Abstract

Vegan diets are a type of diet that many endurance athletes adopt for various reasons. One primary concern regarding vegan diets is the lack of nutrients that may alter endurance performance. With the misconceptions about vegan diets, the literature review investigated if a vegan diet is detrimental to the performance of endurance athletes by comparing the performance of vegan and omnivore endurance athletes. Fifteen scholarly articles from PubMed and Google Scholar databases investigated the performance of vegan endurance athletes to endurance omnivore athletes. The keywords to identify relevant research included: vegan, sport, athlete, training, performance, and endurance. The current literature suggests there is no significant difference between vegan and omnivore diets on endurance athletic performance. Future research should compare vegan endurance athletes to omnivore endurance athletes in various endurance performance activities such as the mile run, 5 km, and 10 km run.