IN THE WINTER OF 2015 I TRAVELED FROM MY HOME IN CALIFORNIA’S CENTRAL Valley to the Spanish resort village of Mojácar Playa to spend a few days with the LottoNL-Jumbo professional bike racing team. I met the cyclists at the Hotel Marina Playa, a four-star accommodation situated fifty meters from a private beach on the Mediterranean Sea and equipped with four pools, indoor and outdoor bars, a golf course, a full-service spa, and racquet courts. The mostly Dutch athletes were not there to enjoy such amusements, however. They had come for a ten-day training camp, and their attitude was all business, for the stakes were high.
Earning a position on a World Tour cycling team like LottoNL-Jumbo is about as difficult as making the roster of a Major League Baseball team. Holding on to such a position isn’t any easier. Most of the twenty-five members of the LottoNL-Jumbo team are on one- or two-year contracts. Each rider must consistently perform well in races to get his contract renewed. And a rider must first prove himself in training before he is even given the opportunity to represent the team in the bigger races. (Only nine men are selected for the Tour de France, for example.) The proving process begins with the team’s annual late January training camp on Spain’s southeastern coast.
The team’s managers are under no less pressure than its athletes. Only eighteen teams are selected annually by the Union Cycliste Internationale (the international governing body of the sport of cycling) to participate in the World Tour, which comprises the twenty-eight premier international cycling events. A team that makes the cut one year will be left out the next if its riders fail to perform.
In short, everything depends on results, and results, in turn, depend on doing everything right, beginning with training and diet. A substantial portion of Lotto’s resources, therefore, are devoted to regulating the riders’ eating. In Mojácar Playa, support staff outnumbered athletes eighteen to sixteen (the other nine riders were racing in Australia), and a third of those staff members served in nutrition-related capacities. Nutritionist Marcel Hesseling planned all of the riders’ meals. Team chef Jesper Boom prepared the meals with the help of his assistant, Marije Hengeveld. Frank van Eerd was responsible for the baking. Van Eerd owns and operates a specialty bakery in Holland but is contracted to supply the team’s bread products. (“We Dutch take our bread very seriously,” he told me.) Also in Spain were Gerard Rietjens, an exercise physiologist who plans and executes much of the testing that leads to adjustments in the team’s fueling practices, and Louis Delahaije, who bears the title of “high-performance manager” and does wide-ranging research in pursuit of better ways to nourish the riders.
The Hotel Marina Playa has a large buffet of decent quality. The cost of eating three meals a day there is included in the price of a room at the resort. It would have been convenient and cost effective for the LottoNL-Jumbo riders to have relied on the buffet to fill their bellies throughout the training camp. But they did not. Instead, the team shipped two pallets of their own food from Holland.
One of LottoNL-Jumbo’s sponsors is a Dutch food service called Daily Fresh, which prepares high-quality fresh meals in small portions and then vacuum seals them at their facility for quick and easy reheating wherever the team happens to be. The riders get all of their hot meals in Daily Fresh form during races. One of the benefits of this system is that it virtually eliminates the risks of food poisoning and of consuming foods tainted with substances (such as certain steroids used on livestock) that might trigger a positive result in a doping test. Another benefit is that it gives the team management an extremely high degree of control over what goes into the riders’ bodies. In Spain, the team did not rely on this system quite as heavily as it does at races. Hot entrees from Daily Fresh were supplemented with fresh produce and breakfast foods brought from Holland and with select items from the buffet.
The team took their meals in a medium-size room called the “Sala Oriente” that was situated just off the main dining area. My first meal with the athletes was a Saturday breakfast, served at eight o’clock. This was the one meal of the day for which Chef Boom did not prepare a special menu, instead supplying the riders with a selection of staple items available at every breakfast. These included cereals, breads, and crepes made by Frank van Eerd, a variety of spreads, and fresh fruit. Athletes who wanted hot items other than the crepes could get them from the buffet.
Steven Kruijswijk, a twenty-seven-year-old racer whose palmarès included an eighth-place finish at the 2011 Giro d’Italia, mixed plain yogurt, whole-grain granola with raisins and currants, whey protein powder, and banana slices in a big bowl and gobbled it up. He rounded out the meal with several orange wheels and a generous blob of cottage cheese, washing it all down with a cup of unsweetened tea. Maarten Wynants, a thirty-two-year-old cyclist who took tenth place at Paris-Roubaix in 2012, ate a whole-grain spelt crepe with apple butter, a plain one-egg omelet, and a few pieces of whole-grain bread, one covered with peanut butter, another with Nutella, and one or two more with marmalade honey. He drank coffee.
