by jpowell » Sat Jun 30, 2012 9:06 am
[quote="Fallen_Horse"]Anyway, I think this would be an ideal diet for health and athletic performance
What Baldy said. Also, I think different athletes may have VERY different nutritional needs, depending on their sport amongst other things.
For many athletes, it would be quite difficult to get enough energy intake on the diet due to high fibre content, unless they consume mostly nuts and sweet fruits, and I am not convinced either are an "ideal" energy source. In fact, there are health issues with very high consumption of either (fructose, ratio of omega6 to omega3 polyunsaturated fats). Allowance of some part grains (e.g. white rice) may help greatly in this regard.
Is seaweed included as a vegetable? To me, it should be, but to some this may not be obvious. Without it, there may be a struggle to get enough magnesium for optimal performance, and enough iodine for optimal health.
Zinc could be an issue for some athletes on this diet (I presume supplements are excluded if you follow it strictly). Soaking pumpkin and sunflower seeds in muesli might help to a degree, so it's not necessarily a massive issue.
People will come up with complaints about calcium, but I believe if you eat the right greens and enough of them, you could do alright.
If all supplements are strictly excluded, people will come up with complaints about B12, which I think are nutritionally valid. A B12 supplement or fortified nutritional yeast can solve this, and is probably advisable for all vegans and many non-vegans.
Inclusion of malt extract/malt syrup from a fermentation process of grains would vastly improve this diet for most athletes. It is a relatively natural product that effectively offers a fairly slow release sugar, metabolizing to all glucose (usable for energy) instead of, like table sugar and most fruit, about half glucose, half fructose (where most of the fructose has to be converted to fat first, damaging your liver in the process and providing less ideal energy release for athletic performance). I would argue that for some athletes, inclusion even of processed glucose from grains and/or maltodextrin would be of further benefit, but I can see the health risk is not done carefully and how it doesn't key in with your overall concept.
This diet can be low in lysine, IF you are not careful with it, which is a factor even for health, and many athletes need quite a bit more lysine than the general population, even when their overall protein needs aren't much higher. Effectively, unless you want a prohibitively expensive diet, it implies consuming lots of legumes. That may work well for some, be harder for others. From this perspective, I highly recommend you include tempeh. Other high lysine wholefoods are parsley (only per calorie, not per dollar or per gram), spirulina (expensive), pistachio nuts (expensive), peanuts (technically they are a legume), oats (only per dollar or compared to other grains, they are not really high), amaranth and quinoa seeds (only compared to other grains, and not per dollar, I see them as more trendy than useful). Perhaps you could also include wheat germ, it's quite affordable and, unlike the whole wheat grain, offers a much higher protein content per calorie, good lysine content per gram of protein (6%) and relatively good fatty acid profile (12% of polyunsaturates are omega3).
Is oil included in your diet? Technically, this is a processed food, and actually from a health perspective, where standard heat or chemically extracted oils or a lot of high heat oil cooking are involved, this might not be such a technicality. You can probably get some quite rapid initial weight loss but not good health or performance by just ditching all oils, however I think for best nutritional quality, your best bet is to substitute seeds and plenty of a select range of cold pressed oils, preferably raw (e.g. salad dressings) or very lightly cooked, watching the omega6:omega3 ratio (you want to bring it down to about 3 or 4 to 1, which is very different to a "standard" diet or "standard" vegan diet.
Other than those points, it's very close to what I'm trying to eat, and working well for me.
