‘Vegging out’ eats at marathoner

By Adam Cohen and Dr. Stephen Prescott | Published: November 18, 2008 Comment on this article

Adam’s training journal

When I gave up eating meat, one of the reasons I did so was to help offset my couch-potatoesque lifestyle. Happily, in recent years, I’ve pretty much left the sofa behind, trading hours glued to the tube for daily runs and occasional trips to the gym.

My particular passion has become the marathon, and at any given time I’m likely to be training for — or have just completed — a 26.2-mile race. Often, though, I notice that my energy levels lag, particularly late in the day.

Obviously, a certain amount of drain is to be expected from logging 40 or 50 miles a week. But I’ve begun wondering whether my vegetarian diet is compatible with long-distance running.

Given my exercise regimen, am I doing myself more harm than good by "vegging out”?

Doctor’s prescription

It should come as no surprise that a vegetarian diet has many health benefits. In a long-term study of the relationship between diet and health, researchers at the Loma Linda University in California found that vegetarians have lower rates of heart disease and nearly every type of cancer, including lung, stomach, pancreas, colon, bladder and breast. Most striking of all, vegetarians in the study lived about three years longer than meat eaters.

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