It was an important meal for all of the athletes. Later that morning they would complete their first major fitness test of the 2015 season. Their performance in this workout would provide the coaches with crucial data that would influence their decisions concerning early season racing opportunities. Many of the athletes were as nervous as they would have been before an actual race.
I got into a team car with Louis Delahaije and Gerard Rietjens and was driven to the top of the mountain where the testing was to take place. The cyclists took the scenic route to the base of the mountain, arriving there after two full hours in the saddle. At that point the riders were sent off individually at one-minute intervals. They were instructed to climb steadily for six minutes, stopping when they reached the spot where the team car was parked. Delahaije and Rietjens would then take a tiny blood sample from a fingertip and measure its concentration of lactate, a metabolic marker of exercise intensity. The coaches would also collect heart rate and power output data from the rider before freeing him to pedal back down the mountain, turn around, and climb again. The athletes would complete a total of six climbs, pushing a little harder each time and going all-out in the final ascent.
Throughout the ride, the cyclists fueled themselves with energy gels and sports drinks; if the workout had been longer and less intense, they would have gotten less of their energy from such products and more from real foods, including homemade energy bars made with fruit and whole grains by Frank van Eerd.
From our vantage, we could see the riders negotiating the switchbacks most of the way up. At the starting point they appeared as tiny splotches of yellow. It seemed incredible to me that in just six minutes they were able to climb all the way to where we waited. Several of the riders sustained outputs exceeding 500 watts on the last climb, enough power to have propelled them at nearly 35 mph for more than three miles on a flat road.
When the test was complete, the riders returned to the hotel, taking the short way this time. The total duration of the ride was a little under four hours. As soon as the cyclists dismounted, they were handed bottles containing a whey protein drink. They then showered and went straight to the Sala Oriente for a late (3:00 p.m.) lunch. Chef Boom had prepared a diverse banquet centered on a pair of hot entrees: a lasagna and whole-grain focaccia topped with cheese, olives, and other goodies.
LottoNL-Jumbo team leader Laurens ten Dam, a climbing specialist who finished ninth in the 2014 Tour de France, ate both entrees and a large garden salad with tomatoes, celery, and peppers plus a few slices of cold roast beef. For dessert he chose melon slices and pineapple chunks. He drank water and coffee, and, just before leaving the Sala, he made a small turkey sandwich to eat later. Sep Vanmarcke, a rising star who took second at Paris-Roubaix in 2013, skipped the lasagna, added pine nuts to his salad, chose turkey slices instead of roast beef, and finished the meal with yogurt. On the way out he grabbed one of van Eerd’s homemade energy bars.
After lunch, the athletes took turns visiting the rooms of the team soigneurs for massages. These rooms were well stocked with snacks: bananas, golden raisins, grapes, gummies, muesli, oranges, pretzel sticks, protein shakes, snack bars, soy milk, trail mix, and yogurt. Whether or not the riders availed themselves of any of these items, at 5:30 in the afternoon all of them were given a smoothie made with avocado, banana, honey, and yogurt to drink.
The Spanish eat dinner late, a custom that suited team LottoNL-Jumbo just fine on this day. At 8:00 the riders were again seated in the Sala Oriente. On Chef Boom’s menu was a salad of mixed greens with broccoli florets, beets, goat cheese, and pine nuts; ratatouille; risotto; salmon with beurre blanc sauce on a puree of sweet potato; bok choy; and spelt pasta. Tom Van Asbroeck, another up-and-comer who posted several top-ten finishes in the 2014 racing season, ate all of these things as well as a few slices of bread with hazelnut butter. Nick van der Lijke, at twenty-three years of age the youngest member of the team, passed on the pasta and the bread and took his salmon without sauce. He did, however, enjoy a glass of wine, which is made available to the cyclists at every dinner.
Dessert was a new concoction from the bread lab of Frank van Eerd, a dense cake made with brown rice, plums, cherries, dark chocolate, and just a sprinkle of sugar. Van der Lijke ate two bites and pushed it away. I snarfed mine in two minutes and was tempted to ask van der Lijke for the rest of his.
Elite Endurance Athletes Eat Everything
The few days I spent with the LottoNL-Jumbo professional bike racing team revealed to me that its members practice all five habits of the Endurance Diet. Even Habit 5, eating individually, was on full display, despite the fact that the sixteen cyclists took all of their meals together. As you saw from the examples given in the previous section, no two plates were identical.
Habit 4, eating enough, was even more evident. Recall that this habit entails regulating food intake by paying mindful attention to internal signals of hunger and satiety. Unlike many restrained eaters, who often undereat, the LottoNL-Jumbo cyclists did not count calories or measure portions, and yet, unlike many mindless eaters who tend to overeat, these cyclists frequently left food on their plates.
