The Vegetarian Diet: What Athletes Need to Know | Your Diet Sucks
Can you build muscle, train hard, and actually perform on a vegetarian diet?
Do plant-based eaters need more protein? Is iron deficiency a real concern or just wellness industry noise? This week, Zoë and Kylee dig into what the research actually says about vegetarian diets for athletes and active people, no Game Changers propaganda, no carnivore fear-mongering, just science.
Turns out vegetarian athletes do need about 20-30% more protein than omnivores to achieve the same muscle protein synthesis. Kylee explains why leucine matters, what PDCAAS scores actually mean, and which plant proteins are worth prioritizing (and which ones are working against you). Then Zoë gets quizzed on iron, B12, zinc, omega-3s, and protein combining in a game called Truth or Deficit, and her performance is, frankly, embarrassing for someone who's been vegetarian since age 17.
They also talk about something that doesn't get discussed enough: the research linking vegetarianism and disordered eating. Studies show plant-based eaters are about twice as likely to report orthorexic symptoms as omnivores, and Zoë gets honest about her own history using veganism as eating disorder cover. If you've ever wondered whether your "clean eating" is actually something else, this conversation is worth your time.
Plus: 2,500 years of people being unhinged about dietary purity, including Pythagoras possibly getting murdered because he refused to walk through a bean field, the anti-masturbation origins of graham crackers, and how "you are what you eat" thinking has been claimed by feminist abolitionists and literal Nazis alike. The plants aren't the problem. The purity logic might be.
Vegetarian diets can absolutely support your training and your health. They just require more planning, more attention to a few key nutrients, and an honest conversation with yourself about why you're doing it.
References & Sources
Research Studies:
Rodriguez-Martín, C., et al. (2025). Environmental impact of lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets. Frontiers in Nutrition. Finding: Lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets reduce dietary carbon footprint by approximately 35%.
Bardone-Cone, A. M., et al. (2012). The inter-relationships between vegetarianism and eating disorders among females. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 112(8), 1247-1252. Finding: 52% of females with eating disorder history had ever been vegetarian vs. 12% of controls.
McLean, M., et al. (2022). Vegetarian and vegan diets and orthorexia nervosa: A systematic review. Appetite, 176, 106134. Finding: Review of 48 studies found no consensus on general ED association, but most orthorexia studies showed positive association; vegetarians/vegans approximately 2x as likely to report orthorexic symptoms (OR=1.99).
Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets. (2016). Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 116(12), 1970-1980.
Rogerson, D. (2017). Vegan diets: Practical advice for athletes and exercisers. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 14(1), 36.
Fuhrman, J., & Ferreri, D. M. (2010). Fueling the vegetarian (vegan) athlete. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 9(4), 233-241.
Historical Sources:
Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–475 BCE) — contemporary account of Pythagoras
Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom, founded 1847 — origin of the term "vegetarian" (from Latin vegetis, meaning lively/vigorous)
Graham, S. — Lectures on the Science of Human Life (1839)
Kellogg, J.H. — Plain Facts for Old and Young (1881)
Lebensreform movement and Völkisch ideology — German historical context, late 19th-early 20th century
PDCAAS Reference Values:
Perfect score (1.0): Whey protein, egg whites, milk protein isolate, soy protein isolate
Good scores (0.7-0.99): Beef (0.92), whole soybeans (0.91), pea protein concentrate (0.89), black beans (0.75)
Lower scores (0.4-0.7): Peanuts (0.52), lentils (~0.5-0.7), rice (~0.5-0.6)
Poor scores (<0.4): Wheat gluten, most single grains
Nutrient Absorption Rates:
Heme iron (animal sources): 15-35% absorption
Non-heme iron (plant sources): 2-20% absorption (average 7-10%)
Animal-source zinc: 20-40% absorption
Plant-source zinc: 10-20% absorption
ALA to EPA/DHA conversion: Low and variable (typically <10%)
Kylee Welcome to Your Diet Sucks, the podcast where today we're talking about vegetarian diets for athletes, which means we're about to get hate mail from both the lentil lovers and the steak zealots, and honestly, we're into it. I'm Kylie Van Horn.
Zoë And I'm Zoë Rom. I can already hear the DMs heating up as we speak. Well, we've already gotten a review. We've gotten an, yes, someone left the review that we had failed to correctly address vegetarianism, which, yeah, I guess in the one year of doing this, we haven't talked about every single diet in great detail. So that's just accurate feedback, bad feedback, but accurate.
Kylee So we've kind of been holding out on this one, right? Not on—
Zoë Not on purpose, just because we wanted to do it right and we wanted to wrap our heads around how to approach it. And I think for me, as a journalist, I always get nervous about the ones that touch close to home. Cards on the table, I'm a vegetarian. Have been since I was 17.
Kylee I guess I've dabbled in vegetarianism. Every time you eat a vegetable, you're dabbling. That is true. My sister's vegetarian. She's been vegetarian since she was, I wanna say 17, 16, 17. But she was what I like to call a pretty bad vegetarian at first, and bad in the sense. I think everyone's bad at first. I mostly ate quesadillas. Yeah, she ate peanut butter and jelly in her dorm room every day.
Zoë I used to be a backpacking guide and all that I— I mean, I can't believe I'm alive. All that I ate for like three summers was I would— my go-to meal twice a day was a tortilla with Justin's honey almond butter on it.
Kylee Wow. Okay, so you guys have similarities.
Zoë I'm like, how do I not have rickets? That is like straight up medieval sailor diet amount of bad. Were you running at the time? No, I was kind of like lightly jogging. I was much more hiking, like for many days on end. And I would sometimes feel extremely tired and not good. So I wonder why, wonder if I had any nutrient deficiencies. That's Chekhov's nutrient deficiency for those of you paying attention at home. I am excited for this one. I think that we had covered the Game Changers documentary, which is an entire sort of, I mean, comfortably, I would say it's vegan quasi-fascist propaganda. And there is a strong strain, especially in the world of fitness, health, endurance. With a lot of hype for plant-based diets and the proposed health benefits therein. We have the other side though, too, right? Yes. We've got the carnivore crowd. Which I would just preface this whole episode and everything that we do here on planet Earth with just be cool. Yeah. Just be cool and be normal about your diet, about everything. Normal. Be normal. Carrots, not gonna kill you. A steak also probably won't cause instant death.
Kylee Vegetarianism, it's kind of a massive topic and there's ethical arguments, we've got the environmental argument, health argument, religious traditions, a whole internet full of people who have made this their entire...
Zoë I feel like we could do a 12 part series on this Ken Burns style and not cover everything. So instead of answering 100 questions kind of poorly We're going to answer three questions fairly well, I think. I hope so. I have questions. This one felt like yet another sort of exercise in ritual humiliation for me of being like I am a professional nutrition podcaster and I knew three things about the diet that I have espoused for the majority of my life.
Kylee Well, I'm glad you get to learn something.
Zoë Exactly. That's what this is all about. But what we're not going to be talking about today, just to like put some guardrails on the conversation, is we're not relitigating the ethics of eating animals or the environmental impact of meat production. We can't do those big topics justice. So that's for other folks and other discussions. But we—
Kylee But we did. Yeah, we did that one. We did a whole.
Zoë We did a whole episode on environmental eating, if people want to go check that out, and just to note the ethical case is real. Research consistently shows that animal welfare is cited as one of the top reasons that folks become vegetarian. The environmental case also is very real. A 2025 study found that lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets cut dietary carbon by like 35%, which is a lot, so. We're not dismissing any of that. I also do just have a deep-seated irrational hatred of all the vegetarian modifiers of lacto, ovo, pesca, aquarius, gemini, vegetarians. It's like, oh my God, I feel that the labeling of diets is maybe not the healthiest thing for people.
Kylee Yeah. Well, I just remember in nutrition textbooks, it's like this chart that's like this long chart and you got to break it down into my definitions of each type.
