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elieve it or not, when Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich wanted to run for president in 2004, one of the reasons the press said he wouldn’t be a viable candidate was because he is a vegan. That made him less than a real man.

For far too long, there’s been a myth that real men and women eat meat. Part of the problem is wimpiness by association. People think of plant eaters as akin to thinkers and dreamers, not doers and fighters. The meat eaters have Genghis Khan, the plant eaters have Confucius. Ernest Hemingway gobbled up entire African game reserves, while Charlotte Brontë nibbled on salad. Ted Nugent will hunt anything that moves, while Moby wouldn’t even attack a stuffed moose head.

This train of thought goes all the way back to antiquity. In Colin Spencer’s
The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism
, we learn that antiquity’s greatest warriors were given the best cuts of meat, while its kings, like the famous Odysseus, were judged by the size of their livestock herds and their prowess in the hunt. Even the simple act of eating flesh was considered heroic. The great wrestler Milo of Croton is said to have consumed an entire bull while reclining in front of the altar of Zeus.

Meanwhile, the great thinker Pythagoras was a plant eater: He came up with the vital mathematical theorem about right-angled triangles that continues to be used by eggheads (and non-eggheads) everywhere. (In case any meat eaters out there have forgotten: In a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Or, A
₂
+ B
₂
= C
₂
.)

Most of the famous plant eaters throughout history have in fact
been thinkers rather than conquerors: Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mahatma Gandhi, to name three. However, in Eastern cultures, there were some well-known tough-as-nails plant eaters, too, notably the Shaolin monks in the Henan province of China, who are among history’s most celebrated martial artists. Similarly, many in Japan’s samurai fighting class were vegetarians.

Today the plant-eating world is changing. More modern role models include Bill Ford (Ford Motor Company’s executive chairman), Russell Simmons (hip-hop impresario), Biz Stone (Twitter Inc. co-founder), Mort Zuckerman (media mogul), Steve Wynn (Mr. Las Vegas), John Mackey (Mr. Whole Foods), and many more.

What do all of these highly successful business visionaries who are true early adopters know about a plant-strong lifestyle that 95 percent of Americans don’t? They know the power of whole plants to control their health destinies. They don’t want to play Russian roulette by eating meat, dairy, and refined garbage.

Many of these men and women have cited Dr. T. Colin Campbell and his book
The China Study
as a factor in convincing them to switch diets. Among them is former Kansas City Chiefs tight end, and current Atlanta Falcon, Tony Gonzalez, who read it in 2007. (His teammates nicknamed him “China Study.”) It took some experimentation and some help from Jon Hinds, a plant-eating strength coach for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, but Gonzalez eventually settled on a plant-strong but not plant-perfect diet. By the end of the 2007 season, Gonzalez had broken the record for both touchdown receptions by a tight end and career receptions by a tight end.

If you want to read about more real men and women who decided to take their athletic performance to the next level with PEPFs (performing-enhancing plant foods), check out the next chapter.

W
hen it comes to performance, athletes can be demigods. But when it comes to food, athletes can be scaredy-cats. They’re often afraid of changing their diets because they think that change might hurt their performance. So they get stuck in the old status quo: Meat is good. Plants are bad.

Phooey! The truth is plants are the dope. In fact, plants are nature’s legal performance-enhancing drug. I made the leap from a meat-weak diet to a plant-strong one in 1987, when I decided to become a professional triathlete. Plants gave me an abundance of phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, protein, and water to support my body in its recovery phase after training and racing. Plants gave me clean carbohydrates that rapidly replaced depleted glycogen stores in my muscles and liver and allowed me to train harder, adapt, and improve. Plants gave me high doses of alkaline and anti-inflammatory substances that protected me from the stresses of four-to eight-hour training days. Plants gave me a clear head to focus like a laser beam. Plants gave me arteries and vessels that were youthful and elastic, improving blood flow to working muscles for killer oxygen uptake and enhanced VO2 max. Plants gave me a strengthened immune system that kept me healthy and free from illness. And plants gave me a lean and muscular body that was ideal for slicing through the water, pedaling efficiently in a time trial, and running like the wind.

