Athletic Performance

Champion Vegetarians

Some world-class athletes, such as ironman Dave Scott, track stars Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses, tennis great Martina Navratilova, world champion wrestler Chris Campbell and sixty-eight-year-old marathoner Ruth Heidrich have discovered that consuming a low-fat, plant-based diet gives them a significant edge in performance. In the laboratory, we fed experimental rats a diet similar to the usual American fare — rich in animal-based protein — and compared them with other rats fed a diet low in animal-based protein. Guess what happened where both sets of rats had an opportunity to voluntarily use exercise wheels? Those fed the low-animal protein diet exercised substantially more, with less fatigue, than those fed the type of diet that most of us eat. This was the same effect observed by these world-class athletes.

A century ago, Professor Russell Chittenden, a famous, well established nutrition researcher at Yale University Medical School, investigated whether eating a plant-based diet affected students’ physical capacities. He fed some students, fellow faculty and himself a plant-based diet and measured their physical performance tests. He got the same results as our rats almost a century later — and they were equally spectacular.

– The China Study by Dr. Campbell; 2006; page 24

Chris Campbell (no relation to Dr. Campbell) is a two-time NCAA Division I wrestling champion, three-time U.S. Senior wrestling champion, two-time Olympic wrestler and Cornell Law School graduate. At the age of 37, he became the oldest American ever to win an Olympic medal in wrestling, weighing in at 198 pounds. Chris Campbell is a vegetarian.

– The China Study by Dr. Campbell; 2006; p121