by jpowell » Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:45 pm
One of my current nutritional concerns as a vegan athlete is getting adequate Lysine for muscle repair. I understand many address this by consuming lots of protein from soy, which is not the approach I want to take. Also, for many endurance athletes this may be less primary an issue - I play a sport where the ideal conditioning is more in terms of fast twitch muscle fibre and short time span high intensity performance.
Also, I am trying now to get a high percentage of raw foods, without necessarily ever aiming to be 100% raw or making it my primary concern, but I think at least 50-80% raw would be good for me. Hence I'm very interested in suggestions which are viable as raw foods, but if cooked foods offer an easier, better or more attractive solution for my needs I will definitely eat them!
I'm not sure what my exact lysine requirement is, but as a guide, I worked out that 100-150g in total of protein/aminos daily helped for my target activity level and muscle conditioning, as a vegetarian previously consuming lots of skim milk and eggs. Getting this total amount of protein as a vegan seems easy enough, but the first sources I looked at, grains and nuts, are apparently both low in lysine, and I want to minimize soy.
So far on my list of lysine sources are:
- Brewers yeast seems an OK source but there's a (low) limit to how much I can eat of it
- Fenugreek which I want for other reasons too, is apparently a great source, but again maybe not huge quantities
- Lentils and chickpeas definitely but I have to cook them, plus they're high in sulfur, so I'm hoping to find additional sources rather than relying on these 100%
Any other suggestions I can look into would be extremely helpful. Thanks in advance.