Can a plant-based diet really provide all of the nutrients your body needs for training and competition?
By Jackson Long

• More and more high-level athletes are adopting a plant-based lifestyle for health, performance, and sustainability.
• A plant-forward diet is the most environmentally sustainable and compassionate way of eating.
• By consuming a well-planned variety of plant-based foods, nutrient and protein requirements are easy to meet, even for serious athletes.
• Everything you need to succeed nutritionally and athletically is available in the plant kingdom—it just requires some effort and planning.

Across the sporting world, many high-level endurance- and strength-based athletes are making the shift toward a plant-based diet to enhance their health and performance, and lower their environmental impact. Yet questions, myths and misconceptions still exist. Can you eat plant-based and still crush it as an athlete? Can you really get enough nutrition and protein from plants alone?

Diet wars: What wins for performance?

Many vegans proclaim that plant-based eating is the latest and greatest performance enhancer—a belief popularized by the 2018 documentary The Game Changers. On the other side of the aisle, proponents of animal protein argue that abstaining from meat, eggs, and dairy is a one-way ticket to nutritional deficiencies and poor performance.

So which diet takes the top prize for performance? Is a plant-based or vegan diet really superior to a well-planned omnivorous one? What about keto? Answering these questions would require a large, well-crafted study to compare people following each type of diet over a long period of time. Because this would take a staggering amount of time and resources, it will likely never happen.

To me, “which diet is best” is the wrong question altogether. Instead, athletes should consider: How can we eat in a way that achieves a balance between optimal health and performance while minimizing our impact on the planet and other animals?

The indisputable truth is that a plant-forward diet is the most environmentally sustainable and compassionate way of eating. Many athletes want to lean this way in an effort to help protect the playgrounds they move in but don’t want to sacrifice performance. So how do we have the best of both worlds—eating in a way that reflects our values as stewards for wild places but also performing our best as athletes?

Fortunately, sports nutrition isn’t that complicated. We know pretty definitively how to eat in a way that optimizes performance. Carbohydrates, fats and protein are needed at certain times and in certain amounts to meet our energy requirements. We need plenty of fruits, vegetables, and other nutrient-dense foods to help our body adapt and recover from strenuous exercise and keep our immune systems strong. And certain nutrients, including iron and calcium, are critical to our overall health. Well-planned diets revolving around plant foods can achieve all these goals.

What about protein?!?

Perhaps the biggest myth about plant-based diets is that you can’t get enough protein. The fact is, protein, and all its amino acids, is a component of every living organism, animal and plant. By consuming a balanced variety of plant-based foods with enough overall calories to meet energy demands, protein requirements are relatively easy to meet for most athletes.

What does this actually look like? Let’s take me, for example. A competitive endurance athlete for more than half of my life, I’ve followed a totally vegan diet for the past seven years. Based on my weight and activity level, I generally need around 100-120 grams of protein per day to thrive. Here’s a sample meal plan that meets this requirement:

 

Additionally, I consume more than enough calcium, iron, and omega-3 fats from common athlete fuel like nuts, seeds, and dark leafy greens. When working individually with clients, regardless of their preferred eating style, I counsel them to achieve balance with the “3 Ts” of performance nutrition: types of food, timing, and total (calories and volume). Bottom line: Everything we need to succeed nutritionally and athletically is available in the plant kingdom—it just requires some effort and planning.

But don’t take my word for it. Recent research published in the journal Sports Medicine shows that once you reach a certain threshold of protein intake, the source—plant or animal—doesn’t matter all that much for muscle and endurance adaptation.

There are countless examples of extraordinary athletes crushing it on plant-based diets, including Nordic skiing hometown hero Sydney Palmer-Leger, a recent Community School graduate. This year, she won two NCAA ski titles for the University of Utah and was voted female college skier of the year as a freshman. Or, check out tennis champion Serena Williams, ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, and the world’s greatest Formula 1 driver, Lewis Hamilton, who happens to follow a completely plant-based diet.

Whether you’re interested in reducing your animal product consumption for health, sustainability, animal welfare or performance reasons, plant-based is a legitimate approach to eating that has many positive benefits when done correctly and mindfully.

About the author

Born and raised in Hailey, Jackson Long is a competitive athlete and owner of In The Flow Nutrition, a performance nutrition consulting business. He specializes in helping mountain athletes interested in plant-based eating succeed in their training and competition goals. To learn even more about this topic, check out a recent plant-based athlete education series on Jackson’s podcast, In The Flow.