carnivore diet vs. omnivore diet vs. vegetarian diet.....

[dhinojosa]

Dr. Per-Olaf Astrand conducted an informal study of diet and endurance using nine highly trained athletes, changing their diet every three days. At the end of every diet change, each athlete would pedal a bicycle until exhaustion. Those with a high protein and high fat meat (carnivore) diet averaged 57 minutes. Those that consumed a mixed (omnivore) diet, lower in meat, fat and protein averaged 1 hour and 54 minutes: twice the endurance of the meat and fat eaters. The vegetarian, high carbohydrate diet athletes lasted 2 hours and 47 minutes, triple the endurance of the high-protein group. (Source: Astrand, Per-Olaf, Nutrition Today 3:no2, 9-11, 1968) <15>

Wow, thats some crazy shit!

[RebelOne]

1. Glad I'm a vegetarian.

I guess that's why I can walk up a hill when I walk my dog every night without collapsing. And I am a smoker.

[MissMillie]

2. I wonder what the results are

when the length of time on each diet is increased....

:shrug:

[dhinojosa]

5. NOW THAT! Is one cool map

Very nice...

[MissMillie]

8. I'm glad you like it

I just started using it today.

[hyphenate]

3. I can see where that would be significant

but because of the small sampling (9 people) it's not going to seem relevant at all, unfortunately. If they were to have a large (over 1000) group and tried it there as well, they might yield the same results and because of the larger group, its significance will be far more noteworthy to the scientific community.

[flvegan]

4. No surprise there.

Protein is shitty fuel for aerobic activity.

I'll say this though, to show I'm not completely biased...this study had a person change diet every 3 days. Not much to be said about that.

[mike_c]

6. with all due respect...

...it's not possible to infer anything from those results without knowing a bit more about the study design. I won't bore you with all the ways this could have been so poorly designed as to completely undermine the results, but be assured there are far more ways to have screwed this up than there are to have gotten it right.

Can you post a link to the original paper? That would make it far easier to assess the results.

[dhinojosa]

9. Oh hey, sorry about that

I usually make it a point to post where I found something...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan#Vegetarian_vs_omnivore_diet:_cycling_stamina

[flvegan]

10. Great page!

Showing my obvious bias here.

[mike_c]

11. unfortunately, that's not a link to Astrand's paper....

It doesn't provide any information on the study design or methods. You've got my curiosity aroused-- I'll see if I can find it.

[dhinojosa]

12. Cool......it is interesting...

are you an athlete?

[mike_c]

14. no, a biologist...

...with a general interest in experimental design.

[mike_c]

13. OK, I had to register at LW&W's Nutrition Today online...

...but an archive search failed to turn up any papers by PO Astrand. A Google scholar search turned up lots of his other papers, but none in Nutrition Today, and none of the archive services I have local access to go back that far. I presume this means that LW&W has simply not made PDF versions of those old papers available, even by subscription. I'm still interested-- if you can find a copy of that paper I'd love to read it. I could put a reference librarian on it, but of course it would be several days at least before they found a paper copy somewhere that could be scanned, so that's no go, at least in terms of this thread.

I've seen MANY studies like this in which a simple mistake makes the whole study invalid. In the present case, the small sample size REALLY makes me wonder-- getting significant results with a single trial of so few replicates is dubious. And if the participants were all put through their diet changes together, the results could be just as likely the result of habituation to the testing routine, or some effect of moving people through that specific sequence of diet changes-- and those are only a few of the potential problems.

[Deja Q]

7. Vegetarian + exercise...

in our society that runs on greed and sedentary work (unless you're a CEO, army drone, or professional photographer), there;s nowhere near enough time to exercise, work, raise a family... not when the family needs 3+ jobs. (that's why the talibornagains are family values: Pro-baby (easier to exploit and indoctrine) and it also negates the need to pay a single person a living wage. They are social engineering in their ungodly image.

[jilln]

15. I just read of a similar study!!!

In Carol J Adams book, "The Sexual Politics of Meat," with the same results. I wish I had it here at work to quote.

[Nikia]

16. It doesn't give enough information about the study

For example, if the nine athletes all went through their diet changes in that cycle and were endurance but not cycling endurance athletes, they might naturually get better at cycling over a period of nine days. They might also get more competitive with themselves and the other athletes. It does not say what the athletes' normal diet was either. For example, an athlete who is used to a vegetarian diet might feel ill on a carnivore diet and an athlete who is used to a more carnivore diet might feel ill on a vegetarian diet. The normally vegetarian athletes might be better at cycling endurance to begin with coincidently or not so coincidently. It does not say if the diets were equivalent in calories either. It does not give any ranges or deviations either.