I eat a primarily whole-food, plant-based diet and credit the low inflammation of the diet with ability to recover quickly and do that at age 45.
I thought it might be a one-off, but in the fall I ended up doing 6 26.2+ mile runs in 6 weeks, including a 50k race and setting my marathon PR on the last run.
But now I'm seeing my 10 year old get into running who has been plant-based from birth. He beat almost 80% of the field in a half marathon about three weeks ago, then two week later completed a 19 mile (30k) run. He's also clearly recovering rapidly and has relatively low soreness.
Congratulations on the marathon PR.
Your comments are not even wrong. They're just completely off base and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding.
My social group tends more towards heterodox dietary choices than most groups, so I have a lot of friends on “extremist” diets. It is quite apparent that the expected outcome of people who only eat meat is significantly better than the people who never eat meat. Both are likely better off than most people consuming the standard American diet, but this might just be due to increased focus on health in general rather than any specific benefit of the diet.
A better approach for most people is to conduct personal n=1 experiments and just see empirically what works best for you in terms of subjective feelings and objective performance metrics.
The issue with personal experiments is often that they are just as biased and cannot be conducted over meaningful time-scales. As an anecdote to illustrate this, I am significantly more productive and energetic when consuming a single sugary, chocolately coffee, but it would be foolish to conclude over such a short period of time that my personally ideal diet should include sugary coffee. I'm not deluded that this is a healthy practice, however; free sugars, fructose in particular, are demonstrably a major factor in the pathogenesis of lifestyle-related diseases.
Even those are not really absolutes, because a diet with only those "good" elements will still be worse than a mix including animal proteins. Also, some vegetables are simply bad in excessive quantities (mushrooms, potatoes, etc).
The problem we typically have is just over-abundance of everything in our diets. Too much meat is bad, too much vegetables are bad, too much fruit is bad, too much fish is bad, too much dairy is bad. And that's because our bodies evolved to make the most of anything they could digest, since the normal state was scarcity and every little bit helped with survival. Now these finely-tuned "recycling systems" are routinely oversupplied in ways they were not meant to be, and they can't help themselves but overproduce nutrients of all sorts, with all sorts of unpredictable results.
We are like ports where ships continue to unload containers at excessive rates. Some of those containers will end up polluting the area, some will just accumulate into horrible mountains, the motorways will be clogged by a continuous stream of lorries, etc etc etc. Some of those boxes will contain life-saving medicines and some will contain pointless junk, but that's not the actual problem - if you reduce the rate of shipping, then all containers will happily go where they have to go and be dealt with as they "deserve".
We were probably not built to have three meals every day.
I tend to agree, however, that a Mediterrean-patterned diet is definitely in the right direction based upon the weight of nutrition literature.
There’s a couple of personal experiences where I switched to a vegan diet and felt great for the first two months or so but other health/performance factors in the longer-term caused me to deviate away from it.
There really some things where the less you have, you the better.
The study linked here agrees-- more fruits and vegetables is correlated with lower dementia.
Hannibal Lecter definitely outperforms expectations.
Your experience might simply reflect that anyone on a careful diet is likely to be healthier than average simply by avoiding all the junk people typically eat.
What is the basis for this assertion? I mean besides self-congratulating anecdotes and other second-hand knowledge.
Rarely can conversations like these be improved by absolute claims.
There’s research going back decades showing reduction in saturated fat (generally from animal products) improves cardiovascular health. CV risks are one of the largest mortality links in industrial societies.
As far as "doing anything weird", have you looked in how farmers forcibly impregnate cows or what happens baby chicks or dairy calves that have the misfortune to be born male?
I’m curious how you arrived at this conclusion. Granting that allergic or inflammatory responses may be on a spectrum, a cursory look online seemed to indicate many animal products have higher rates of allergic responses than plant products. E.g., soy is listed at 0.4% of the population while (cow) milk is 2-3%.
Maybe a better way to phrase it is to remove any food that causes an inflammatory response.
Edit: clarifying the type of animal milk
Switching a population to a ruminant-based diet is currently a privilege that is not generalizable under the current food system. (Which is why I specifically chose cow milk as the comparison as a calorie/protein source).
- humans should eat (minimally processed) animal products - production of animal products must be minimized to fight catastrophic climate change
From where I sit, it seems like more and more educated, well-meaning people are starting to lean into a plant-based craze on poorly founded information that seems well founded because the educated classes generally agree it is correct.
If I cherry pick the first Google scholar link that is showing a 2.3% seafood allergy, would you conclude that all people should abstain from fish?
It’s not a question of whether a particular food (let alone an entire group like plants) can cause inflammation, but whether it’s prevalent enough problem to claim people should completely cut it from their diet. You alluded too this with the caveat “in those who are susceptible”. We shouldn’t generalize a rule for those who are susceptible to be applicable to those who are not.