Equally difficult to overlook was the cyclists’ practice of Habit 3, eating carb-centered. The team’s diet was jam-packed with carbohydrate-rich foods, from the crepe with apple butter that Maarten Wynants ate for breakfast to the lasagna and focaccia that Laurens ten Dam ate for lunch to the pasta and risotto that Tom Van Asbroeck ate with his dinner.
Habit 2, eating quality, was exhibited as well. Almost everything the team ate belonged to one of the six categories of high-quality foods (vegetables; fruits; nuts, seeds, and healthy oils; unprocessed meat and seafood; whole grains; and dairy). The only low-quality food types they consumed were refined grains and the occasional sweet. They ate no processed meats or fried foods whatsoever.
If I had to pick one Endurance Diet habit that team LottoNL-Jumbo best exemplified, however, it would be Habit 1: eating everything. The balance and variety in their diet were truly impressive. Few riders left their table in the Sala Oriente after any meal without having consumed all six high-quality food types, not to mention healthy beverages such as unsweetened coffee, tea, and wine.
Take another look at Sep Vanmarcke’s lunch. The focaccia he ate checked the boxes for whole grains (spelt), dairy (cheese), and vegetables (olives, etc.). Granted, it contained only a small amount of vegetables; but the salad he ate with it was all vegetables except for the added pine nuts and dressing, both of which belong to the category of nuts, seeds, and healthy oils. The unprocessed meat category was covered by the turkey slices Vanmarcke selected, and the pineapple chunks he had for dessert took care of the last category, fruit. His dessert of yogurt added more dairy and the homemade energy bar he left with doubled up on the whole grain, fruits, and nuts, seeds, and healthy oils categories.
The riders not only ate a balance of all six high-quality food types but also consumed a wide range of foods within each category. Consider Frank van Eerd’s baking, for example. Van Eerd works with no fewer than eighteen different grains (none of which is wheat or corn). His breads and other baked goods frequently contain a variety of nuts, seeds, and fruits as well.
Eating everything means eating some low-quality foods, too. Sweets and refined grains added to the variety of the LottoNL-Jumbo team’s diet in Mojácar Playa. Although their meals and snacks were dominated by high-quality food types, nothing was explicitly forbidden or completely avoided. Recall that gummy candies were among the items available to them in the soigneurs’ rooms.
The LottoNL-Jumbo professional bike racing team is not unusual in this way. Choose an elite endurance athlete at random and you are almost certain to discover that he or she eats everything. Take Gina Crawford, a professional triathlete from New Zealand who has won thirteen iron-distance events. Her typical breakfast is a homemade porridge with oats (whole grain), chia seeds (nuts, seeds, and healthy oils), flaxseed (same), coconut (fruit), raisins (same), and whole creamy organic milk (dairy), supplemented with seasonal fruit. Lunch is often boiled or scrambled eggs or an omelet (unprocessed meat and seafood) with seasonal vegetables or a tossed salad (vegetable), cheese (dairy) on toast (whole grain), and more fruit. Dinner is another balanced meal with chicken, beef, or venison (unprocessed meat and seafood), brown rice (whole grain) or potatoes (vegetable), and a big salad (vegetable). Dessert consists of yet more fruit plus yogurt (dairy) or ice cream (sweet).
Why You Should Eat Everything
There are three reasons why you should follow the example of the LottoNL-Jumbo cycling team, Gina Crawford, and other elites and eat everything. First, eating everything is healthy. Second, eating everything is natural. And third, eating everything is enjoyable.
Eating Everything Is Healthy
On January 26, 2012, London’s Daily Mail newspaper published a story about a seventeen-year-old girl named Stacey Irvine, who had recently been rushed to the hospital after she collapsed at home with breathing difficulty. Tests done there revealed that she suffered from severe anemia, inflamed veins in her tongue, and multiple vitamin deficiencies, which were treated with vitamin injections. But what made this story newsworthy was the reason Stacey Irvine collapsed. The teen told doctors that she had subsisted on a diet of fast-food chicken nuggets since she was a toddler. She had never eaten a single fruit or vegetable that she could remember and the only food she ate regularly besides chicken nuggets was French fries. Her drink of choice was Coke.
