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Welcome
to Consumercide.com |Vegetarians
Possess Greater Strength and Endurance
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from consumercide: As a vegetarian of over 10 years, I must agree that
my strength and endurance with weights increased significantly when I became
vegetarian. It seemed counterintuitive when I first noticed it, thanks
to meat marketing concepts in my head, no doubt. Regrettably, the article
below offers no information as to "why". A body-building friend of mine
told me it was due to the reduction in lactic acid present in the muscle,
though I know nothing of the accuracy of this statement. If anyone has
info. on this, please email me and I'll post it here...
Vegetarians Possess Greater Strength and Endurance
"At Yale, Professor Irving Fisher designed a series of tests to compare the stamina and strength of meat-eaters against that of vegetarians. He selected men from three groups: meat-eating athletes, vegetarian athletes, and vegetarian sedentary subjects. Fisher reported the results of his study in the Yale Medical Journal. His findings do not seem to lend a great deal of credibility to the popular prejudices that hold meat to be a builder of strength. Of the three groups compared, the . . . flesh-eaters showed far less
endurance than the abstainers (vegetarians), even when the latter were
leading a sedentary life [Fisher].
"In 1968, a Danish team of researchers tested a group of men on a variety of diets, using a stationary bicycle to measure their strength and endurance. These men were fed a mixed diet of meat and vegetables for a period of time, and then tested on the bicycle. The average time they could pedal before muscle failure was 114 minutes. These same men at a later date were fed a diet high in meat, milk and eggs for a similar period and then re-tested on the bicycles. On the high meat diet, their pedaling time before muscle failure dropped dramatically--to an average of only 57 minutes. Later, these same men were switched to a strictly vegetarian diet, composed of grains, vegetables and fruits, and then tested on the bicycles. The lack of animal products didn’t seem to hurt their performance--they pedaled an average of 167 minutes. . . . "Doctors in Belgium systematically compared the number of times vegetarians and meat-eaters could squeeze a grip-meter. The vegetarians won handily with an average of 69, whilst the meat-eaters averaged only 38. As in all other studies which have measured muscle recovery time, here, too, the vegetarians bounced back from fatigue far more rapidly than did the meat-eaters. "I know of many other studies in the medical literature which report
similar findings. But I know of not a single one that has arrived at different
results. As a result, I confess, it has gotten rather difficult for me
to listen seriously to the meat industry proudly proclaiming "meat gives
strength" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
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