Zoë Like, ah, okay, can't keep it straight. Can't keep is straight. And again, I personally, I guess for additional context from me, I started vegetarian, went vegan, experienced profound health issues related to an eating disorder and relative energy deficiency that I wasn't able to address within the bounds of how I was doing veganism. And so I started not doing that. And also found that I had essentially been using it, and we'll talk about this later, as like eating disorder training wheels. It was something that I was using to justify some of my habits and patterns without taking a good, hard look at them. And when I had removed what for me was a crutch, not saying it is for everyone else, I don't know your brain, but I am starting to get to know my brain, and I was that diet in a way that's not healthy or supportive and... When I was able to set down that mantle, I was about to reengage with a pattern of eating that I don't feel like is interesting or helpful to label, but was much more supportive of like my mental health, my physical health, and I think that it's just values aligned eating. There's no like cute, trendy label. I'm not lacto-ovo anything. I eat in a way that hopefully... Communicate something about the type of person I am, and I feel like I always make fun of vegetarians and people who talk too much about their diet, but also that's what I do professionally. So thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Kylee Well, we're so in the episode we're going to discuss athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and if you can train hard and yes, be on a vegetarian diet. And that's something I get a lot of questions about, like people will be curious about it. Like, well, how do you actually do this? Yeah, is it possible? Like it seems impossible. And then what do I need to get tested for? Like, what do I need to pay attention to? So
Zoë To point back to our Game Changers episode. Go back and listen to that, because it is one of my favorites and one of our most popular, which I love. That one discussed the fact that you do not have to be vegan to be a good athlete, which at last fact check is still correct. So I'm excited to dive in, but before we get too deeply into the science, maybe we can go through some of the history of vegetarianism. Your favorite thing. Okay, I know I say this every time, but this shit. Is wild. It is wild, I learned a lot. And this is always my favorite part because I feel like these stories reveal some really important things about why we're still having fights about this on the internet 2,000 years later. So I'm going to go to the way back machine and start with the guy who basically invented Western ideas of vegetarianism, Pythagoras. Who you've probably heard of. That's the Triangle guy, right? It's the triangle guy, yeah. So around 500 BCE, he started a commune in southern Italy where his followers practiced vegetarianism, lived communally, and believed in the transmigration of souls. So this was like, eat, pray, love for ancient Italian dudes. I'm into it. I would join. But what does that mean is that Pythagoras believed that when you die, your soul gets recycled into another body, human or animal, so the chicken fingers you're about to eat could have been your grandma? What? Yep. So there's a story from a guy who was a contemporary of Pythagoras, a poet named Xenophanes, describing Pythagoras stopping a man from beating a puppy because he recognized the voice of a departed friend in the dog's yelp, which like, I mean, there's so much to unpack here from the ancient Greek Christy Gnome of it all to like, there are a lot of good reasons to not beat a puppy, to my assessment. It's important to note Xenophanes was basically making fun of Pythagoras when he told this story. Which, I think, shows you that vegetarianism has been controversial enough to be satirized even in ancient Greece. Ugh, wow. Yeah. And here's where it gets weird, not just with the puppy beating. Pythagoras was also fanatically anti-bean. His followers couldn't eat them, couldn't touch them, couldn't even walk through a bean field. There are various theories about why he didn't leave behind a very robust paper trail about his bean philosophy. Some scholars think he thought that beans contained human souls in transit. Others point to the bean's resemblance to human fetuses. Others suggest that it may have been an early awareness of favism, which is a rare genetic condition where fava beans can cause serious illness. So scholars are pretty IDK about this whole thing, but whatever. It's kind of wild because that's a good protein source for it. I am like very pro-bean. I stan the bean. We should get, like, pro-bean t-shirt, hashtag pro-beans. All beans, all the time. So whatever the reason, one ancient legend, and again, I want to stress that it's a legend, written down centuries after Pythagoras lived and not actually, therefore, possible to fact check, claims that he was being once chased by an angry mob and he reached the edge of a bean field and he refused to go through this bean field in order to escape this angry mob, so they killed him. He died for beans, so... This is either the most principled death in history or a legit cautionary tale about letting your dietary beliefs become your entire personality.
Kylee So vegetarianism, it's kind of been tangled up with bigger ideas. Yeah, people have had big feelings about beans for a very long time.
Zoë From the very beginning, vegetarianism in the West has been connected to ideas about purity, spiritual purity, bodily purity, moral purity, and that entanglement has led to some fascinating and sometimes pretty dark places. For centuries after Pythagoras, people who didn't eat meat were actually called Pythagarians. The word vegetarian wasn't actually coined until 1847, when the Vegetarian Society Formed in England And it actually comes from the Latin vegetis, meaning lively or vigorous, not from vegetable. Yeah. I did not realize that. Number one, Kylie fact. I always love stump Kylie. The things you don't know are always like the dumbest things where it's like.
Kylee Did you know? Hey, but now we know and we can bring that.
Zoë Up at a party. Exactly. This is like, I am going to be insufferable at every future cocktail party, because if you think for a second, I'm not going to start calling myself a Pythagorean, you got another bean think coming. So from early, early on, vegetarians were selling their premise on vitality, not just salads.
Kylee When did all of this come to America?
Zoë Yeah, so this came to the good ol' U.S. Of A, and things got extremely unhinged, extremely quickly. It starts with a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, which, yeah, that—
Kylee Why is this guy in every one of our episodes? One of our episodes.
Zoë I know. Him and... The Kellogg guy. He's coming too. Don't worry. Oh, okay. John Harvey. I'm like, these lunatics have such an outsized impact on food culture and history. But in the 1830s, Graham became convinced that the key to moral and physical health was suppressing sexual urges. And again, I just, I can't understand how these 19th century no-fap bros, how often they come up on this podcast. According to Graham, you eat a bland diet of whole grains, no meat, no spices, and nothing that might inadvertently inflame your passions. He believed that eating meat made people lustful and violent, and so he invented the Graham Cracker to be a health food designed to be so boring that it would calm your libido. And now...
Kylee It's interesting because some of my athletes think graham crackers are the devil. They have sugar in them. Yeah, okay
Zoë I mean, I wouldn't say they get me like, yeah. I wouldn't say they'd get me hot and bothered, but like I'm into it, you know? Would it calm your libido? On my like scale of how horny am I for this food? I'm not like Jacob Elordi. It's a great option for me, I think. So his lectures connecting diet and sexuality were so controversial that bakers and butchers literally rioted against him. In 1837, a violent mob of food workers attacked him at his hotel in Boston. I also personally would riot against anyone who was super into white bread and chastity. He promised that his diet would help people live to be 100, and fun fact, died at age 57. Hashtag don't die
Kylee Unfortunately, probably had very few sexual desires.
Zoë I hadn't even thought about that. I'm like, oh my God, if this is how that guy eats, fuck, Brian Johnson died at 57. So his legacy lived on through a friend of the show, John Harvey Kellogg. I think this is his sixth mention. Why is this bizarro serial magnate such a big deal, living rent free in our heads and culture forever? We've talked about him before on the show and I'll be honest, we did lean pretty into cornflakes were invented to stop masturbation narrative? The fuller and more nuanced picture is that Kellogg absolutely believed that bland food suppressed sexual urges, and he wrote extensively about the evils of what he called self-pleasure. But cornflakes were developed as an easily digestible health food. They were never actually marketed as like, eat this, don't masturbate. The anti-masturbation thing was like his worldview, and it was all kind of wrapped up in that, but it wasn't the overt sales pitch. So it's still weird, but just more accurately weird, more nuanced weird, which is classic YDS.
Kylee But this is also weird because American vegetarianism is tied up in the sexual panic. Was this the same? I'm like wondering if in England it was the same or...