Stacey Irvine’s story is an extreme example of the consequences of eating a diet with too little variety. Sure, she could have picked a better food than chicken nuggets to eat three times a day, but she would have developed health problems on any single-food diet. Only one food in nature contains all of the nutrients required to support human life: breast milk. Everything else is incomplete. Even foods we think of as very healthy would eventually kill us if we ate them exclusively. Vegetables are certainly very healthy, but no vegetable contains all nine essential amino acids that the body needs to build the proteins we’re made of. If you ate nothing else besides spinach you would die of heart failure at some point.
It is possible to live on just two foods, if you choose the right pair. But research has shown that people are healthiest when they eat a wide variety of foods. In 1987, Susan and James Krebs-Smith analyzed the diets of 3,701 American men, women, and children. A tool called the Mean Adequacy Ratio (MAR) was used to assess how well each subject’s diet satisfied basic human nutritional needs. The Krebs-Smiths also collected information on how often the subjects ate foods of different types. When these two measurements—MAR and dietary variety—were compared, it was discovered that the subjects whose diet included the greatest variety in food types did the best job of meeting their nutritional needs.
Nearly twenty years later, Suzanne Murphy at the University of Hawaii went a step further, dividing each basic food type into subtypes and measuring how often each subtype was consumed by each of ten thousand adult subjects. Separately, Murphy quantified the subjects’ intake of healthy nutrients such as vitamins and unhealthy nutrients such as refined sugar. She found that people who ate a wider variety of food types consumed more healthy nutrients and fewer unhealthy nutrients and that people who ate a wider variety of subtypes consumed even more of the good stuff and even less of the bad stuff.
There is some evidence that the benefits of dietary variety extend beyond food types and subtypes to individual foods. A 2006 study involving Iranian women revealed that those who ate the greatest variety of whole grains were most likely to get enough vitamin B2, while those who ate the greatest variety of fruits were most likely to get enough vitamin C, and the women who ate the greatest variety of meats were most likely to get enough protein.
So it appears that dietary variety is beneficial at every level, from types to subtypes to specific foods. Variety at the level of basic food types is most important, though. Put another way, it is healthier to eat just one food of each of the six high-quality food types than it is to eat six different foods of any single type. The reason is that foods within each type are not as diverse nutritionally as are foods of different types.
Each high-quality food type has a distinct but limited nutrient profile that is complementary to the other types. Vegetables contain a more diverse array of antioxidants than fruits, which contain more fiber than nuts, seeds, and healthy oils, which contain more unsaturated fat than unprocessed meat and seafood, which contain more protein than whole grains, which contain more starch than dairy, which contains more probiotics than vegetables. A diet that includes a balance of all six of these food types is therefore more nutritionally complete than is a less inclusive diet.
Each high-quality food type supports health in a different way. The antioxidants in vegetables prevent cellular wear and tear, the fiber in fruit promotes digestive health, the fats in nuts, seeds, and healthy oils are good for the nervous system, the protein in unprocessed meat and seafood supports tissue regeneration, the starch in grains provides energy for both mental and physical exertion, and the probiotics in certain dairy foods benefit immune function. What’s more, the health effects of the various high-quality food types are synergistic. Each food type is more beneficial when the other five are also included in the diet.
Before the 1980s, nutrition scientists tended to study the health effects of individual nutrients, foods, and food types in isolation. But over the past thirty years nutrition scientists have put greater emphasis on identifying the healthiest combination of food types. There is now a general consensus that a diet including all six high-quality food types is best. This consensus is based on a number of large-scale epidemiological studies including a 2014 study undertaken as part of the ambitious Dietary Patterns Methods Project. Its authors reported that, within a population of 424,000 older men and women, those who ate all of the high-quality food types most frequently were more than 20 percent less likely to die of heart disease, cancer, and other causes over a fifteen-year period compared to others.
Such findings have immediate relevance to endurance athletes and exercisers, because overall health is the foundation of endurance fitness. Every component of health is a component of endurance fitness also. Consider these few examples:
Antioxidant defenses: Nonathletes need strong antioxidant defenses to prevent bodily wear and tear and to slow the aging process. Endurance athletes need even stronger antioxidant defenses to absorb the stress of training.
Lean body composition: Nonathletes need a lean body composition to minimize their risk for a long list of chronic diseases. Endurance athletes need to be even leaner to maximize their efficiency of movement on the racecourse.
Insulin sensitivity: Nonathletes need their body tissues—particularly their muscles—to be highly sensitive to the action of the hormone insulin, so that they are better able to absorb and utilize carbohydrates obtained from food, leaving fewer carbs to be converted to body fat or get stuck in the bloodstream and wreak havoc. Endurance athletes need even greater insulin sensitivity to burn carbs effectively during workouts and races.
