A Vegan's Grip Strength

It’s been a while since I sequestered myself away for a weekend to read scientific journals. The last time was over ten years ago, while writing my thesis (saying that makes me feel so old). My research began on Friday night, and lasted about ten minutes before I was sidetracked by some interesting anthropological evidence which suggests that Roman Gladiators trained and competed on a vegetarian, if not largely vegan, diet. This turned into a larger detour from my self-mandated task, as I cast my mind back to images of Russell Crowe’s not-so-wispy figure battling Bengal tigers and such in Gladiator and led me into a labyrinth of websites (doesn’t online research always go this way?) that depict some rather arresting images of what can happen when you lift weights and eat too many plants.

While scaring me just a little, this particular line of inquiry served to remind me how much I miss going to the gym. For the cost of a gym membership here in Switzerland, one could rent a small commercial space, buy a second-hand treadmill and some last-season dumbbells, and not have to share any of it with others. Prohibitive costs aside, the gyms here open after 8am, close early on Saturdays and are closed all day Sunday, which means they are open at precisely all the times that I do not wish to workout (which reminds me a bit of the Swiss grocery stores: closed at lunchtimes, closed in the evenings, and closed on Sundays, which is precisely all the times that I would like to grocery shop). All of this to say that I am not expecting to look like a the female counterpart to General Maximus anytime soon, but I do miss my morning workouts with the rest of the other Lululemon-clad sprites in my hometown of Vancouver.

I quit my research at this point, in order to go squeeze the milk from my puréed almond mixture for my cereal in the morning (there is something extremely satisfying about this process, and I’ve developed an addiction to the veritably sublime, frothy, creamy elixir that results from my efforts. Needless to say, the kitchen is beginning to look like a small-scale nut processing plant).

When I finally got down to the task at hand, I managed to round up all of the studies that evaluate how a vegan diet affects physical performance. This took me several hours, and turned up preciously…(drumroll)…one. Now I wasn’t expecting to find much, but I was expecting that there would be a slightly larger body of research than this; at least a couple of studies with an introduction to the effect of: “we took 50 vegans, put them on a treadmill with a carrot dangling in front of them, and increased the speed to 8.5 m/hour. Blood lactate levels, respiratory gas exchange values and RPE were measured at regular intervals to the point of voluntary exhaustion. The protocol was repeated with flesh-eating athletes…”

But no cigar. The one study I found is from 1970 (must have been a good year for the vegetable lobby). A group of researchers compared thigh-muscle width, pulmonary function measures, and cardiorespiratory response to submaximal cycle ergometry exercise in 14 vegan and 86 nonvegetarian women. Ventilation responses during rest or exercise did not differ between the groups, and thigh muscle width was similar. The authors concluded that the lack of animal protein did not impair the physiologic response to submaximal exercise. (Cotes JE, Dabbs JM, Hall AM, et al. Possible effect of a vegan diet upon lung function and the cardiorespiratory response to submaximal exercise in healthy women. J Physiol 1970;209:30P–2P.)

So a vegan diet was found to not impair performance at submaximal exercise performance. Big deal. As my previous post indicates, there are a substantial number of high-level athletes who are training and racing on vegan diets. With this amount of empirical data available, why is this not a focus of study using controlled experiments? Yes, it’s reasonable to assume that the vegetable lobby is a little lacking in funding and influence. But there have been a decent number of studies that have pitted vegetarian athletes against meat-eaters, so why not vegans?

For those interested, here’s a snippit of how vegetarians have measured up against meat-eaters in a sample of studies published in peer-revived scientific journals:

Fisher, Irving, "The Influence of Flesh Eating on Endurance," Yale Medical Journal

At Yale, Professor Irving Fisher designed a series of tests to compare the stamina and strength of meat-eaters against that of vegetarians. He selected men from three groups: meat-eating athletes, vegetarian athletes, and vegetarian sedentary subjects. Of the three groups compared, the flesh-eaters showed far less endurance than the vegetarians, even when the latter were leading a sedentary life.

Overall, the average score of the vegetarians was over double the average score of meat-eaters, even though half of the vegetarians were sedentary people, while all of the meat-eaters tested were athletes.

Ioteyko, J., et al, Enquete scientifique sur les vegetariens de Bruxelles, Henri Lamertin, Brussels

Dr. Ioteyko compared the endurance of vegetarians and meat-eaters from all walks of life in a variety of tests. The vegetarians averaged two to three times more stamina than the meat-eaters. Most interestingly, the vegetarians took only one-fifth the time to recover from exhaustion compared to their meat-eating rivals.

Astrand, Per-Olaf, Nutrition Today 3: no2, 9-11

In 1968, a Danish team of researchers tested a group of men on a variety of diets, using a stationary bicycle to measure their strength and endurance. The men were fed a mixed diet of meat and vegetables for a period of time, and then tested on the bicycle. The average time they could pedal before muscle failure was 114 minutes. These same men at a later date were fed a diet high in meat, milk and eggs for a similar period and then re-tested on the bicycles. On the high meat diet, their pedaling time before muscle failure dropped dramatically—to an average of only 57 minutes. Later, these same men were switched to a strictly vegetarian diet, composed of grains, vegetables and fruits, and then tested on the bicycles—they pedaled an average of 167 minutes.

Schouteden, A., Ann de Soc. Des Sciences Med. et Nat. de Bruxelles

Doctors in Belgium compared the number of times vegetarians and meat-eaters could systematically squeeze a grip-meter. The vegetarians won handily with an average of 69, whist the meat-eaters averaged only 38.

Bravo for the vegetarians. These are some impressive results, but as a three-week old vegan with a repressed desire for validation, I am feeling under-represented. The results of this final study are sending me back to the kitchen to see if I can't squeeze some bonus milk from my almonds.