The First Studies on Vegetarian Athletes

"The First Studies on Vegetarian Athletes" In 1896, the aptly named
James Parsley evidently led a successful vegetarian
cycling club to victory, their competitors evidently having
to "eat crow with their beef." Evidently some Belgian
put it to the test in 1904, with those eating more plant-based
supposedly lifting some weight like 80 percent more times, but I couldn't find the
primary source in English. This I could find though: a famous
series of experiments at Yale, published more than a century ago, on the
influence of flesh-eating on endurance. Forty-nine people were compared:
regular athletes (mostly Yale students), vegetarian athletes, and then
just sedentary vegetarians. "The experiment furnished a severe test
of the claims of those flesh-abstainers." Much to the researchers' surprise,
the results seemed to vindicate the vegetarians, suggesting that
not eating meat leads to far greater endurance compared to those accustomed
to the ordinary American diet.

Check it out: the first endurance test was
how many minutes straight you could hold out your arms horizontally:
flesh-eaters versus flesh abstainers. The regular Yale athletes were
able to keep their hands out for about 10 minutes on average. It's harder than it sounds;
give it a try… OK, but those eating vegetarian
did like five times better. The meat-eater maximum was only
half that of the vegetarian average. Only two meat eaters
even hit 15 minutes, whereas more than two-thirds
of the meat-avoiders did. None of the regular diet
folks hit a half hour, whereas nearly half of
the healthier eaters did, including nine that exceeded an
hour, four that exceeded two hours, and one guy going for
more than three hours. How many deep knee
bends can you do? One athlete could do more
than 1,000—averaging 383— but they got creamed even
by the sedentary plant-eaters.

That's the crazy thing; even
the sedentary abstainers surpassed the exercising flesh-eaters. The sedentary abstainers were, in most cases, physicians
who sat on their butts all day. I want a doctor that that can do
a thousand deep knee bends! And then in terms of recovery, all those
deep knee bends left everyone sore, but more so among those eating meat. Among the vegetarians, of two that
did like 2,000 knee bends, one went straight off to the track to run and
another went on to their nursing duties. On the other hand, among the
meat-eaters one guy reached 254, went down once more and couldn't
get back up, had to be carried away, and was incapacitated for days; another
impaired for weeks after fainting.

It may be inferred without reasonable
doubt, concluded the once skeptical Yale researcher, that the meat-eating
group of athletes was very far inferior in endurance to the vegetarians,
even the sedentary ones. What could account for
this remarkable difference? Some claimed that flesh foods contained
some kind of "fatigue poisons," but one German researcher who detailed
his own experiments with athletes offered a more prosaic answer.
In his book on what looks like physiological studies of
uber-driving vegetarians— I told you I only know English— he conjectured that the apparent
vegetarian superiority was just due to their tremendous determination
to prove their point and spread their propaganda,
so they just make a greater effort in any contest than do
their meat-eating rivals.

The Yale researchers were worried
about this, and so special pains were taken to stimulate the flesh-eaters
to the utmost, appealing to their college pride. Don't let those lousy
vegetarians beat the "Yale spirit." The experiments made it
into The New York Times. Yale's flesh-eating athletes—
sounds like a zombie movie— beaten in severe endurance tests.
Yale professor believes that he has shown definitely the inferiority
in strength and endurance tests of meat eaters compared to
those who do not eat meat.

Some of Yale's most successful
athletes took part in the strength tests, and Professor Fisher declares they
were obliged to admit their inferiority. How has the truth of this result
been so long obscured? One reason, Professor Fisher
suggested, is that vegetarians are their own worst enemy.
In their fanaticism, they jump from the premise that meat eating
is wrong—often based on scripture or some kind of dogma—and jump
from that to meat-eating is unhealthy. That's not how science works
and such logical leaps get them dismissed as zealots and prevent
any genuine scientific investigation. Lots of science, even back then,
was pointing a distinct trend towards more plant-based eating,
and yet the word vegetarian— even 110 years ago—had
such a bad, preachy rap that many were loath to concede
the science in its favor. The proper scientific attitude is to study
the question of meat-eating in precisely the same manner as one would
study the question of anything else.

Video Transcript – As found on YouTube

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