Each of the six high-quality food types makes a unique contribution to endurance fitness. Vegetables promote a lean body composition; fruit helps the immune system stand up to the stress of training; nuts, seeds, and healthy oils keep postworkout inflammation in check; unprocessed meat and seafood enables the muscles, bones, and connective tissues to adapt to training; grains provide fast fuel for workouts; and dairy accelerates muscle refueling and repair.
Eating Everything Is Natural
The story of humanity is largely a story of dietary diversification. Scientists believe that several million years ago our primate ancestors survived on a diet that consisted primarily of fruits, leaves, and insects. That’s already a fairly diverse (technically omnivorous) diet, but our forebears were just getting started.
At some point—exactly when is not known—some of these proto-apes took a chance on living off the savannah, adding new foods such as grasses to their diet. Those who stayed behind in the trees continued to eat fruits, leaves, and insects, as chimpanzees (their direct descendants) still do today. This first genealogical split was followed by many others. At each fork in the road, it was the lineage that went down the path of greater omnivorousness that led a step closer to modern humans.
Slightly less than two million years ago, for example, a particular lineage known as hominins split into two groups. Analyses of food residues left in the fossilized teeth of each species indicate that Paranthropus had a relatively narrow diet based on grasses and sedges, whereas Homo had a broader diet that mixed grasses and sedges with foods from trees, shrubs, and herbs, as well as from the animals that ate these same foods. Guess who faded out and who became us?
Paleobiologists have proposed that one of the reasons why the primate, hominin, and human lineages that expanded their diet tended to outlast those that clung to narrow tradition was that a diverse diet offered greater security. The more omnivorous a species or subspecies was, the more options it had to fall back on when climatic or other environmental changes eliminated an important food source.
Such security comes at a cost, though. A species such as ours that is long accustomed to a highly varied diet becomes nutritionally dependent on dietary diversity. Because humans have such a long history of omnivorousness, we require a balanced and inclusive diet to sustain optimal health. A lion can live a long and vigorous life without ever eating anything but antelope meat. Poor Stacey Irvine showed us what happens when a person tries something similar.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for about two hundred thousand years. Roughly one hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors began to spread out from Africa to populate the planet. As they wandered, separate groups encountered many new foods, causing the overall diet of the species to become even more diverse. For example, a tribe known as the Ainu arrived on the island of Japan roughly fourteen thousand years ago and began to eat seaweed—not something their ancestors had eaten very much of.
Until recently, scientists knew little about the biological mechanisms that made such abrupt dietary shifts possible. It is now recognized that the microbiome, a collection of bacterial colonies that live in our gut and do much of our digestive work for us, are largely responsible. The microbiome is astonishingly adaptable, altering its composition and function on various timescales in response to dietary changes. Returning to the example just mentioned, the Ainu, through contact with marine microbes, quickly acquired microbiotic genes that produce enzymes that make seaweed more digestible.
By 10,000 BC, the nomadic era of human history had more or less come to an end. Individual populations settled down in their chosen environments, shifted from food gathering to food production, and gradually developed distinct cultural cuisines based on favored local foods. If the prior era of human history was characterized by increasing dietary diversity, this new age was a time of dietary winnowing. Each society domesticated select plants and animals and pretty much gave up eating everything else. Their diets remained diverse, though, because people still craved variety in their eating and human health still depended on variety, and a diverse food economy was still needed for food security.
What is most remarkable about the various cultural cuisines that developed in different parts of the world is their overarching similarity. Humans everywhere chose the same general types of foods to domesticate and incorporate into their cuisines. Populations from South America to Siberia based their diet on five food types: vegetables; fruits; nuts, seeds, and oils; meat and seafood; and grains; and a sixth food type, dairy, was added somewhat later in Europe, North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and a handful of other places.
The Maya, who thrived in Central America between 2000 BC and 250 BC, ate lots of squash and beans (vegetables), papaya and pineapple (fruits), Maya nuts (nuts, seeds, and healthy oils), turkey and shellfish (unprocessed meat and seafood), and corn (grain). The Assamese people of precolonial India were fond of yams and gourds (vegetables), bananas (fruit), betel nuts (nuts, seeds, and healthy oils), duck and sol fish (meat and seafood), rice (grain), and curds (dairy). Medieval Britons ate (among other things) carrots and cabbage (vegetables), plums and blackberries (fruit), hazelnuts and acorns (nuts, seeds, and healthy oils), mutton and herring (unprocessed meat and seafood), breads made from wheat, rye, and barley (grains), and cheese (dairy). You get the idea.