Zoë Shockingly, in Victorian England, things were not much better. It makes me remember when I was a kid, PETA started putting out these extremely horny vegetarian commercials. Oh my god, I have to show you one really quick. The description of this ad, which features a model jumping into a giant bowl of vegetable soup, almost totally naked, is that studies show vegetarians have better sex. I personally can't validate or deny or probably fact check that in a meaningful way. It does show, I think, an important thing about if things just say studies show, probably pretty good to ask questions. But yes, people have had like weird feelings about sex and vegetables forever. I can't believe that's a thing I get to say on a podcast. I think that dietary purity has equaled moral purity, which has always equaled sexual purity, which again, it's not about nutrition, it is about control, and it's about controlling bodies. And we see that same pattern show up in 20th century Europe, like you said, in some really dark ways. So in Germany, starting in the late 1800s, there was a movement called Lebensreform, which means life reform, which was basically before Maha was Maha or was even like Twinkle and RFK's workout jeans? These folks rejected industrialization. They rejected urban life. They practiced stark vegetarianism, nudism, nature worship, raw foods. So they were basically like the hippies of that era. But some branches of this movement got absorbed into the Volkisch movement, which was a German ethno-nationalist ideology obsessed with racial purity. Their tagline was blood and soil. And returning to an imagined ancient Germanic way of life. So for some vulkish thinkers Vegetarianism wasn't just about health. It was about Aryan purity and the idea that you could purify your race through diet. Wow. Which don't love how many echoes of this there are still today. Would love to be like, here's another quirky bean field fat that isn't relevant. But I'm like sweating. So it does sort of connect into the Nazis, as some people likely know. I feel like this was like a fun fact that was always lobbed at me at these sexy vegetarian cocktail parties is that Hitler followed a mostly vegetarian diet, at least in his later year. He apparently had recurrent GI issues, though some historians argue that his vegetarianism was also partially propaganda crafted by Goebbels, and he wasn't super consistent with his diet. So, welcome to the E-Club. Himmler was reportedly extremely interested in vegetarianism alongside his obsession with yoga, runes, and the occult. So really not cool stuff there. And I wanna be really clear also about what I'm saying and what I—
Kylee You're talking about Nazi—
Zoë Yes. I'm like, we went from masturbation to Nazis shockingly fast for, again, a nutrition podcast. So, grrr, like record scratch sound effects. I am not saying that vegetarianism is fascist. I Am a vegetarian. That's absurd. Although there is always a political and an identity angle to food. But what I am saying is that the idea of dietary purity the belief that you are what you eat and that that determines your moral worth or your place in some natural hierarchy, and that can be attached to virtually any ideology. It's been used by progressive health reformers, it's been used by feminist abolitionists who often were vegetarians, Ben Franklin was a vegetarian, and it's used by racial purists fantasizing about Aryan regeneration. So the plants aren't the problem, the problem is the moral absolutionism and diet and again this is the thing that I'm kind of like A little too close to home in terms of some of the conversations we're seeing in the Maha movement and the Maha adjacent. Yeah, like I wish it didn't feel relevant. Because it didn't stop around the 1940s, right? Absolutely not. So starting in the 2010s, vegetarianism and veganism got fully absorbed into wellness culture, which, as we discussed on the show, is awesome just like, is basically just diet culture in a jade roller? Suddenly, plant-based became marketing gold. There was that wave of documentaries, forks over knives, cow-spiracy, the game changers that told people that plant-based eating could reverse disease, save the planet, and help them get a gold medal. Some of those claims had merit, but the framing kept sliding into this familiar and troubling territory. Eat this way and you'll be pure, you'll better, and your culture and world will be too. Meanwhile, weight loss companies rebranded restriction as plant-based eating. Orthorexia has been known to find cover behind ethical eating, because I can't eat that I'm vegan gets you a halo and gets you thumbs up online, while I can eat that I'm restricting because of what's going on in my interior world. Big thumbs down on that phrasing. And supplement companies figured out that anxious vegetarians are a captive and extremely affluent market.
Kylee With many things in the nutrition world, there's the one side here, and then comes the backlash. Like, I don't, dear God, why do diets have backlash? Like, okay.
Zoë People, be cool.
Kylee Because we have to be polarized.
Zoë Yes, we have to be polarized. The carnivore diet basically emerged as a direct oppositional identity. Jordan Peterson claiming his daughter cured autoimmune diseases with all beef, Joe Rogan doing carnivores challenges, Paul Saladino telling people that vegetables are trying to kill you with their anti-nutrients. The carnival people are responding to something real. There is. There can be smugness of plant-based evangelism. But anyone who's evangelical about stuff is annoying. Again, not the plants. And the way that veganism got tangled up in a certain kind of elite wellness culture I think also is deserving of cultural critique, but their solution is the exact same purity logic pointed in the opposite direction. Instead of plants are sacred and meat is murder, it's meat is sacred and plants are poison. So it's all just tribal internet warfare. It's identity. It's not actually a diet.
Kylee Do you think there's like images then that people associate with these diets?
Zoë Oh, absolutely, and I feel like Pythagoras would absolutely see echoes of himself in today's world. It's the same energy, different bean field. So here are the patterns, the sort of through lines that I want us to hold onto as we get into today's episode. One, is that purity logic? The persistent belief that dietary purity equals moral purity. That's dangerous, no matter what direction it points in. Two, diet as identity. Because when your eating pattern becomes who you are, you can't evaluate it objectively anymore. I'm ready to get rid of the you are what you eat. I think we need to cancel it, 2026. Three is the false binary because every era generates opposing camps. But what's important to note is that both sides benefit from the conflict and who loses? We do, in the middle, the confused consumer, the person with less power and less information. But reality is almost always way more nuanced than any culture war can suggest. No, that's not why we're here at all. I know. Now that we're like 30 minutes into what's going to be a nine-hour episode, I'm so sorry. So with that in mind, let's look at what the research actually says about vegetarian diets for endurance athletes and active people, not as a moral question, not as an identity question. Again, we're not going to get Peter Singer on this bitch. But we just want to ask. Does this work? What are the trade-offs? And what do you need to pay attention to?
Kylee First, we're gonna look at this, the fitness and endurance performance piece. Perfect. And it was interesting, like when we did the Game Changers episode, they were very selective about like who they, from my perspective, like who the chose to like feature and like these elite athletes so that people thought that like, okay, if I switched to plant-based, then I'm gonna be an elite athlete. But when we actually look at something like endurance performance, The research shows that well-designed vegetarian and vegan diets can support high level endurance performance, but that doesn't mean that the diet itself is like giving an edge to performance, I guess.
Zoë Here's the thing, Kylie, is that that is absolutely not going to sell content. So could you update what you just said, please? Marketing. For the clip?
Kylee So it is largely marketing. What actually matters is whether any given diet, vegetarian or otherwise, is providing adequate energy intake and the nutrients that you need, like micronutrients, macronutrient, et cetera. And then even when we look at strength and power sports, similar outcomes, as long as adequate protein is consumed. And then we're gonna get a lot of hate mail probably from certain people being like proteins overhyped, but we're going to get into that, so.
Zoë I already did an episode on that. Welcome, bring it. I don't have plans this weekend. I would love to just like have an NA martini, which I guess would just be like olive juice in answering your DMs about this. About this.
Kylee And any martini.
Zoë Just gonna be swinging olive juice, getting weird in the DMs.
Kylee Performance-wise, not really any advantage, as long as you're eating the right amount of calories, micronutrients to match your training. Go for it.
Zoë You're not going to win a gold.
Kylee Recovery though, so when we look at this, the research is a little bit more mixed. It doesn't show a clear advantage. And then in some cases, it could actually show a potential disadvantage if the diet is not carefully planned out. When we look at what might help vegetarians with recovery, well, plant foods are really high in antioxidants and phytochemicals. Do you know what those are, Zoe? Um... So phyto is like Greek for plant. So it's plant, plant, chemical. Do you know what like antioxidants and phytochemicals do? If for argument's sake, I.
Zoë I happen to not know what those were. How would you explain them to me at a third grade reading level?
Kylee Well, they theoretically can balance out oxidative stress and inflammation from training. And we've talked about this before that like inflammation isn't necessarily a bad thing. And it's kind of, it's debated as to whether we really need to be like tampering down all of our inflammation because we wanna be able to adapt to our training stresses. When we look at the recovery and performance aspect, there's some debate as to whether you should be reducing down like all this inflammation post-exercise. Plant-based diets are going to typically provide more antioxidants and polyphenols. And those things are like the compounds that the plant produces to protect itself. And that's what is doing the work in the body when we ingest them. Got it.
Zoë So would you say this is something reasonably that people need to be thinking about or paying attention to? Because wouldn't you have to eat like a shit ton of plants to move the needle? You would have to have this perfect constellation come into alignment if you're eating enough plants that are high enough in these specific nutrients that also would counterweight the strategic inflammation that you're trying to get in training at exactly the right moment, the amount of plants you would have to eat and the amount of training you would to be doing and the specific stimulus you would want to be getting from that would have be so exact that I can imagine the takeaway here being, don't worry about it, dog.
Kylee Getting complicated, but I will say, you know, if you're a vegetarian and you're just eating a tortilla with honey and peanut butter every day, that might not be the best for performance either.
Zoë I did not set a PR that year.
Kylee Things like juices or tart cherry juice, something like pomegranate juice, blueberry juice. When we concentrate down some of our highest antioxidant plant food sources, theoretically, potentially that can have an effect on recovery. So when we look at tart cherry, juice, there are a lot of athletes that will use that in a after. A heavy training session or after a race. That is something that I'll recommend to athletes like might wanna try to help with recovery.