This is not just me talking. According to study after study, the optimal athletic diet is very close to being completely plant based. If meat is included, it is present as an optional source of fat and protein, even for athletes who need to bulk up (and we all know there are better places to get your fat and your protein).

To understand why even the most serious exercisers don’t need
meat, you have to understand what an active body actually does need. All athletes, from triathletes like me to mixed-martial-arts fighters, require the same five nutrients to ensure they have plenty of energy: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals.

Take a gander at that list: meat ain’t on it.

Carbs are the most important food that an athlete can eat because they are the body’s main source of fuel. Unlike fats and proteins, they are easy to digest and even easier to use when you need energy. Your body breaks down their starches and stores them in your muscles as glycogen, which offers hours of power for any kind of physical activity.

During the first hour of exercise, carbs provide half of the energy your body consumes. The harder you push it, the more carbs you use. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) recommends that athletes base 70 percent of their diets on this type of plant fuel, focusing especially on the so-called complex carbs, such as whole grains, starchy vegetables, and cereals.

Fat is your backup source of energy. Along with glycogen, your body metabolizes fatty acids for fuel, especially after the first hour of exercise. If you don’t have enough, your engine will start to sputter. This is where most people turn to meat without thinking about what they are really putting into their body.

But the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, states that endurance athletes on high-carb, low-fat diets can actually perform longer than those on high-fat, low-carb diets. They get their fat from healthful whole-food sources like avocados, olives, oats, nuts, and green leafy vegetables (yes, green leafy vegetables contain roughly 9 to 11 percent healthy fat!).

Protein is another nutrient that people often confuse with meat. While many athletes (I’m looking at you, weightlifters) credit it as the secret to their strength, the truth is that most Americans eat too much of the stuff, which can lead to dehydration as well as tricking your body into not using the more efficient fuels available to it. Besides, you can’t store protein as protein. If you eat too much, it turns into fat. All those protein shakes and supplements that people use to bulk up are just making them pack on unnecessary pounds.

The amount of protein athletes need is actually quite small, perhaps 10 to 12 percent of their total calories, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. No one recommends that any athletes, even
strength-training ones, eat more than 2 grams of protein per day for every kilo (2.2 lbs) of body weight. And remember, you can get all you need from plants like leafy greens, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds. (The Nevada state government recommends that even boxers get their protein from vegetable sources rather than meat.)

With their energy needs covered, a lot of athletes forget about fruits and veggies. Bad idea, says the Australian government, citing a 2005 study of athletes that found that not getting enough of the vitamins and minerals in fruits and veggies can lead to fatigue, muscle damage, and impaired immune function.

Heavy exercise makes you lose potassium and iron. You can re-up potassium on the go by munching bananas and oranges. Iron, which helps transport the oxygen in the blood to your muscles, isn’t lost as quickly, so don’t worry about trying to gulp down a can of spinach during a marathon. But do make sure to eat your leafy greens before and after exercise to replenish it. You can also boost your iron absorption by combining iron sources with vitamin C, as we talked about in
chapter 5
.

Exercise also stresses your immune system, putting you at risk of infection and disease. The vitamins A, C, and E, as well as the mineral magnesium found in fruits and vegetables, help guard against day-to-day illnesses that will run you down or even keep you out of the game. I’m not just talking about colds, either. Exercise causes the body to produce free radicals, those nasty particles that cause cancer, cell damage, and oxidative stress on the muscles. The best way to fight them is through antioxidants, and the best way to get those is through whole plants.

Study after study after study shows that the best source of antioxidants such as vitamins A, C, and E and selenium is whole, plant-strong foods and not supplementation. In fact, these studies suggest supplements of these nutrients in many cases cause more harm than good. Remember, the body doesn’t know what to do with an isolated dose of these vitamins, especially when they don’t arrive in a package it recognizes, such as an orange, apple, kale leaf, broccoli stalk, or sweet potato.

