all posts post new thread

Old Forum Are Vegetables Important?

Status
Closed Thread. (Continue Discussion of This Topic by Starting a New Thread.)

dmaxashman

Level 5 Valued Member
Let me clarify the question.  Are vegetables important to short and medium term sports performance? I understand vegetables may be important for prevent cancer many years down the road and for longevity, but that is not the question here.  In sports nutrition advice it seems standard that people say it's important to eat green vegetables.  The impression I have is that this advice is given so the author has something to write about, and to make themselves sound good, and to protect themselves and be politically correct.

Maybe I'm wrong? If so, please show me I'm wrong.  How do vegetables improve sports performance? Where is the proof? Where are the anecdotal stories?

FWIW this question is a reaction to this article:

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/4week_radical_reinflation_plan

the author wants to get people to put on 1o pounds of muscle in one month with hardcore workouts.  Then the first thing he says in nutrition advice under the heading "eat big quantities of healthy foods" is - "All I tell my clients who want to gain good weight is to eat green things in each meal, choose whole foods first, and then pound as much of it as possible."  His explanation is, "you need to start every meal with the veggies and fruits that are going to supply the micronutrients your cells need."  I dunno, just sounds a little too mystical to me.  If the goal is to get strong and put on muscle then it seems logical to me to pound calories and forget about vegetables.
 
Not as such.

What is important is the micronutrients i.e vitamins and minerals. They are essential to the body to help it function. Alot of these are contained in vegetables, inparticular green ones. But they can be obtained from other foods, namely eggs, meat etc.

Beef liver, as I understand it, is one of the most nutrient dense foods available. Even contains more vitamin C per 100g than an orange.

If carbohydrate is petrol in a car, and fat is diesel. I guess vitamins and minerals may be the oil, water?

Run out of those and you won't get too far!!

Just my 2 cents.


Sam
 
There are no superfoods only people super at marketing regular foods.  Nearly everything you can find about nutrition is endorsed by some sort of fake-food product so it can be hard to decide who to listen to.  Recently I have been reading nutritional blogs written by scientists, not athletes.  Most nutrition gurus are driven by the desire to sell stuff and make money. On the other hand  scientists who study nutrition are generally driven by the desire to become famous in the scientific community.  The scientists vanity works to our advantage while the nutrition-gurus greed work against us.    One of my favorite nutritional science blogs is www.archevore.com.

For the past few months I've been experimenting with a diet that is high in protein/fats/fiber which also happens to be low in vegetables. I've gained more strength and muscle eating this way than any other previous nutritional approach.    The difference in my results is staggering when compared to my old low-fat moderate protein/carb diet.  The only thing I think vegetables are definitely necessary for is digestion.   I get around this by loading my protein shakes with flax and chia seed.

There is one drawback to eating like I do and my girlfriend is making sure I know it.  Apparently I smell different now as compared to how I smelled when I ate more veges and less protein.  I am not sure if this b.o. is from my high protein intake or lack of veges.  So I am committing myself to eating 2-3 small salads a week and changed at least half of my 10 weekly protein shakes from whey-based protein to plant-based protein.
 
Personally, I try to eat as many plants as possible. I feel better day-to-day than I ever have, but that could also be a product of me cutting out almost all processed foods.
 
I would bet all the "veggies are overrated" posters are under 50 and probably under 30.  Inflammation is your enemy esp in the long term but also in short term for recovery from heavy training sessions.  Here is one of MANY studies   <a title="Fruit and veg intake vs inflamation" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19248856">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19248856</a>  Yes, getting big and strong is great fun and an ego builder but it won't mean squat when you find yourself in a new "present moment" w/ advanced arthritic degeneration or cardiovascular disease or cancer or....  The pro athletes converting to vegetarian or near veg diets most often report ability to train longer and harder w/ much quicker recovery.  If that doesn't make you go, "Hmmmmmm...." then go ahead and see how well and long you live on meat and fat
 
Sam, could you please explain what nutrients we need from vegetables and what how a low store or low intake of these nutrients causes poor athletic performance? All I've heard about is how vegetables have various antioxidants which are important for their cancer preventing abilities.

Geoffrey, cancer and cardiovascular disease and arthritic degeneration do not matter for this discussion, unless you want to argue that not eating vegetables causes significant risk of onset of these problems between ages 20-35 (peak sport performance years).  The number of times an athlete's career is ended for these reasons is very low though, and that is before you even show those specific cases were caused by not eating vegetables.  I dunno, I just can't imagine hearing Pavel say "okay to prepare for your SFG certification I need you to focus on eating lots of brocolli this week, otherwise you may not pass the test."

I have no idealogical problem with vegetables.  It's not like I'm staring at mountains of evidence here and saying "f*** vegetables," I am asking where is the evidence?? I don't think I've ever heard an athlete say "one of the keys to my success was eating lots of vegetables everyday," the closest some athletes will come to that is saying their diet is important and they have a good diet because they eat real foods and plenty of calories on a regular schedule.  Two very different statements.
 
I do not believe it is the fruits and vegetables reducing inlamamtion in the above study.  I believe the participants who ate less fruits/veges also ate more refined carbohydrates, most likely from modern grains.     They would have to because I doubt we're looking at 300 adolescent boys and girls who ate a low-carb diet for any length of time.