Zoë Dude, I ran a marathon on Saturday and I like can't walk right. So I might need to hit up. Did you take tart cherry? No, I shouldn't have. I had a margarita.
Kylee Ah.
Zoë That was a very tart margarita. It was very good. Did you have tarts?
Kylee Did you have tart cherry margarita? Dude, I wish. Or pomegranate margaritas? That would have been amazing.
Zoë I was getting all of my antioxidants via tequila that evening.
Kylee So I guess, I mean, the point when we're talking about this is, yes, like variety in plant foods and getting in different colors of plants might be beneficial for recovery and theoretically can reduce oxidative stress. But to your point, how intensely do we need to think about this? Like how intensely to we need think about when I'm consuming this particular diversity of plants and like, if you don't eat vegetarian and you still eat plants, like, could You still— recover just as well. That's an open-ended question, I guess. The other thing that might help vegetarians with recovery is carbohydrate availability. Vegetarian diets tend to be like our trusty bean is high in carbs. The trusty constantly carb loaded. The bean, the squash.
Zoë Love me a squash, love me a carrot, all of them. Peas and carrots, peas and carrots.
Kylee Those are going to support glycogen replenishment, you know, between our training sessions. So those are the two areas that might help with recovery.
Zoë Yeah, so I'm curious if there are areas where it might compromise recovery, like is there anything that shows there are things that plant-based people should be thinking about?
Kylee This is where I feel like we might get people that are gonna hear me say something and hear it in the wrong way.
Zoë And I would just encourage you to get fucked, if that's you. And you wanna listen to this in bad faith. That's a choice? You're making that choice? You're allowed to make that choice.
Kylee I'm going to say something and then people are like, but N of one, you know, or like. But I ate a pineapple that sucked once. Can't wait for that DM. Muscle protein synthesis. And again, like we did do that episode on is protein overhyped. Plant proteins do have typically lower leucine content. And we're going to get more into this later. But they have different makeups of amino acids, which might not be as supportive from a recovery process. That doesn't mean, again, that you can't have appropriate muscle protein synthesis levels with plant-based proteins. It's just maybe the amount that you're consuming and the diversity of plant food sources for protein that you are getting in, those maybe need to be looked at so that you aren't missing out.
Zoë Out on things. So let's right-size that concern for people. Is that something that you want athletes actively thinking about and looking at?
Kylee I think yes. Okay. Yeah. And we'll talk about it later, but I want to talk more about how you can do that without over-obsessing. Amazing. Okay. So then the second thing, creatine, and I feel like creatine is something people are asking a lot about. Should I take it? Should I not take it. The reality is vegetarian athletes do have lower stores of muscle creatine since their dietary creatine that you're consuming only comes from animal products. And this could potentially again affect recovery between high intensity sessions, but it's also not something that I think you have to take. I will say anecdotally, some of my vegetarian athletes that do take it have a noticeable difference in their recovery. Like they I just feel like they bounce back quicker. It's something that if you're curious about it, you're vegetarian, you choose creatine monohydrate, and you do three to five grams per day. Yeah, why not experiment with it and see? It's one of those things where I'm like, yeah, if you choose a reputable supplement company and wanna experiment with, the research is there, and I would support.
Zoë This is one of three things where it's like, yes, this can work. Every other episode of YDS could be like, no, and this one is like...
Kylee Yeah, I know. Supplement wise. Supplement, yeah. Okay, so then moving on to the third one. If you don't plan in a plant-based diet and you don't take in enough iron or aren't aware of how plant-base iron differs from animal iron, then you could end up in a deficiency state. And even if you have a well-planned vegetarian diet, You might not be getting enough in. Which can really affect you from an iron storage standpoint, and that can affect your training capacity and training adaptations and all of those sorts of oxygen carrying capacity. So it is a real concern. We will dive into that.
Zoë Perfect. Another Chekhov's deficiency. So I'm curious to talk through some of the nutrient considerations about the vegetarian diet that actually matter. You sort of tease the protein one, because I think that's one that a lot of vegetarian athletes get, like I know that I'm personally do not send me another reel about this, friends. But do plant-based athletes need more overall protein than omnivores if we're looking at overall recovery?
Kylee When we look at this closer, technically vegetarian athletes do need about 20 to 30% more total daily protein compared to their omnivore counterparts to achieve the same muscle protein synthesis rates and recovery outcomes. Why? Typically, this is due to the leucine content. So leucine is an amino acid. And it's a primary trigger for muscle protein synthesis. It does activate the mTOR pathway, which is the switch that tells muscles to build and repair. And you need approximately two to three grams of leucine per meal to maximally stimulate muscle protein syntheses. And so the challenge is that animal proteins are eight to 10% leucin by weight, plant proteins are six to 8% leucin by weight and some are as low as 5%. I'm not saying we need to over obsess over the leucine content, but if you are trying to maximize training adaptations and recovery and not just prevent a deficiency, we might want to just look at overall consumption. I would say look at the overall consumption of protein. We've talked about if you're not triggered by doing a little bit of tracking, a program like Chronometer will actually break down the amino acid content of your protein Yeah. So you can kind of see how much leucine am I getting in, et cetera, if that's up your alley, you know, like don't be triggered and say, I need to do this because she said on the podcast, but.
Zoë Would you say this is like medium hanging fruit? Cause like, I don't think it's low hanging fruit. Cause like I guess I'll just say I've never once thought about this and Like you're Lucy. And like I've
Kylee consumption and you're fine.
Zoë I've won money running, like, I don't know, not the best in the world, but I also have no idea what my Lucy intake is. So like, if you're not like a nutrition black belt, who should be the something that if I want to get a little better, I want to get a little more intentional, and I'm nailing the foundations, this might be an additional An additional. Your green belt. Yeah. I think that's.
Kylee Well, and here's the thing. I would say examine overall consumption. Yep. Eat enough. Like I said, vegetarian athletes might need even a bit more protein overall than their meat-eating counterparts. And then the second piece would be, look at your diversity. Because if you're just consuming like beans, for instance, and that's all you're consuming. It needs. Then maybe you want to look closer at that. But if you have a divert, like you tend to eat pretty diverse vegetarian diet, then I feel like, you know, I don't know how closely you would need to look at that, so hopefully that— I actually do eat more than just beans, I love. Hail Seitan. Okay. So then we also want to look at amino acid profiles. We're not just focusing on leucine here, but some of the plant foods that you're getting protein from are not going to be a quote complete protein, meaning that they don't contain all the nine essential amino acids that you must get from food. So a lot of single plant protein sources are limited in one or more essential amino acids. For instance, our legumes, our friends, the beans, are low in besties, low in methionine, grains are low and lysine, nuts and seeds are variable, but often low in lysine. When we're looking at protein synthesis, we do need to have all essential amino acid. Present that doesn't mean that we need to eat them on the same meal Okay, so like throughout your day if you're eating off these things, so
Zoë So it's not like you need, like if you're having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you don't need to have a meltdown that you're not getting enough lysine. You can be like, I'll have a dinner where I have some seitan and some rice and I'll just be, again, I will just be cool, man. Just be cool. Just be cool.
Kylee Some people get so rigid with their choices and their repetition of things. They're like, oh, but this is so easy. So I'm just gonna eat the same thing every day as a vegetarian.
Zoë So if you're only eating PB&Js, or if you are only eating almond butter on a quesadilla, not smart. That might not be a good thing. You may not ever live to launch your incredible nutrition.
Kylee There's something called the protein digestibility score. It's a scoring system that measures protein quality and absorption by combining two factors. So it looks at— Where my spreadsheet people at? Amino acid profile. So does it have all the essential amino acids in the right amounts in this protein source? And then digestibility. How much of that protein can your body actually absorb and use? So different foods have different PDCAAS scores. And so I just wanna read out a couple of them. We're not gonna go through the whole list, but there's a perfect or near perfect score, a 1.0 score. Those foods are going to be whey protein, egg whites, and then milk and soy protein isolates.
Zoë We did
Kylee Yeah, so let's go, but that would be like the protein the soy protein isolate. I think the powder
Zoë Okay, like a new powder. Also, I get the almond milk that has like extra protein in it. That's like kind of my new thing. Oh, nice. Yeah. I love that. I recommend that. 10 grams right off the bat. Exactly. It feels, like it's the closest thing to a hack, which is just, I'd get like eight grams more.
