Mini Mikkipedia - Considerations for the vegetarian athlete

Mikkipedia

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00:11
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And today I'm gonna chat about the vegetarian athlete because there are certain nutrition considerations which I feel could warrant a little bit more attention beyond just the micronutrients and macronutrients we know to be of concern. So I'm gonna run through them as I see it and then also have a chat about blood biomarkers.

00:40
just at the end. And I will preface this by saying that whilst of course I have an omnivore diet, I work with a number of athletes and individuals looking to optimize their vegetarian approach. These are conversations that I'll have in my clinic at least every couple of weeks because there is a way to do it properly so you're not going to be at risk of losing muscle mass or impacting negatively on recovery.

01:10
This is particularly for people with high energy requirements and a lot of teenagers would fall into this and particularly teenage girls who may turn vegetarian because of a moral stance or they have it in their head that this is going to help with their body composition or whatever it is. Yet often those health conscious ones take it just a little bit further than what ideally it would be taken.

01:38
And calories are of a concern in this space because teenagers particularly have high energy requirements just through the fact that they're growing plus their sport and of course to fill their brain for school etc. And there are just periods of the day where they just can't eat all day long, right? Not that you would necessarily want them to. And vegetarian based diets can be challenging in that getting quality calories.

02:07
can be limited because there is an increased fiber intake. From people who follow a vegetarian diet, which has a lot of beans and vegetables added, getting the calorie requirements in quite a high volume diet can be tricky. So, you know, if I look at the literature around this area, on balance for adults at least,

02:30
The difference in energy intake between omnivores and vegetarians might be only about 5%, which isn't actually a major in the big scheme of things. Someone may easily maintain their weight in that space, but it's just those higher energy requirements from a vegetarian athlete. And another person I would, or avatar if you like, that I would put into this camp would be potentially a male who is doing endurance-based sport, who has gone vegetarian and isn't

03:00
calories or supplementing. So they're just sort of loading up a lot on beans and rice and potatoes and and hey maybe cheese and stuff like that but find that they're actually losing weight but importantly they're unable to recover as well. So I think calories is or can be a major consideration but then of course to turn that on its head sometimes people can absolutely overdo calories particularly if they're chasing something like protein and protein which

03:29
It's more difficult to get in a vegetarian diet. And you do have to consume almost several hundred calories more to get the same amount of protein that you would otherwise find in a steak. If this is the case for some people, then their vegetarian approach by dropping out meat can in fact increase the calories and make it more challenging for them to maintain a body composition that aids performance and also aids health.

03:56
So I think that's also really worth considering too. And of course from the macronutrients, protein is the major one of consideration. And protein quality is a term which we refer to here. So it encompasses a protein's sources of amino acid composition, its digestibility, and subsequent bioavailability of specific amino acids. And also of course that metabolic fate of those amino acids.

04:23
Such factors are affected by the specific protein source, whether it's consumed as isolated protein, such as you'd find in a protein powder, or as a protein-rich whole food, and whether that protein source is consumed alongside other foods in a meal. Irrespective, the quality of a protein source has reliably been shown to play an important role in determining the magnitude of post-exercise muscle protein synthesis response. And that response is responsible

04:53
for aiding recovery. So milk, egg and meat derived proteins all stimulate robust post-exercise NPS response and this is attributed to their high essential amino acid content, particularly leucine, a lack of any notable amino acid deficiencies, rapid digestibility, and a high total digestibility and absorbability and therefore more availability in circulation.

05:22
So that is that they're just more bioavailable. And this has been observed in a number of studies using milk, using eggs, using ground beef and beefsteak. So we're quite confident that if you have these foods, then you're gonna be okay, particularly if they're in a certain amount, right? In contrast, there are in fact fewer studies looking at post-exercise MPS response following the ingestion of non-aminoderived proteins.

05:49
Nevertheless, there is a widely held view that these non-animal proteins are inferior with respect to their capacity to stimulate that NPS rate compared with animal proteins. The lower anabolic potential of these proteins is thought to be attributed to a few factors. So, the presence of non-protein constituents and anti-nutritional factors are thought to slow and reduce the digestion and absorption of protein, meaning that a lower

06:17
proportion of ingested amino acids become available in circulation after a meal. So they're just not there to help with that muscle protein synthesis. However, if you were eating these amino acids in their purified form, so isolated from these other food constituents, it does help that digestibility. So the digestibility or the lower digestibility is attributed to the fact that they are in a whole food and a food matrix.

06:44
So once you strip them out and have it in, say, a protein powder form, it's actually much better. Despite that though, these plant sources frequently have lower total essential amino acid contents, and leucine, methionine, and or lysine in particular are amino acids which are suggested to provide limitations to that muscle protein synthesis response, either at the molecular signaling or substrate availability level. And this is

07:13
true when we're looking at studies investigating wheat or soy protein compared to their animal-based sources. However, interestingly, there have been studies recently demonstrating that getting a good bolus ingestion of mycoprotein, which is a fungal-derived protein-rich source, and I believe that if you eat something like corn, that Q-U-O-R-N product, that's made of mycoprotein,

07:41
This does result in a greater stimulation of NPS compared with a leucine-matched bolus of milk protein. So non-animal protein sources aren't necessarily less anabolic, but require consideration on a case-by-case basis. So you can't just blanketly say, that's gonna be lower. An emerging theme is that the differences between animal and plant-based protein sources are absent when we have higher doses of protein.

08:08
So, and I talked to Don Layman about this in an upcoming episode in that you will need to, as a plant-based or a vegetarian, if that's what you're getting a lot of your protein from, you need to eat more of that protein source to get a similar muscle protein synthesis response. Whereas in certain situations where 25 grams of animal-based protein is enough to hit that NPS, you might be looking at about 40 grams of a plant-based protein to get a similar response.

08:38
Blending plant protein sources is suggested as a way to get rid of these essential amin...