A great excpert from one of the top experts!

This is an excerpt from “The No Meat Athlete” recent interview with Vegan tri-athlete Brendan Brazier. You can read the rest of the interview here.

(NMA = No Meat athlete, BB = Brendan Brazier)

NMA: Yeah, I’ve noticed that too; I’ve needed a lot less sleep since I became vegetarian six months ago. But with the vegan thing, since it sounds like it started out entirely for performance, would you say there are no circumstances at all where having animal products, even meat, would be beneficial to an endurance athlete?

BB: I really don’t think there are, you know, people can get everything they need from plant sources. And really, you know, the animal gets its nutrition from plants. The plant passes on its nutrition to the animal, and it gets passed on again, but everything comes from the soil originally. The plant is really just the medium for the nutrition that’s in the soil. And a lot of these factory-farm cows now have next to no nutrition in them, because they eat food that’s grown on over-farmed fields because the demand for it is just so high, there’s nothing in it anymore. If you just eat the high-quality plant that’s grown in good soil, you’re going to get all you need. And also too, when I did become vegan, I started being asked by environmental groups and some animal rights groups if I would give talks at their conferences, and I have. So I’ve learned a lot of the other benefits of being vegan too; of course there’s a huge environmental benefit too. Simply making better food choices, eating food that requires less energy to produce, is going to have the biggest impact on reducing anyone’s carbon footprint, more so than driving or anything else they do.