Kylee Than I was initially. If you have a whole pint glass, you might get 16. Yeah, exactly. OK, so then we have the good scores, which are 0.7 to 0.99. We've got beef at 0.92. We've soy, whole soybeans, 0.91. We've black beans at 0,75. And then we've got a pea protein concentrate at 0.89. Point plants. Yeah, so there are, I mean, there are quite a few good score plant foods in there. Yeah. And then we've got our lower score foods, 0.4 to 0.7. We've got out peanuts at 0.52. Lentils at 0,52. Paul Mescal would not be happy. That feels like personally offensive. Paul Mescal is not gonna be happy! Like Paul Mescol for lentils campaign. Rice at 0.47. And then there's the poor scores, which we're considering below 0.4. One of those big ones is wheat gluten. Oh, shoot, that's satan. And most single grains. Oh, all right. That's why you eat more than one grain. Well, here's the thing, right? Kind of what we said before. So what is all of this? Does this matter? How do we use this? System to look at our overall diet, if you're just eating wheat gluten, that's probably not going to be the best for protein digestibility and absorption. And so you'd have to eat maybe a lot more wheat gluten to be able to absorb the protein that you need for muscle protein synthesis.
Zoë And so the takeaway from this isn't get out your notepad and pen and graph every single piece of protein you eat, it's like the overall message is eat lots of
Kylee different things. Yeah. When we're putting together these episodes, it's always my fear is to like, I don't want to make people obsessive. I do want to teach them some—
Zoë Right. That's always the double edged sword of a podcast is like you want to say stuff because if our podcast was just eat a varied diet, which is like great advice, that is just good advice. That has the most evidence based thing you can say. No one wants to hear that. That is so boring. And so we're always trying to bring information but contextualize it and right size it too with being like, okay, there are some concerns. There's things to look at. Not all of the information. It's tough, because when you're listening to a podcast, it all sounds approximately as important. So we always want to not give too much air time to one thing over the other, but we do want to go sometimes into the minutia because the science is fascinating and because there can be real world impacts. But sometimes the best science is not gonna be very fascinating and sometimes the most interesting science isn't gonna have that many profound real world con impacts. And so we just always want to contextualize all of it.
Kylee Yeah, exactly.
Zoë Which is hard, but job security. We've established that these vegetarian diets can work for athletes. I mean, N of one, I'm still sore from Saturday.
Kylee You needed to eat more Lusine or drink cherry juice.
Zoë I did. I went to a Mexican restaurant and I had like a black beans and rice plate. So tried to really ball out with my beans. Shout out beans. Beans and a margarita. Yeah. But I feel like there are some nutritional landmines that like I know I worry about and I bet other athletes worry about. So at the risk of letting this podcast turn into a checklist of things you should be stressed about, I want to play a game.
Kylee I wanna play a game. Okay, cool. What kind of game are we doing? It's called Truth or Deficit.
Zoë So you're going to name a nutrient that people say vegetarian athletes need to worry about, and I'm going to guess whether it's a legit concern or overblown. If I'm wrong, I have to answer the vulnerable question of your choice. It's like truth or dare.
Kylee Okay, awesome. I can't wait to be pretty ruthless with you, Zoe. Oh my God. This might have been a bad idea. Well, and then I'll give a little explanation, too. Yes, there will be science here. There will be some science here, round one. I feel like you already got, this one's unfair. Yeah, teaser. You already got the teaser, but iron. Legit.
Zoë It, also because I'm a menstruating athlete that lives at altitude and eats plants. So iron is my hero's journey dog. I feel like it's my number one thing that I'm always trying to be. I actually had, like it took like four years of work with you actually. We got together and this was like before we were really good friends.
Kylee Oh my gosh, this is so long ago.
Zoë So long ago, we had a meeting, so I was like, hey girl, I know we don't know each other super well, but my iron sucks. And you helped me create a roadmap. You helped me do light tracking. Three years later, I have optimized iron levels. Amazing. So it can happen.
Kylee It only takes three years. But you brought up some good points about why maybe athletes are at a higher risk before we get into this. So athletes themselves are breaking down a lot of red blood cells because of foot strike hemolysis. We also lose iron and other micronutrients in our sweat and through the GI system going to the bathroom. Um. You know, when we look at female menstruating athletes, there's also that component in the sense of you are losing more blood. You're losing iron every month.
Zoë Man, I'm like the Kristin Chenoweth of low iron. I'm a triple threat, like, menstruating, altitude, endurance.
Kylee She can do it all. Oh yeah, and the altitude component. You got that one up too. So oftentimes there are a lot of things kind of that are compounding on top of our baseline needs, right? And then... We've got our vegetarian diet, and the main problem is that we've got a non-heme form of iron. So there's this idea of heme versus non-heme iron. Heme iron is going to be what's coming from your animal sources. It's found in hemoglobin and myoglobin in meat, poultry, and fish. And it does have an absorption rate of about 15% to 35%, which to me, I'm still like, doesn't seem that high. Oh my god.
Zoë We've been evolving for freaking ever, and we can't just get all the iron out of stuff. Oh my god, who is responsible for updating the software?
Kylee Absorption itself really isn't impacted much, though, by, like, other dietary factors. So our non-heme iron... Coming from plant sources, four to five foods, and the absorption rate is about two to 20%. On average, I have seen numbers around seven to 10. That's where I'd say like most fall. Don't love it, but all right. And the absorption is highly influenced by enhancers and inhibitors in the diet. So would that be things like caffeine inhibitor, vitamin C helper? Yes, but in this case with the plant-based thing, Looking at things like fiber. Oxalates, those sorts of things that are like compounds that are found in plants that would actually reduce the absorption, phytates, oxalates. I know we have talked about before, like we don't want to obsess over those things, but at the same time they do actually have a real impact on the absorption of plants.
Zoë So if you, like me, are on the low iron heroine's journey, there could be a world where that's a factor to consider. Yeah. But, like, probably not the thing you need to think about first thing when you wake up every day of your life.
Kylee Life. Probably not. The plant-based iron must be reduced from ferric to ferrous form before absorption. So unlike the animal base, does not need to do that. So that's an added step, right? Yeah. And sometimes when we have added steps with things, that can lead to like, there can be conversion issues. Yeah. I know it leads to me doing less things. Yeah, exactly. And then the competition with other minerals for absorption. Here's the thing though, animal products do have other minerals as well. But when we look at plant foods, if we're having a lot of plant foods at once, we might have a bigger volume of minerals that might compete with iron for absorption, like our calcium, sometimes magnesium, all those things can impact the actual absorption of the iron, and we might get higher amounts of those from plant foods. When we look at considerations as to what you might want to do as a vegetarian athlete, I would say testing more frequently than maybe someone that eats meat. Unless, I mean, there are always stipulations and caveats here, like if you're somebody that eats meat and you struggle with your iron levels, then maybe you do want to do more frequent testing as well. But I would say every six months maybe as a plant-based athlete. Less than taxes. Great. Yeah, um, I also also tip, like if you are having trouble getting an iron panel from your doctor, go through Quest Labs or reach out to me and I'll just order you an iron pan. That is historically what I have done. It's honestly if your insurance isn't going to cover it because a lot of insurance is sucks. Yeah. Why not? It's like 60 bucks. Yeah. It's just like good luck girl. So we've got our testing component. We've got consider cooking with a cast iron. Pan, or the iron fish that you can put in your pan. This is one of the big...
Zoë Oh, this is one of the big Zoe's life hacks in addition to the protein milk. TJ and I bought a 15 inch skillet because we cooked so much freaking food because like two ultra runners. It looks like we're constantly cooking for a dinner party. So we have a 15-inch cast iron skillet that we cook the majority of our meals in.
Kylee Cast iron drives me insane. I'm like, I am surprised that you're this excited.
Zoë I'm also from the South, so I am a cast iron people. I was just visiting my parents in Arkansas. My mom has like 13 cast iron skillets. This one gets the bacon grease and this one's for cornbread for Zoe so I don't get the bacon grease run. She has like a Russian nesting doll of cast iron skills. So, yeah, I feel like I come from a long line of...
