The Paleo Diet for Athletes (13 page)

BCAA and essential amino acids are most abundant in animal products. If you’re hesitant to eat red meat from feedlot-raised animals, we don’t blame you. The common beef products you buy in supermarkets are a poor source of food. While certainly rich in BCAA, meats from feedlot-raised animals are also packed with omega-6 polyunsaturated fats and other questionable chemical additives and are best avoided.

So what should you eat to provide BCAA and the essential amino acids for your rebuilding muscles? The best possible source would be meat from game animals such as deer, elk, and buffalo. Of course, chances are that you don’t have the time to go hunting, given your workout and career choices. (For our ancestors, hunting was exercise and career all rolled into one activity.) No, it’s unlikely that you will find game meat outside your back door, and it can’t be sold in supermarkets, either. But there are other readily available choices that are almost as good.

TABLE 4.8

Suggested Daily Protein Intake per Pound of Body Weight

Ocean- or stream-caught fish and shellfish are among the best protein sources; they are, after all, wild game. It’s best, however, to avoid farm-raised fish, which is essentially the same as feedlot-raised cattle. Another good choice is turkey breast. It comes as close to providing the lean protein and fat makeup of game animals as any domestic meat available. It’s still a good idea to seek out meat from turkeys that were allowed to range freely in search of food. The same goes for any meat you may choose. Free-ranging animals have not only exercised but have also more likely eaten foods that are optimal for their health. This means that omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fats are in better balance. You’ll find that such meats are more expensive than the more common meat of penned-up animals. It’s just like so much in life: Quality costs more. You get what you pay for.

In Stage V, continue to take in 0.6 gram to 1 gram (2.4 to 4 calories) of protein per pound of body weight relative to your training load. The longer or more intense your exercise was, the more protein you should take in, as shown in
Table 4.8
.

Maintain a healthy pH.
In our discussion of Stage III, we told you about the acid- and base-enhancing properties of foods, illustrated by
Table 4.4
. The need to maintain a healthy pH continues in this stage in order to reduce the risk of losing nitrogen and calcium. This is especially critical for older athletes whose bodies tend toward acidity more so than young athletes’. As explained earlier, nitrogen is an essential component of muscle, and calcium is crucial for bone health. Fortunately, the very foods that are the most nutrient-dense are also the ones—the only ones—that reduce blood acidity: fruits and vegetables. Any fruit will do now, so eat whichever appeal to you. As for vegetables, it’s best to choose those of vibrant colors—red, yellow, green, and orange—while avoiding white ones. Be aware that beans, although often categorized as vegetables, are net acid-enhancing and best avoided. This includes peanuts, which are legumes.

Prevent or reduce inflammation.
All athletes are susceptible to inflammation of muscles and tendons—it comes with the territory. You may have a tendon that is a persistent problem for you following high-effort workouts and sometimes flares up, causing pain or discomfort. Muscle tissue damaged during an intense workout may also result in inflammation. If allowed to go unchecked, nagging inflammation can become a full-blown injury, causing you to miss training and lose fitness. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fat supplements have been shown to reduce inflammation by lowering the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids, which should be approximately two parts omega-6 to one part omega-3 or less. Due to the high intake of omega-6 from snacks and other packaged foods that are abundant in our society, the average American diet has a 10:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. In fact, avoiding omega-6 is quite a challenge in Western society. By consuming foods that are rich in omega-3—cold-water fish, leafy vegetables, macadamia nuts and walnuts, eggs enriched with omega-3, and liver—you can lower this ratio and reduce your inflammation risk. We recommend that to improve the odds of accomplishing this, you take an omega-3 supplement, such as fish oil or flaxseed oil.

Optimize body weight.
For most endurance sports, maintaining a low body mass translates into better performances (see
Chapter 6
for more details on this). Yet, even with a lot of daily exercise to burn calories,
avoiding weight gain can be a struggle for many endurance athletes. We think you will find that by eating a Stage V diet made up primarily of fruits, vegetables, and animal protein, weight control will not be a problem. It’s when you eat less-than-optimal foods that you tend to add body fat.

STAGE V AND CARBOHYDRATE

On a conventional Stone Age nutrition plan, such as the one described in
The Paleo Diet,
a person would be eating much more protein and less carbohydrate than the diet we suggest here for athletes. The shift toward more carbohydrate is due to the need to quickly recover from strenuous exercise, a need that the average, sedentary person does not have—and that our Stone Age ancestors did not have. For the athlete who trains more than once per day or has exceptionally long workouts, as is common with many serious athletes, the absolute carbohydrate intake is even higher because the need to recover increases as the number of training hours rises.

