Celebration of Scholars
Vegan Diets and Endurance Athlete Performance
Name:
Emma Self
Major: Athletic Training
Hometown: Buffalo Grove, IL
Faculty Sponsor: Ashley Greenwood
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Course project
Abstract
Vegan diets are a type of diet that many endurance athletes adopt for a variety of reasons. One major concern regarding vegan diets is the lack of nutrients that may alter endurance performance. A literature review was conducted to investigate whether a vegan diet should be recommended for athletes by comparing the performance of vegan athletes and omnivore athletes. Keywords such as vegan, sport, athlete, training, performance, and endurance were used to identify relevant literature. As a result, fifteen scholarly articles from PubMed and Google Scholar databases were utilized to compare the performance of vegan endurance athletes to that of endurance omnivore athletes.Results from the overall analysis indicate that vegan and omnivore diets did not have a significant enough effect on the performance of endurance athletes. It is also unclear whether vegan diets should be recommended for endurance athletes based on their performance outcome when compared to an omnivore diet. Further research should be conducted to compare the performance of vegan endurance runners to omnivore endurance runners in order to help researchers conclude whether a vegan diet is as effective in athletic performance.
Submit date: Feb. 26, 2021, 3:23 p.m.