Kylee Or, if you don't like cooking with cast iron, you can get the iron fish, and you can put that in your food. Do you iron fish? We do not have... I use a cast... I mean, I do use cast iron but I'm not using it for every meal and I don't get as passionate as you do. We only need one. I'm sorry. And then the other thing to consider is because of that reduced absorption, you might need higher dietary intake to maintain your iron levels for performance. So say it's someone that eats meat. And is a female menstruating athlete needs 18 milligrams of iron. If you're vegetarian, you might need a lot higher intake of iron, and there can be differences in male and female, like absorption. The amounts that male and female athletes need can vary. Some nuances to this iron thing, and I don't expect everyone that I am working with to know all the nuances. So... Job security for you. The supplementation might be necessary, but I caution people against going directly for a big supplement all the time. I want people to try to work to get their iron at appropriate levels without a supplement. And that might feel sometimes impossible if you need 10 milligrams more a day as a vegetarian or something. But when I give people a tip like eat iron fortified cereal, they're like, what? That has 15 milligrams of iron in it. So, you know, doing all these little things could add up to you being able to get your iron levels up without long-term supplementation. And I'm not against long-term supplementation, but I think sometimes we rely on it too much as a Yeah. In a replacement for something that we're maybe like. Not addressing, and what you really need to do.
Zoë Is make your entire personality cast iron skillets.
Kylee Yeah. Okay. And that too. That's the solution. I could ramble on all day about iron. Same, girl. Don't get me started. Round two, B12, Zoe. Um, uh, overrated. You're wrong. No! Ah, damn it, okay. So I get to pick a truth option. Okay. Okay, what's the longest you've gone without eating a vegetable while telling other people to eat vegetables? My gosh.
Zoë Man, I feel like I really love my sweet treats. I'm sure there's been a weekend where all I ate was pancakes and like pastries.
Kylee Wait, what about when you were in college and you ate the tortilla? Did you eat vegetables then?
Zoë Oh, dude, I probably wasn't eating, like, any vegetables. Yeah, I was just doing quesadillas, like all the time.
Kylee Were you in the dorm or in the—
Zoë I was in the dorm my first year and the dorm I lived in, shout out to the University of Arkansas, had incredible food and I was actually able to eat really well. It wasn't until I moved off campus and had to cook for myself that I was like, oh my God, I don't know how to keep this thing alive. You're like, Oh shoot. But then I was, Oh, I can cook quesadillas. Years, I ate so much tortilla and cheese.
Kylee Wow, so that might be the time then.
Zoë Yeah, that would be it. I would also sometimes, this is so gross, I apologize. This is probably going to be not— How did—
Kylee How did you not end up with scurvy or something?
Zoë I don't know. I also did get overtraining trying to train for a half marathon. So eating enough is used. Can confirm. All right. And also this was pre-VO life good cheese. Like I was doing the dia stuff at the time and now I can't be around it because it smells like feet.
Kylee Oh, it smells so bad.
Zoë It smells so bad. It smells like gym sock to me.
Kylee Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about B12. Do you know, have you heard about B-12 and what it does?
Zoë Comes after A in the alphabet?
Kylee It's involved in red blood cell formation and energy production.
Zoë Energy that one. Okay. Yeah
Kylee So it's similar to iron, some of my athletes might have similar symptoms in the sense where they feel super fatigued going uphill or like trying to push in training.
Zoë Your blood is broke.
Kylee Yeah, so the oxygen, you're not able to carry that oxygen nearly as well. It can't make energy, it can't make ATP as well, B12 really is produced only by bacteria. It's not made by plants, it's not made by animals, it is made by specific bacteria in soil, water, and animals. And our bodies are like, we've got to have it.
Zoë We gotta have it. Wow. Okay. Wouldn't have been my go-to solution, but sure.
Kylee Don't ask me. If you're an omnivore, ruminant animals like cows and sheep have bacteria in their rumen that produce B12. B12 is absorbed and stored in animal tissues like their muscle, liver, and kidneys. Humans will eat those animal products and get the B12, fish and shellfish accumulate B12 from bacterial sources in the water. Huh. So if you do eat eggs and milk... Eggs contain B12 stored by hens and milk contains B12 stored from the cow's bacterial production. So why don't plants have B12? Modern agriculture, cleaned, washed, sanitized, and then the soil bacteria that produce B12 are washed off. Yeah, so you like probably shouldn't.
Zoë So you, like, probably shouldn't go around licking dirty vegetables to get this one.
Kylee Probably not, but, and sometimes I think people use the organic card too. They're like, but what about organic vegetables? Nope. Don't have reliable amounts of B12 in them. Like even if you did get some from your plants, it's not going to be enough for what you need on a daily basis.
Zoë Yeah, and like the trade-offs of eating dirty, unwashed food is like not where...
Kylee Not worth it? People bring up the historical context, they'll be like, but people back then, like, they got beat— Okay, people, yeah, I get it.
Zoë Okay, people, yeah, I don't wanna hear it with people back then. We are not jealous of these people. Women couldn't get credit. We couldn't run marathons. These people were not smarter than they were. They didn't.
Kylee They didn't, they didn't wash their produce in the same way. Not smart. They ate insects on food. They ate insect on food!
Zoë They ain't insects on food. I'm not about that life. Go with God if that's you, not me, bro. Like, no aphids on my broccoli.
Kylee When we look at the reality for vegetarians, if we look at vegans, no animal products at all. There's not a reliable natural source at all people will try to argue this, but there's not one and you should really just supplement. Yeah. Great. Don't argue. Just supplement. If we're looking at lacto-ovo-vegetarians, which is mainly what we were talking about in this episode, it is possible to meet needs, but it can be difficult. And you've gotta make sure that you're having consistent intake of eggs and dairy. And there's still a possibility that you become deficient. Is this one of the things you can get from nutritional yeast? You can get it from nutritional yeasts, but it is fortified with— Oh, okay. So someone was like, it's not a— Like, I realized it wasn't natural. Somebody messaged me about this. But like, you can still eat it, right? Otherwise, you're gonna take a supplement, which is also...
Zoë Yeah, also not natural. Not natural. So, nut rocks. Cause it's vegan cheat code. You can just make everything taste a little bit more like cheese. Yeah. I put that shit on everything.
Kylee Do you? I feel like I haven't seen you sprinkle it on much. Really?
Zoë Really? I literally will bring it to the movie theater for popcorn, which I know is probably not chill, but you know I'm bringing my own dime bag. Do you get the large popcorn? I'm just curious. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I get the larger.
Kylee I got one the other day and I ate the whole thing. I was like, wow. Same. This is amazing.
Zoë I'm always, like, when I see it at the beginning of the movie, I'm like, oh my god, that's so much food, there's no way on earth a third of the way done before the movie starts.
Kylee Sean's like, wait, I was trying to get some. Yeah, get your own large. Essentially, bottom line is I would get tested if I was vegetarian. Maybe annually, like once a year, you might not need to do it as much as iron. Or you can just supplement, go ahead and supplement. You will end up peeing out extra B12 if you're supplementing. Whereas iron, it can get trapped in like your intestinal cells. You can store it in the body. It can cause inflammation, higher levels of inflammation to occur in the gut. So, you know, when you're thinking about what you want to do with some of these things, consider positives, negatives as to whether you want to just go ahead, and supplement without testing. Yeah. Round three, Zoe. Protein combining, which I feel like you already got a spoiler alert on this. Is it legit? It is. That's wrong. The protein combining, right, is this idea that you have to have all of your protein sources that make up all nine essential amino acids in one meal. Oh, right. Right.
Zoë But you just need it over the course of your diet.
Kylee Over the course of your day. Yeah.
Zoë More or less a 24-hour window.
Kylee Variety of plant protein sources we said earlier, and you'll be good. Nice. All right. So no, we are not suggesting that people protein combine, even though we got criticized of that one time. We did. Not over it.
Zoë How much of our episodes are just petty responses to one piece of feedback we got in 2023?
Kylee How do I still remember that?
Zoë I literally think it's like the first comment we ever got on Spotify. Thank you. You are seen. You are heard. Thank you for engaging.
Kylee Okay, so zinc. Uh, overblown. That's wrong. Damn it. Okay. So you're gonna have to do a question. Question. Alright. What supplement have you bought and never opened?
Zoë Oh man, so when we did the GI episode where you actually analyzed my GI tract, I did a poop test with you. Not physically with you, but like, with you and we discovered I had an overgrowth of, I can't remember, it's like the really popular, it was one of the things, H. Pylori, which can contribute to iron deficiency. So again, one more piece of the puzzle on my like Lord of the Rings. Quest to throw this deficiency into the, into Mordor. And you had me on a supplement protocol and I nailed the first three months. Like, did it? I had these supplements.
Kylee Which was the most important part, but... Yes.