The next big change in human diet occurred in the age of industrialization, which began in the nineteenth century. This era witnessed the development and popularization of processed foods made from the five or six natural food types that all traditional cultural cuisines had been based on for centuries. Four particular types of processed foods became central to modern diets: refined grains, sweets, processed meats, and fried foods. Whole wheat bread was turned into Wonder Bread, milk into ice cream, pork into bologna, and potatoes into potato chips, as it were.
Unlike the natural whole foods they come from, these four types of processed foods are linked to negative health consequences such as obesity and heart disease. The explosive increase in the rates of diet-related chronic diseases that occurred in the last part of the twentieth century in particular gave rise to a general notion that the modern human diet was in a fallen state—that we had gone off track with our eating. Although the evidence clearly showed that it had happened in the industrial age with the propagation of the four types of low-quality processed foods, some people placed our fall much earlier. Proponents of the Paleo Diet argued that we never should have started eating grains, dairy, or even legumes, and that we should stop eating these foods now. Vegetarian diet advocates argued that we never should have started eating seafood, meat, and dairy, and should reverse those errors today.
Although they disagree on exactly when and how humans fell from dietary grace, all modern advocates of restricted diets agree that it is unnatural for humans to eat everything. However, an unbiased look at human history teaches us not only that it is natural for humans to eat everything, but that eating everything is what made us human in the first place and what continues to define us as human even now. When any species of animal, humans included, is coerced into defying its own nature, bad things happen. For this reason, I believe that endurance athletes (and anyone else seeking health and happiness) should include not only all six high-quality food types in their diet but the four low-category food types as well. I will say more about why you should allow yourself to eat refined grains, sweets, processed meats, and fried foods in the last section of this chapter.
Eating Everything Is Enjoyable
All animals like what is good for them. Evolution wouldn’t work very well otherwise. The joy of sex apotheosizes the link between pleasure and survival. The same principle also applies to diet. Each species possesses a hardwired attraction to its natural food sources.
Humans not only are programmed to like certain flavors, such as sweet, but we also have a built-in liking for diversity in our foods. Evidence of this predilection comes from studies on the effect of food variety on energy intake. In one such study, six young men spent nine days in a clinical environment where they had free access to food, but the variety of offerings was manipulated. When the variety of the food was minimal, the men ate 15 percent fewer calories than they did when the number of options was maximal, presumably because they got bored with eating the same things. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as sensory-specific satiety.
In theory, it’s possible that this preference for variety in the diet is learned—something society imposes on people—rather than genetically rooted. But research involving young children, whose eating choices are based more on instinct and less on acculturation, suggests otherwise. In a 2012 experiment, researchers at Cornell University and London Metropolitan University created images of forty-eight dinner plates featuring different combinations of foods and asked twenty-three children between the ages of five and twelve years to choose their favorite. The most diverse plates contained six foods, and those were the ones that a majority of the children selected. Adults presented with the same images favored plates with three foods. So it would appear that acculturation tends to narrow our naturally diverse food tastes rather than expand them.
The origins of this taste for eclecticism are ancient. As I mentioned above, even the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees was omnivorous, so it is not surprising that scientists have learned that modern monkeys also like to mix things up in their diet. In 2010, scientists at Duke University and the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Rome taught capuchin monkeys to use tokens to barter for food. After identifying the monkeys’ favorite food type, the researchers gave them the option to trade tokens for a large amount of that one type of food or for an assortment of foods that included their favorite as well as several others that they did not like as much. They went for the variety pack.
In a report published in Behavioural Processes, the experimenters wrote, “These results suggest that variety-seeking is rooted in our evolutionary history, and that it satisfies the need of experiencing stimulation from the environment; at the ultimate level, variety-seeking may allow the organism to exploit novel foods and obtain a correct nutritional intake.”
This observation closes the loop on the three reasons endurance athletes (and humans in general) should eat everything. We enjoy eating everything because it is natural for us to eat everything, and it is natural for us to eat everything because it is healthy for us to eat everything.
The Costs of Not Eating Everything
Although nearly all elite endurance athletes eat everything, many recreational endurance athletes and exercisers do not, and when they don’t, there’s almost always a price to be paid. In some cases the costs are physical. In other cases the negative effects are mainly psychological but no less harmful to health, fitness, and performance.
Physical Consequences
In my experience, the three high-quality food types that are most often absent in the diets of recreational endurance athletes and exercisers are vegetables, unprocessed meat and seafood, and whole grains. I haven’t yet encountered anyone whose diet lacked all of these food types. Rather, individual endurance fitness seekers tend to avoid just one of the three.
Athletes and exercisers (not to mention sedentary individuals) who avoid eating vegetables do so not because they think veggies are unhealthy but simply because they don’t like them. These men and women typically eat some vegetables (and, no, potato chips don’t count!), but not enough of them to escape physical consequences, which can range from poor recovery to increased risk for colds and flu.
