Vegan diet

Are you vegan, or would you like to try a vegan diet? The idea that vegans don't get enough nutrients is a thing of the past. More and more often, we see top athletes following a vegan diet, precisely for the health benefits and to achieve even better sports performance. Still, many people worry about a protein shortage, but on a vegan diet you can get enough protein. Even if you train! In this blog, we explain how protein works on a vegan diet and answer more questions about a plant-based sports diet.

PLANT-BASED PROTEIN FOR VEGANS

Protein provides energy, but it is mainly important as a building block. It plays a role in building cell structures and producing hormones and enzymes. This building block is especially popular among athletes because it plays a big part in maintaining and repairing muscle mass. As a vegan, you can get more than enough protein. Examples of plant-based protein sources are nuts, seeds, beans and lentils.

Eating a varied diet is important to get all 22 so-called amino acids. By combining different plant-based protein sources that together contain all the amino acids, your body can make a protein with all 22 amino acids itself. Combinations that work well for this are grains and legumes, or grains together with nuts.

ENERGY

Plant-based foods generally contain more fibre. The advantage? You feel full sooner than on an animal-based diet. This is because of the energy density, which means you have to eat more to get the same amount of energy. If you want to lose weight, this is ideal, of course, because you hardly ever feel hungry.

HOW DOES A VEGAN DIET HELP YOU ACHIEVE SPORTS PERFORMANCE?

The basis of sports performance is training and recovery. When you train harder and harder, small tears appear in your muscles, because your body is doing heavier work than normal and isn't used to it. Your body then repairs the damage, but this time it adds a little extra to prevent the same situation next time. This is called supercompensation. If the process keeps repeating, we get stronger.

Protein helps your muscles recover. This macronutrient replenishes the muscles, which creates new muscle tissue. As we mentioned earlier, a vegan diet contains little saturated fat and cholesterol, which supports excellent blood circulation. Herbivores generally recover faster, and that's a plus! If you recover faster, you can train more and so make more progress.

WHAT CAN YOU EAT ON A VEGAN DIET?

A vegan diet is free of all animal products. That means no meat and fish, of course, but butter, milk, cheese and eggs, for example, are also excluded from a plant-based diet. So what can you eat? Because eating animal products has become such a habit in our daily lives, we find it hard to think of what is left. With ingredients such as vegetables, fruit, grains, legumes, nuts, soy, seeds and herbs, you can combine endlessly.

Or make it even easier for yourself, because we have also recently started delivering vegan meals! Like our other meals, these fit perfectly into a sports diet, because they are super healthy and rich in protein. In our sport meals, we use soy as the protein source. Besides protein, soy also contains a lot of fibre and very little saturated fat and cholesterol. Soy is also an important source of potassium, magnesium, manganese and copper. These vegan sport meals fit perfectly into a vegan diet. We have a vegan pasta bolognese, and the vegan chicken Teriyaki is a real recommendation too!