing/humour ?

I merely ask, but I recommend living in Perth or Sydney instead.

Tara

Godot-
Many great points, much to consider. I've never been very responsible in educating myself on nutrition, other than avoiding the obvious "bad" foods and sticking to perceived healthy options. The vegetarianism was never planned on, I just began to eat meat less and less.

3500kcal?... I certainly don't get to eat that much, but I get the point.

Thanks for all the insight, book suggestions, etc. Judging from your nutrisionist's view, the world is a far friendlier place for vegetarianism than I thought.
Cool. I'll I've heard in the past from most people encountered is that I need to eat more protein. No meat? The horror! I think I've been brainwashed. I'm very happy to maintain my current diet, it seems to work for me well so far.

thanks!

alek0

YUp, that's what my father, MD, likes to say. Every time I visit my parents he drags me to the hospital for a blood test. Just takes the form and circles everything on it, ugh! But I gladly submit to it because after results come in I can gloat over his frustration for not being able to find anything out of order

Edited to add: I am not actively training anything now (though I go hiking and do regular exercise), but I was training swimming in highschool and had no problem in spite of vegetarian diet.

JGL53

I don't think that the one study you cite has proven that a CHO-limiting diet is counterproductive to performance for ALL types of athletic activities.

Perhaps Dr. Rick or others know more about this than I do, but I distinctly remember reading an article in some popular science magazine a couple of years back that reported on a study of low-carb vs high carb diets on the performance of world-class bikers. All had eaten a high carb diet previously, and the group that was put on a low carb, high fat diet performed much poorer than their personal records in the short run - for about 6 weeks or so. Then there was a breakthrough, as they began to match their previous PRs, then began to surpass them and actually outperform the high carb group. The explanation offered was that it took this long for their chemical pathways to switch over to fully utilize body fat as a primary energy source. The body fat proved to eventually provide a more efficient and smoother supply of energy, especially into the second hour of exercise and longer.

As I said, these were world-class distance bikers that actually improved their performance on high-fat diets. The article pointed out that long distance bikers, marathon runners, and others who engage in endurance type exercise could benefit from utilizing fat as a main energy source rather than carbs.

The article stated that those athletes who engage in sports requiring short bursts of explosive energy, like power lifters, pole vaulters, short distance runners, etc., would not see this benefit, and would do best on the seventy per cent carb type diet of which the government is so fond - proving no one is wrong all of the time.

Re the Zone Diet - all I know about it is what I gleaned from reading Barry Sears book. I wonder - is Barry Sears a liar? In his book he states as a proven fact that when one University's swim team took up his diet, they began to consistently beat, year after year, another University's swim team to which they had previously finished second for several years - the ONLY apparent difference being the diet. Again, these are world class athletes. I believe the schools were the University of Texas and Stanford University in California (is that correct, Zone followers?).

In any case, I think we all could agree that whatever diet world-class athletes use to add a fraction of one per cent efficiency to their performance probably doesn't have that much to do with what the average person might need eat to maintain good health, especially since we talking about quite young athletes with low body fat ratios who exercise a TREMENDOUSLY greater amount of time each day than any average person ever will.

Nuno Figueira

I wasn't really talking about a vegetarian diet but about a possibly EFA and protein deficient one.

She (or he) said:
"I'm prescribing to the anti-Atkins diet, although not intentionally; I eat almost no fat, very little protein and all carbs which, I know, is an abomination. "

Now, there's only two essential things to your body, nutrition wise and these are the essential aminoacids and the essential fatty acids. If you fail in satisfying your needs of these, how healthy can you be? She said no fat, and very little protein, so yes, I think HER diet is unhealthy. I told you before I really have nothing against vegetarian diets, in my opinion they're far from "ideial", but that's only my opinion.

Godot

I was merely responding with a little bit of sarcasm of my own. I couldn't stand living in Sydney; too big too much too fast. Haven't checked out Perth yet though. Canberra isn't half as bad as the rest of you make it out to be (the only govvie town I know where pot and prostitution are legal). Hell, given the choice, I'd be living in Jindy!

Nuno Figueira

Can be, but there's actually a lot of debate if it's that counterproductive in the long run, and I haven't seen any research done with athletes in long term low carb diet. I can tell I never had any problems or drops of performance in my weightlifting activities when cutting carbs.

Phosphocreatine is also used.

Tara

Considering something "far from ideal" isn't "having something against" that thing?

Just wondering...

Nuno Figueira

I guess you could say that. I've said before that I believe most pitfalls presented by a true vegetarian diet (like yours seem to be) can be couteracted with some carefull planning, but avoiding a macronutrient group that's vital to your health (fats) and replacing it with another that is not (carbs) is not a good thing.


There's quite a few concerns about a (frutarian?) grain, fruit and veggies only diet like yours. Plasma taurine levels will probably be very poor, B12 vitamin, all the vitamins that need fat to be metabolized (I forgot the english term for this, sorry) as betacarotene needs to be eaten with fat to stimulate bile salts necessary for conversion to take place and plus it will take 46 units of carotene to make one unit of true vitamin A, iron stores will probably be very low despite a non-heme dietary intake that meets RDA requirements due to the very poor absortion rate and the high phytate content will interfere with other mineral absortion rates as well.

My advice to you, if you're interested at all, would be to go to Fitday , register (it's free), input one day sample menu in there (you have to have at least an ideia about the portions you eat), then hit the reports link and see if you're meeting your RDA micronutrient requirements (because macronutrients I seriously doubt you are). A week menu will give you a more acurate report.

All in all, vegetarians have even been shown by research to have a HIGHER all cause mortality rate than meat eaters (1), so I do question how much healthier it really is.

Frankly, I do not wish to discuss this with any of you, it all comes down to personal choices and beliefs and any dietary aproach will have it's potential shortcomings. I have read a lot on nutrition, tried most aproaches, was even a vegetarian and then a macrobiotic for as few years and I now believe that we have a lot to learn about the hunther gatherer nutrition aproach. I jumped on this discussion because low carb and keto diets were being given a unjustified bashing that IS NOT supported by any actual scientific evidence and this is not acceptable to me.

It's like some hot shot american nutritionist once said: "We spent billions of dollars on reasearch and all we know at this point is that the ideial diet will have adequate protein intake, enough of the essential fatty acids, a lot of green vegetables and fruit "


1. "Death Rates of Vegetarians," Am. Jnl Epidemiol. 97:372 (1973)