Having sport with Vegans.

Official Fitness Nerd Hall Monitor MichM asked me to read Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life by Brendan Brazier, so I did, and it's a fine book. If you're a vegan or part of that ever-increasing crowd who seem to be simultaneously allergic to meat, gluten, soy, and dairy, it's a very useful tool indeed.

If I had to say anything bad about it, I'd probably criticize the surrealistically fancy grocery list required to eat the Thrive way, which includes hemp protein, rooibos, popped amaranth, sprouted chickpeas, and dulse. Were "eye of newt" not meat-based, I'm sure it would be in there too.

Also, while I agree with much of the philosophy, Brazier seems to spend a lot of the book beating the reader over the head with vegan dogma that's pretty tough to substantiate. Sure, there's a bibliography in the back, but if you're going to spend the first half of a book throwing down controversial science like that, you need to include some footnotes.

For example, he spends 10 pages on the importance of achieving a good pH balance. He discusses acidic and alkaline foods and points out that meat and refined flour are acidic and that's bad. It's all very interesting, but he sights no sources so, you know, am I just supposed to take his word for it?

Conversely, here's a great blog post from Fitness Spotlight, in which runner Scott Kustes points out that trying to balance pH via diet is pointless because there's no science out there proving you can do it. He then mentions the fact that he couldn't find anything on Pubmed proving otherwise and quotes Dr. Gabe Mirkin, who points out the acid in your stomach overwhelms the acidity in your food anyway, so it's a moot point.

The weird thing is, at the end of Brazier's commentary on pH, he basically says the same thing with, "I believe that trying to hit a specific dietary ratio is unnecessary. This is partly because... several factors other than food affect the body's pH."

So why did you just spend 10 pages spelling it all out?

Again, this is a great book for what it is, but I don't like it when someone tries to claim any extreme diet is the apex of nutrition. Brazier spends much of the book explaining the ethical benefits of eating vegan. I have no issues with this. I think vegan eating is noble indeed, although I must admit that I don't think bees care too much about us harvesting their honey and I've often wondered, should we as a race suddenly stop using bovine products, what would we do with all those cows? (Full disclosure: I haven't eaten red meat in 16 years.) Just as it's incredibly easy to pick holes in the complete superiority of the paleo diet or the low-carb diet, it's pretty easy to see where vegan eating isn't the end-all-be-all of sports nutrition. Does it work for some people? Absolutely! But not everyone.

And with that, I'm going to hit "Publish Post," and go hide under my bed in preparation for the shit storm of angry sports vegans who will read this and immediately make it their life's work to rip me a new a-hole.