 

OP - You will have to study the available information and decide for yourself.  Use your body as a laboratory.  If you eat a certain way, say for 3 months and don't get sick, have good daily energy, good mood and are achieving your  strength and conditioning goals than I doubt that diet would be bad for you in the longer run.
 
hyperlipid is the best of the nutrition sites IMO, since it is not a nutrition site at all.

Peter delves here and there into veggies (even eating them, GASP!).

My take away is eat a small amount and a wide variety to gain the hormetic benefit of a wide variety of planty chemicals.

Since we are not eating tons of offal we may need other sources for micro nutrients, but I am not convinced veggies are necessarily the path.
 
Daniel, my point is not so much directly related to immediate performance but to your whole life.  Disease risk is related to life time accumulation of exposures and intake of nutrients.  Your risk of total risk of cancer in fact may be the most related to what your mother ate while she was pregnant and what both parents ate while growing up;  even your grandmother's and greatgrandmother's diets are important etc.. What you do now has a definite effect on your health when you are much older and not competing and if you plan to ever be a parent will have a very significant impact on your children's health. If you are willing to sacrifice those things for a bit higher performance now, so be it though from what I know, that bump in performance will mostly be gained in sports that rely on total brute strength and size for a large part of competitive edge, football linemen come to mind.
 
Thanks for the sites, Stephen & Rob.

Geoffrey, in fact I agree with you that long-term health is a better priority than getting big.
 
I don't have any scientific back up for this, nor am I a diet guru or trying to be. But I've read a little bit and what I read about micronutirents and stuff just reminded me ALOT of all the internet discussions about what isolation movement is better to get your bicep biggest and most defined. So I discarded alot and simply came to view nutrition in the same way as the idea of quality movements changed my training. Think Dan Johns push,pull,hinge,squat, loaded carry. I think vegs for me are prolly the hinge.
 
A lot of it depends on how you define vegetables.  Some people don't count potatoes as vegetables, which can be a major contributor to calories.  Without heading over to pubmed, I don't ave any research off the top of my head, but I do know that vegetable intake improves diegestion, which in turn improves your immune system and inflammation response.

Those two factors, have a big influence on your recovery ability.  The faster you recover, the harder, more frequent, and longer you can train.  That will improve your performance.

There's my 2 cents, for what it's worth. I hope it helps.

 
 
Daniel,

Technically we "need" all of them, as they are classed as essential, i.e our body cant produce them. I think the biggest debate would be in what amounts the individual nutrients are needed. But that goes beyond the scope of your question.

Antioxidants, amongst other things, combat "free radicals", which are produced by performing exercise. Some people take vitamin C after exercise, for instance. Magnesium plays an important role in the contraction of muscle. Just two examples.

I think whats important is to not over complicate things. I dont know what your diet is like or what your preferences are, so here's what fruit/vegetables I eat, mainly; Spinach,raspberries (often frozen), bananas, sweet potato, tomatoes, broccoli and onions.

Covers my bases, most are mixed in with my evening meals, and I dont over do it. Just "enough".

Do I think vegetables are important, yes. But no more important than proteinis, or healthy fats. Eat your vegetables :)
 
Vegetables are not the best source of energy for sports performances, now, if y
must be " light ", ( jockey..), better to eat vegetables.
The " positive " point of view of veggies for sports is written in Russel post !!! ( funny post Russel ! )
 
Rickard, definitely obsession w/ individual micronutrients is like doing biceps isolation movements and forgetting about all the big complexes and ignoring conditioning!  There are thousands, literally, of micronutrients that our bodies require and most are not even named or known yet.  The only source for them is fruits and vegetables. When studies are done with isolated micronutrients very often the results show that the specific one is of no benefit or even of some harm, actually increasing disease risk (beta carotene, folic acid, vitamin e, all come to mind).  And it is for the same reason as an unbalanced micro approach to training is not productive and even counter productive; it throws everything out of balance.  But quite a few strong studies show that the more fruits and veg people consume in their daily diets, the healthier they are long term and the lower their risk of most all degenerative diseases and the diseases of aging.  That is because of the increase in overall micro-nutrient consumption in a balanced manner that just cannot be duplicated with pills and concentrated, isolated nutrients.
 
Be careful quoting observational studies as "proof" of anything.  Very easy to say peanuts cause plane crashes.

Humans have developed with all sorts of diets.  From Inuits primarily meat/fats diet to tropical fatty fruits and sea creatures.

Correct high fat diets are protective and recycle many of these allegedly beneficial antioxidants.

There are no superfoods we need to survive.  Otherwise we would be long dead as a species.

My personal take home message is eat Food.  Few ingredients and if it goes bad, it is probably a decent food item.

Find what works for you.  Plenty of folks on this glorious interwebs have done ZERO carbs (I mean ZERO) and posted results, while others have done high carb and posted results.  Three meals, one meal, eight meals, it all works.  Find your flavor.

For the zero carb extremists I recall one gentleman who ate some type of all meat, fatty dog food for one or two meals a day, crazy.
 
Status
Closed Thread. (Continue Discussion of This Topic by Starting a New Thread.)
Back
Top Bottom