An example is Brandon, a subelite runner from Ohio who was attempting to qualify for the US Olympic Trials Marathon when I worked with him. Brandon was raised on a particularly low-quality version of the Standard American Diet and stayed on it throughout college. He told me that he did not eat a single vegetable during his five years as an NCAA student athlete. His youth kept him out of trouble for a while, but eventually he began to suffer from fatigue, poor recovery, and recurrent injuries. A physician traced these problems to Brandon’s adrenal glands, which play a key role in the body’s response to all kinds of stress. His diet was so poor in key vitamins that his adrenal glands had become overtaxed, unable to manage the stress of his training. Brandon changed his diet and his problems went away.
Unlike veggie haters, athletes who shun meat and seafood do so intentionally, often but not always because they believe they will be healthier and perform better without animal foods in their diet. The problem I see with the greatest frequency in athletes on plant-based diets is iron-deficiency anemia. This problem is common even in omnivorous athletes, and it is possible to avoid it on a meatless diet, but it becomes that much more difficult to avoid when the most iron-rich foods (e.g., beef and shellfish) are excluded from the diet.
One of the many anemic vegetarians I’ve worked with is Claudia, who reached out to me in 2012 after unusual muscle pains and lethargy sent her to a sports medicine clinic, where testing revealed that she was severely anemic. Claudia was shocked by the diagnosis because she had been vegetarian for several years. But I see this quite often. The removal of meat from the diet does not always lead directly to iron deficiency and anemia. In many cases it just leaves athletes more vulnerable to being pushed over the edge by some other factor, such as stress or increased training.
Many athletes do just fine on a vegetarian or vegan diet, but you never know how your body is going to react to the elimination of animal foods. Another athlete I’ve advised, a triathlete from Florida named Maria, placed herself on a carefully planned vegan diet for four months and then spent the next four years trying to recover from immune system and adrenal disruptions that virtually shut down her training and caused frequent and diverse illnesses.
Grain avoidance has become increasingly popular among endurance athletes and exercisers in recent years. In many instances this unnatural restriction leads to chronic fatigue, poor recovery, and other symptoms of overtraining syndrome, such as mood and sleep disturbances. An example is Julie, a runner from my home state of New Hampshire, who came to me after a disastrous foray into something called the No Sugar No Grains (NSNG) diet.
“I felt awful,” she told me. “It didn’t just slow me down—I could barely even run at all.”
I asked Julie what sorts of problems she’d been experiencing on her normal diet that motivated her to try NSNG. Her answer? “None.” Julie had just been talked into it by some friends who were already on the diet. These same friends urged her to stick with NSNG despite the sabotage it was wreaking upon her training, insisting that she would eventually “adapt.” She did not adapt, and after several weeks she pulled the plug.
There are plenty of anecdotal reports of athletes who swear they are thriving on a grain-free diet. But I’ve counseled enough Julies to know that, if not impossible, it’s a lot harder to absorb intensive training on a grain-free diet than it is on the Endurance Diet, just as it’s harder but not impossible to avoid iron deficiency on a plant-based diet. My question is this: Why make it harder for yourself?
Psychological Consequences
Most advocates of unnaturally restrictive diets for endurance athletes completely ignore the psychology of food, but I believe it’s just as important as the physical side. Indeed, I have never encountered an endurance athlete who was unhappy with his or her diet and happy with his or her training and racing. To experience lasting success as an athlete, you need more than a healthy diet. You must also be happy with your healthy diet—and diets that forbid entire food types breed unhappy eaters. More specifically, diets based on the total elimination of one or more high-quality food types promote a fear- and guilt-based relationship with food that takes the fun out of eating, creates stress around food, and in some cases leads to full-blown eating disorders.
Returning to the case of Julie and the No Sugar No Grain diet, not only did she feel lousy on it, but she also really missed eating sugar and grains. Eating wasn’t as fun without her morning pumpkin muffin. Worse, the NSNG diet culture that she found herself immersed in had a distinctly negative ethos that brought her spirits down every time she interacted with it (not surprising for a diet whose name contains four words, two of which are “no”).
“I was appalled by how people treated each other on their [online] forum,” she told me.
It seemed to her that everyone was competing to be the purest and most loyal representative of the diet, and just waiting for an opportunity to pounce on someone who revealed himself or herself to be less than 100 percent committed. Julie felt as if she had woken up in some bizarre dietary police state. When she quit the diet she had to cut all ties with the culture in order to get her equanimity back.