The list of athletes who have ditched the meat and switched to a primarily plant-strong diet to run their engines is growing like a garden of kale! Salim Stoudamire of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team doesn’t believe in eating anything “that had a mother” and claims a steady diet of only plants has caused his endurance to go through the
roof. Mixed-martial-arts fighter Mac Danzig won the 2008 season of Spike TV’s
The Ultimate Fighter
eating brown rice, beans, soy, nuts, and vegetables—a diet pretty similar to that of the Shaolin monks. In addition to Danzig, MMA fighters Jake Shields, Herschel Walker, and James Wilkes have found the force in plants. The Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, are serving aces and winning tournaments with a daily protocol of plants, while former Heisman Trophy winner running back Ricky Williams and the newest NFL running back sensation, the Houston Texans’ Arian Foster, are dashing through football defenses with plants. And Lizzie Armistead, one of Great Britain’s best female cyclists and winner of a silver medal at the London Olympic Games in the relentless 87-mile road cycling race, is generating mega wattage by hailing to the kale.

Other famous athletes who kept their motors running with only biofuels are Basketball Hall of Famer Robert Parrish, tennis greats Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King, the original strong man Bill Pearl, track and field Olympian Carl Lewis, bodybuilder Billy Simmonds, champion boxer and reformed ear-muncher Mike Tyson, winningest golfer of all time Gary Player, and the co–world record holder for number of Ironman triathlons won, Dave Scott, who also goes by “The Man.” And then there’s my friend John Joseph, whose form of athleticism takes place as the lead singer of the punk rock group the Cro-Mags, which means he gives performance after performance leaping around like a hyperactive banshee onstage, and diving off it into the crowd, for hours at a time—at the age of fifty!

How about the plant-strong supermarathon runners? Rich Roll, Brendan Brazier, and Scott Jurek (dubbed North American Male Ultrarunner of the Year from 2003 to 2005 and in 2007, respectively, by
UltraRunning
magazine) are crazy about plants.

Not long ago I was talking to Brazier, who recently wrote
Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life
, about the connection between plants and improved athletic performance. Here’s what he told me: “Eating plants instead of meat gives you the edge as an athlete. For one, think about digestibility—you’re not expending as much energy on food digestion. Then there’s nutrition: You’re getting more when you eat plants. And, there’s less inflammation in a plant diet than an animal protein one, so you improve muscle functionality.”

And when I asked Jurek, seven-time winner of the Western States 100-mile running race and recent author of
Eat and Run
, how making the switch to plants affected his performance, he replied: “I noticed changes in my body’s ability to bounce back after hard workouts. Following a plant-based diet got me eating more whole foods, and because of that, my muscles don’t get as sore and tired.”

Although many of Jurek’s and Brazier’s competitors eat meat, there is another very special group of distance runners who don’t. The Tarahumara Indians of the Western Sierra Madre in Mexico have been called “the finest natural distance runners in the world,” and the most highly conditioned people “since the days of the ancient Spartans.” Running is the primary means of transportation in their rugged mountain surroundings, and also a form of diversion. The traditional game of long-distance “kickball” sees individuals cover around 200 mountainous miles in two to three days. And they do it all on a diet of corn, beans, squash, and berries.

Two years ago, Christopher McDougall wrote the best-selling book
Born to Run
, which examined the Tarahumara culture, their plant-strong diet, and why they are the best endurance runners on the planet. Everything about these running Indians sounds far-fetched and fantastical, but I was lucky enough to see their world with my own eyes. In 2005, I went on a mountain-biking trip to the bottom of Copper Canyon (larger and deeper than the Grand Canyon) to an old silver mining town called Batopilas. On the twenty-five-mile ride down harrowing dirt roads (which required more than 6,000 feet of climbing on the way back!) I witnessed the Tarahumara living in caves on the side of the mountains, running down to the river to wash clothes or get water, and eating their plant-strong diets. It was a simple and magical world where time seemed to stand still and fantasy became a reality.