For example, an athlete training once a day for 90 minutes may burn 600 calories from carbohydrate during exercise and needs to take in at least that much during Stages I, II, III, and IV of recovery. This athlete may be eating around 3,000 total calories daily. If he gets 50 percent of his daily calories from carbohydrate, he would take in an additional 900 calories in carbs that day in Stage V, above and beyond the carbohydrate consumed in the earlier stages of the day. Of course, this carbohydrate should primarily come from fruits and especially vegetables, so calories aren’t wasted by eating foods lacking in micronutrients.

The high-volume athlete may do two of these 90-minute exercise sessions a day, thus doubling the total requirement for carbohydrate to 1,200 calories during the first four stages that day. This shift toward greater volume of training also should be accompanied by an increase in total calories consumed daily. Say 3,600 calories are taken in on such a
day; if the athlete is also eating a half-carbohydrate diet, he will need another 600 calories from carbohydrate sources this day in Stage V. This illustrates how the absolute carbohydrate intake varies with the training load of the athlete, despite the percentage of intake being the same.

STAGE V AND PROTEIN

Getting too little carbohydrate in the diet is seldom a problem for athletes; it’s abundant in grocery stores, inexpensive, and enjoyable to eat. No, the real stumbling block is protein intake. When we do dietary assessments of athletes, we typically find that they aren’t eating enough protein. Why? Because protein is not abundant in stores, it’s relatively expensive, and it’s not as enjoyable to eat as a sweet or starchy food. Protein in the form of meat has also gotten a bad rap in the last few decades. We’ve been taught that animal meat is bad for us, as it contributes to heart disease, cancer, and assorted other evils. The problem with this conclusion is that it doesn’t isolate the true causes of these diseases. It’s not protein that is to blame for Western society’s health woes but, largely, the omega-6 fats and other additives that often accompany it. And combining saturated fat with high glycemic load foods (think mashed potatoes and gravy or bread and butter) is a double whammy. Protein from free-ranging animals and fish does not cause heart disease. And, in fact, is quite healthy.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Feedlot-produced animal protein should be eliminated from your diet, but not the protein from free-ranging animals. Fish, shellfish, and turkey breast are excellent sources of healthy protein and rich in essential and branched-chain amino acids. For now, the take-home message is that athletes need an abundance of amino acids daily, and these are best found in free-ranging animal sources.

Since protein is so important to your total recovery, this is a good place to begin deciding what to eat at meals in Stage V. The first concept
to understand is that the amount of protein you need is related to how much you train. For the average person on the street who does little or no exercise, the level of protein intake stays much the same from day to day, as physical activity is usually quite limited. It’s different for the athlete who often pushes his or her body to near its limits and, in the process, potentially damages a lot of muscle tissue while perhaps using some protein as fuel. The greater your training volume or intensity, the greater the likelihood such cellular harm will occur. A considerable amount of amino acids from animal protein sources is needed in the hours of Stage V recovery to repair this tissue and prevent the body from seeking amino acids from internal sources, such as other muscles or the immune system. Without adequate protein, the risk of a compromised immune system increases and the possibility of muscle wasting rises.

Table 4.8
provides general guidelines for how much protein to eat with regard to your weekly training volume. Intensity of training is much harder to quantify, but you may also assume that when doing a lot of interval training, hill work, resistance training, or other high-effort exercise, you probably need to increase your protein intake to the next level in the table.

The next matter is deciding where you will get this lean protein. You may be aware that you can obtain all of the essential amino acids by mixing grains and legumes in a meal. Each of those food categories is lacking in one or more of the essential amino acids, but when you eat them in combination, the meal becomes more balanced (although plant-based diets will always be lacking in the essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan). What is not generally explained, however, is that the volume of plant-based foods one has to eat to get adequate daily protein (see
Table 4.9
) requires eating considerable amounts of grains and beans because these foods are nutritionally poor. In addition, they contribute to body acidity and the loss of nitrogen and calcium (see
Table 4.4
). A serious athlete attempting to get nearly a gram of protein per pound of body weight from a combination of grains and legumes would need to eat all day long—and have a gut that can process a significant amount of fiber. Even if he or she could do this, blood acidity levels would stay high, and anti-nutrients would prevent the absorption of much of the limited micronutrients these foods have.

Table 4.9

Protein and Essential Amino Acid Content of Common Foods