The risk of psychological consequences is present even when low-quality food types alone are purged from the diet. From a purely physiological perspective, there is no reason not to completely do away with refined grains, sweets, processed meats, and fried foods. There are no health or performance benefits to be gained from eating these food types. Yet I recommend that endurance athletes include them in their diet nonetheless. There are three good reasons to do so.
First, eating refined grains, sweets, processed meats, and fried foods in small amounts does no harm. Proof of this claim is to be found in the fact that most elite endurance athletes enjoy them as occasional treats. (The riders on the LottoNL-Jumbo team, I was told, have a tradition of eating French fries on the final day of the Tour de France.) You can be sure that if eating small amounts of low-quality foods reduced performance by even one half of 1 percent, they would be wholly absent from the diets of all successful elite endurance athletes.
Second, many low-quality foods taste really good. That’s the whole reason we created them in the first place! One may argue (I wouldn’t) that it was a mistake to create them, but they exist now and are normal parts of diets all over the world. I strongly believe that foods that bring pleasure but not physical health have a place, albeit as small one, in the diets of all health-seeking persons, including competitive endurance athletes. Indeed, because pleasure itself is healthy, a diet that includes a modicum of pleasurable but unhealthy foods is better for overall mind-body health than a diet that excludes these delicious low-quality items.
Finally, total eradication of all low-quality foods from the diet fosters the same unwholesome relationship with food that diets like NSNG do and produces the same consequences. Remember Brandon, the Olympic Trials aspirant? After he cleaned up his diet, Brandon hired a sports nutritionist to help him continue the process. Unfortunately, he hired a sports nutritionist who forced rigid restrictions upon him, forbidding the consumption of any sweets, fried foods, or alcohol. And that was just the beginning. She prescribed precise calorie counts and (highly restrictive) carbohydrate amounts for every meal he ate and even told him exactly when he was required to eat. After a few weeks on this stifling regimen, Brandon felt that he was no longer eating food but math.
Overall, he was on board with the program. The new Brandon was more than willing to load up on the vegetables that he used to push away. But he developed a persistent fear of eating the wrong thing and was wracked with guilt whenever he broke a rule. These feelings intensified after Brandon ate sweet potato fries at a restaurant dinner with his wife and some friends and posted a photo of the meal on Facebook, which his nutritionist saw and later rebuked him for.
Brandon’s next big race was the USA Half Marathon Championship. Although he had avoided injuries and his diet was immaculate, he felt terrible from the very start and dropped out before he reached the finish line. Upon returning home, he went on an extended junk food bender and gained 10 pounds.
This is an all-too-common scenario. Ironically, the person who is most likely to eat an entire box of cookies is not the one who eats a cookie every day but rather the one who tries to avoid ever eating a single cookie. In 2015, researchers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand invited subjects to fill out a questionnaire that collected information about their psychological orientation toward food. The subjects were first asked to state whether they associated chocolate cake with “celebration” or “guilt.” The researchers found that those who chose guilt “reported unhealthier eating habits and lower levels of perceived behavioural control over healthy eating when under stress . . . and did not have more positive attitudes towards healthy eating.”
When I started to work with Brandon, I told him that developing a positive, healthy relationship with food was every bit as important as eating healthily. The most successful endurance athletes have what I call a “yes-saying” attitude toward their diet. They don’t just eat healthily—they’re also contented in their diet. Athletes whose relationship with food is based on fear and guilt always end up sabotaging their fitness and performance in one way or another, even though their diets look good “on paper” most of the time. I explained to Brandon that one of the most important steps toward developing a healthy relationship with food is to eat everything, a habit that is also best for endurance fitness on a purely physiological level.
It took some time, but Brandon eventually stopped worrying about his diet even as his nutritional standards remained high. “It’s not only simplified my approach to eating,” he told me by e-mail, “but it’s reduced a ton of stress around wondering if I’ve made the right food options in the right amounts.”
How to Eat Everything
Putting the first habit of the Endurance Diet into practice couldn’t be simpler. Step one is to reintroduce to your diet any food types you currently avoid, unless you cannot eat them because of a food allergy or intolerance. Step two is to make sure you eat all six high-quality food types regularly. Vegetables and fruits should be included in almost every meal and snack. With the others—nuts, seeds, and healthy oils; unprocessed meat and seafood; whole grains; and dairy—there is more flexibility. Each of these food types should be consumed at least a few times every week and may be eaten as often as a few times a day. The Diet Quality Score, a tool that I will introduce in the next chapter, will guide you toward eating each of the high-quality food types with sufficient frequency and consuming low-quality foods in amounts that don’t impede progress toward your goals.