Zoë Yes. I got to tell you, month four, I didn't open a single of those supplements. You're like, I hate supplements. I understand how hard it is to systematize these things. I do take a, I take an iron supplement, so that's like the thing I've been able to stay consistent and actually do in a way that helps. But yeah, dog, I can't even remember what they were. They're all just still sitting up in my bathroom. That's okay.
Kylee That's okay. I'm glad you're being honest with me though. Here we are. Thank you for your honesty. Am I still alive? You are. I mean, your iron levels are better, so... It's true. Maybe the H. Pylora is not thriving anymore. Yeah. Yeah, so Zink, you were like, I don't even think about Zink. I never think about zink. Not something that I am aware of what it does, and I kind of think...
Zoë I think of it as sunscreen.
Kylee Okay. When I have athletes come to me that are talking about zinc, they're like, oh yeah, I'm taking a zinc supplement for my immune system.
Zoë Oh yeah, this is one of the big boosting where like, again, you can't boost your immune system if you have a deficiency that's going to limit how well your immune systems function, but just deep throating a shit ton of zinc day in day out is not going to make you immune to all disease.
Kylee So the immune system is the big, the number one thing that people will think about with zinc. I will have some male athletes that will be taking like ZMA, which is a combination supplement that has— Like Zima? ZMA. Not Zima, like the alcohol— I'm just seeing a million dollar business plan. That's supposed to help with testosterone production. Zinc does play a role in testosterone production, so my biggest thing is like, you need to eat more food. You need zinc and—
Zoë and a few Mission Impossible reruns. Get that testosterone back up.
Kylee I'm not saying that a zinc is going to support or going to fix a testosterone deficiency.
Zoë Yeah, that's where the mission impossible comes in.
Kylee Anecdotally, a lot of my vegetarian athletes might get more frequent colds and illnesses and things. And I think that's due to not enough protein, potentially not enough zinc as well. Plant-based zinc does have a lot lower bioavailability than animal-based Zinc. And vegetarian athletes might need 50% more dietary zinc than omnivores to meet physiological needs. So when we look at absorption rates, animal sources have a 20 to 40% absorption rate. Whereas plant sources have about 10% to 20% absorption rate. And then athletes tend to lose more zinc because of the sweat losses, cell turnover, and GI tract inflammation and permeability. So similar to iron, all of our minerals were...
Zoë Our minerals. There's risk factors. Yeah, yeah.
Kylee You know, more magnesium, things like that too. When we look at dietary needs for vegetarian athletes, for our male vegetarian athletes where we want to target about 15 to 20 milligrams of dietary zinc per day, female vegetarian athletes 12 to 16 milligrams of dietary Zinc per day. Zinc testing is really tricky because I'll have people saying like, Hey, should I go and get my, my zinc tested? And it's really the lab testing is not verified by the FDA. Oh, that's so interesting. And it is less straightforward. Most zinc, 90%, is intracellular inside cells. Serum, or plasma zinc, only represents about 0.1% of...
Zoë So the sample you'd be looking at would be so small as to not be accurately representative of the fuller picture.
Kylee Zinc moves in and out of cells rapidly in response to stress, meals, and inflammation. So if you go and get a blood test done, even if you were getting like intracellular zinc or something looked at and you were in a stress state, that could cause it to be inaccurate.
Zoë Yeah.
Kylee I would just try to focus on increasing food sources of zinc, and that's where... Eat more, eat better. Yeah. So highest zinc food sources for vegetarians are pumpkin seeds, yogurt, and cheese. Love that. You love your cheese. Shout out cheese. Eggs, hemp seed, wheat germ. Don't just go and willy-nilly be like, oh, I'm going to go take a zinc thing because I want to prevent colds this season.
Zoë Looking at you, airborne. Emergency.
Kylee So people be on like 50 milligrams of zinc and I'm like, and they have no idea. They're like, oh, I've been on this for years. I'm, like, could end up with a copper deficiency because zinc and copper compete for absorption sites in the body. Oh, wow. If you end up with a carbon deficiency, that actually impacts your iron absorption. So there's like this whole cascade of events that can occur.
Zoë The takeaway is be cool. You probably don't need to be worried about the copper deficiency unless you're already doing something kind of weird.
Kylee Yeah. All right, Zoe, round five, Omega threes. Legit. OK, so you're half right. I'm not going to give you. OK.
Zoë So I don't have to debase myself further. I'm not going to give you a penalty. Vegetarianism should be like my home turf and I just feel like I'm getting my nose rubbed in it right now.
Kylee Okay, so omega-3s are concerning for vegetarian athletes because plant sources, the ALA does convert to active forms, EPA and DHA, but it's often at low rates. Yes, you're getting some in, but the amount that you need for inflammation balancing effects and brain health, cardiovascular function, et cetera, it's probably going to be pretty with the plant data sources. Unlike iron or zinc where optimization can work, you simply can't get enough adequate EPA and DHA from plant ALA sources, no matter how much flax seed you end up needing.
Zoë You know I'm eating a lot of flaxseed.
Kylee The performance benefits for endurance athletes are kind of less clear than the, like, health, like, brain. Just like normal human benefits. Yeah, exactly. So EPA and DHA, it's not necessarily going to make you faster if you're in a deficiency, but chronically low levels might subtly impair recovery and increase systemic inflammation. So would you need to worry about it? Maybe not. If you are worried about it, a plant Algal Omega supplement is something you can access and take. Yeah, I would say it's not like a thing that I'm like every vegetarian needs to be snorting
Zoë All day long. So I feel like one of the big concerns of a vegetarian diet for athletes and active people is the idea of just meeting your basic energy needs because some athletes have really big training volume or maybe folks who don't have a ton of time to cook or to plan and to get everything right and make sure they're getting the zinc and the copper and whatnot. So could you expand on that a little bit? Like, why are vegetarian athletes at higher risk?
Kylee So when we look at, I guess the big answer would be fiber. For me. Fiber, volume, like the amount of volume that you need to do. Fiber. Fiber mass.
Zoë Yeah, fiber maxing, not endorsed by YDS.
Kylee I guess fiber and— Again, just be cool with your fiber. Protein too, like in regards to, like yes, you can meet your protein needs as a vegetarian, but the volume of protein that you need to eat is a lot more than animal products. So like, I always like to do the comparison of if you wanna get 30 grams of protein from a piece of chicken, you would do a deca-card size serving. If you wanna 30 grams of protein from beans. And lentils and chickpeas, you've got to eat about two and a half cups, two and half to three cups of beans, lentils, and chick peas. So that's a good visual as to why this can be challenging for people. And I think whenever athletes make the transition, they're not thinking about that. They're like, oh yeah, this is gonna be great. And then they start eating and they're like whoa, I'm feeling full. And they might not even know what their nutrition needs are, right? Because you've
Zoë Because you've just had an entire pint glass full of chickpeas and you're going to be full.
Kylee So if you don't know your nutrition needs and then you're just like eating to fullness, which I have a lot of athletes who are like, I eat intuitively. I'm like, that's great, but like sometimes that can be problematic. So people end up then under fueling unintentionally on the diet.
Zoë I believe I was once in this camp.
Kylee Yeah, and it's like the calorie density there of plant foods is, I mean, it's not great unless you're eating like avocados and nuts and seeds and olive oil and like lots of healthy fats. Like you are gonna get pretty good caloric density from those foods, but from other plant foods, a lot, you know, a lot of your veggies and like even squash people will be like, it's a great source of carbs. I'm like, actually it has half the carbs per volume. It's like mostly water, yeah. Um. So that and fruit, so people will be like focused on their plant food, like their fresh fruit and fresh squash consumption. Love that. And I'm like, well, you know how much of that you have to eat compared to your oatmeal or something. So like understanding the differences between the plant foods and their caloric density I think is also an important component in the whole equation. And being okay with... I might have to eat more simple carbs than I thought or something, you know, like I might have to more white rice versus quinoa because I can't fit all the volume in and it has lower fiber.
Zoë Yeah, and again, being more strategic and understanding, there can be limitations to the intuitive approach, because fiber will make you feel full in different ways, and so again, that may not necessarily be a bug, it could be a feature in some ways, but just being diligent, being aware. So okay, I think another thing, and I know I had sort of talked about my experience earlier, but it does make me curious about, like, eating disorder prevalence, because I just wonder if you see vegan or vegetarian diets functioning the way they once kind of did for me, which was like a cover-up for an eating disorder? Has there been any specific research here that you're aware of?
