Effect of vegan diet (VD) on sports performance: a mechanistic review of metabolic cascades

Abstract

Sportsmen may choose to include vegetarian diet in their dietary regime for a variety of ways like its beneficial health impact, due to religious restrictions or to protect animals for environmental integrity. These diets are loaded with a wide variety of phytochemicals with superior health benefits safeguarding against chronic diseases. Besides their role in health management these foods also play a key role in enhancing different sports performances owing to contained with instant energy providing carbohydrates that are crucial for competitive sports performance. Furthermore, they are also richly enriched with antioxidants that are essential for high-end sports performance. However, few vegetarian diets are the source of anti-nutritional entities like high fiber content, chelating agents, phytates, and tannic acid. These interfere with the bio-availability of crucial dietary components like iron, zinc, proteins. Therefore, a sound nutritional approach is required while planning plant-based dietary regimes for sports performance. This review will systematically focus on the impact of vegetarian diets on sports performance in the light of currently available research findings in this field to provide a guiding hand to sports specialists and nutritional experts in planning the vegetarian dietary plans for optimizing the sports performance. In addition, this review explains the bio-availability and enhancement strategies of different vegetarian diet-based nutrients through different energy metabolism pathways.