Kylee Well, I guess in practice, what I've seen is like in esthetic sports or weight-sensitive sports, which is a lot of endurance athletes. Just like a lot sports too. Yeah, a lot a sports in general. Shout out Rugby for I guess doing it right. And then in like the adolescent or like younger population, I have seen it as well. In like the, I would say collegiate athletes, I will see it. And you were, I mean, I guess you went vegetarian when you were in. Or when was that? When was that?
Zoë By senior year of high school.
Kylee So you fit into that category.
Zoë Bless my poor mom for... I was just like...
Kylee I was just like, I'm vegetarian now. So, I mean, I definitely see the propensity here as being like the cover-up sort of thing. And it's really interesting because as a practitioner I've had to learn how to tease this out with some of my athletes and do it in a way that is not supporting the eating disorder and like kind of trying to uncover. Is this the eating disorders? Is this actually like your— A deeply held— Belief. Belief, yeah. Exactly. When we look at specific research on the topic, the research does align with what I've seen in practice. That's so interesting. Now, of course, we have to consider specific reasoning and motivations for athletes that engage in the vegetarian diet, which is why, you know, understanding how to talk to athletes or friends, family, et cetera, is really important. Not just coming in hot with like, hey! Yeah, exactly. Researchers have suggested that vegetarianism may be used as a socially acceptable way to kind of legitimize food avoidance and avoid certain eating situations. So it's like this kind of smoke screen for more severe eating pathology. And then a vegetarian lifestyle may also further simplify the lives of individuals with eating pathology in terms of providing clear do's and don'ts of eating.
Zoë Right. It provides control. It's like, here are your rules. Sometimes people's disorders come with a ready-made set of food rules. Thank you very much. And sometimes you might borrow other people's.
Kylee Exactly. I mean, right? Like with the eating disorder, it's like, where's your form of control? Like, what are you trying to do to control something? Exactly. And like, again, just my inner—
Zoë I mean, and like, again, just my end of one experience is like my eating disorder sort of like waffled back and forth through a series of things. And so again, like I've been on every witch side of this, which is why I want to be able to take a clear eyed look at it because now I view myself as coming from a place of deeply held beliefs and also skepticism about the blind spots we can have about ourselves. Wanting to understand the research and wanting to understand what this looks like at the population level and in the lives of individuals.
Kylee Okay, so two key research points that I want to point out. One was in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in 2012, and they looked at females with an eating disorder history, and found that they were considerably more likely to have ever been vegetarian compared to all controls. So that was 52% versus 12%. That makes sense. And then a 2022 systemic review of 48 studies. We love this found no consensus on a general association
Zoë Oh, that's so interesting.
Kylee But noted that most studies looking at orthorexia specifically showed positive associations, which I could see because I see this a lot. Like I need to clean up or healthify my diet. So this association with plants being like a cleaner food.
Zoë Point like I that was I had a vibe about that.
Kylee And one analysis reported that individuals adhering to vegetarian and vegan diets were approximately twice as likely to report orthorexics and symptoms as omnivores.
Zoë Yeah, so okay, I'm maybe backing up. I think it's just important to sort of go back to the fact that the point of this episode isn't to discourage athletes from being vegetarian. We, again, like YDS, eat a lot of foods. Eat a lot food, eat different foods, eat variety. But in reality, it does seem like there are some real concerns of this specific diet that need to be thought about. And I'm curious if someone is listening and they are interested in becoming vegetarian. What advice would you give them?
Kylee I would say, number one, like, what are your reasons for doing it? So, want to make sure that you're doing it for the right reasons. Yeah. I mean, if you are, this might be hard to discern, though, for someone that is dealing with an eating disorder, has an eating-disorder history, like they might not be able to pick that up themselves.
Zoë If you can't ask yourself that question, I think that is very good information for you.
Kylee Yes. And if you're solely using it for weight loss, like, I don't know.
Zoë Again, with diets don't work, none diets work, this one won't work. If you eat less food, you will temporarily lose weight, yada yada, you know the drill.
Kylee Yeah, so reasoning behind it. And then I also think that you need to monitor, like how do you feel on this diet? How does your energy, how's your recovery? What is your blood work going, looking like? Practically, is it going to work for you? You know, there, if you can't keep up with that volume of food that you needed to eat. Um, and you can't cook, like sometimes it's harder, uh, in the sense of like, you might need to cook more. And if you don't like cooking, it might be harder, I will say, to get in the nutrition you need. There are always trade-offs. Yes. Um, you can consider, like, if you do end up looking at your blood work and you're like, well, some things are off, but you know, maybe, maybe I can still do this if I consider some supplements, um, I would say B12 is kind of that non-negotiable sort of thing, especially for vegans. And then if you're monitoring blood work and it's low, it's okay to take a B12 supplement if you are a vegetarian. With iron, like we said, I'd love for people to monitor it. I'd for people try and work on that intake from food overall. And I do find as a note, I don't think I made this note earlier that like overall volume of food consumption can actually impact iron levels. Yes. If you're not eating enough, you will not be eating enough iron. Yeah. Or just like overall microbes too that impact iron absorption and utilization. And then omega-3s are kind of that optional one we talked about. Case by case basis is going to be zinc. So that's not one that we're in the episode saying every vegetarian should take zinc. Um, so I think it'd be interesting too, to just kind of summarize that for like the different perspectives out there. Yes. Um, do you—
Zoë You know, I think again, like this is, hey, it's me, Zoe, your friendly neighborhood, technically vegetarian, who hates labels. Your friendly neighborhood Pythagorean. I'm absolutely gonna start telling people that. I think it's so funny. That's amazing. I'm a Pythager. They're like, she loves triangles? I do, it a very strong shape. Hey, my plant people, let's stop claiming it's a performance enhancer. That is not what the science supports. It is neutral at best. And that's okay. We don't need that argument to do the heavy lifting. There are other great arguments for this way of eating. And also let's just like maybe not argue about eating anyway.
Kylee Well, and also, not everyone can or should or maybe even wants to do this. Yes. I mean, I do kind of like for people to be able to make their own decisions. Yeah.
Zoë Yes. Yeah. Foisting your life choices on other people, especially when it comes to diet, is not cool. And it must be acknowledged that the work that we talked about today requires time. It requires money, knowledge, privilege, information, access to resources, access to time to cook, access two grocery stores that have this fresh food available. And so if you're someone who's all hot and bothered, but you've managed to be hot and for, like, the 90 minutes it's taken us to get to this point. For the love of God, like your low-hanging fruit is policy change and making it so that people can actually make healthier choices, not yelling at people on the internet. So, okay, what message would you have for the people on other side of the coin, like for the carnivore keto bros out there?
Kylee Why are we fear-mongering that plants are dangerous? That's my question. So funny. Carrots will kill you. And if you're vegetarian, it doesn't mean that you're going to be a nutrition disaster. Yeah. I've done it the dumb way.
Zoë It the dumb way and I've done it the smart way. Yeah. I guess the message I would give to diet culture in general is that we have to stop promoting vegetarianism as a weight loss tool. It is not. And that is a harmful message to associate with a diet that again can have some valid rationale and beliefs tied up in it. And people should not become vegetarian or vegan to cleanse or to seek some level of purity or to get in touch with their early 20th century, problematic German, and orthorexia can hide behind ethical eating. We see this in the science.
Kylee Well, it goes along with that idea of like purity cleansing health. Yeah. I think it kind of like wraps up in that.
Zoë Do you want to be like Hitler? I don't think so. So takeaways for the audience. What do you want people to remember about the vegetarian diet?
Kylee Okay, so vegetarian diets, you can have successful athletic performance on them. They need to be well-planned and you might need to have more attention to detail like doing your blood work, that sort of thing. The moral and environmental arguments are valid and we talked about how we weren't going to cover that in this episode, but it's separate from the performance science. Individual variation matters. So some athletes do thrive, but others actually struggle on the diet. And I have seen this. Yeah. I've had, I've done this. I have seen this with people that have well-planned, well-thought-out vegetarian diets too.
Zoë Not just chaos quesadillas, like, your girls.
Kylee Yeah, I always tell people like, I do want you to think about how you feel on this diet. Yes. And not just say for face value, like, this is what I'm doing. Yeah.
Zoë Yeah, not who you are, how you actually feel.
Kylee Because Joe Rogan told me. And it's not superior or inferior for performance, but it's a viable option with some trade-offs.
Zoë Well, that's an extremely boring and complicated conclusion, but I guess we'll have to leave it at that.