Why Youth Female Athletes Should NOT Go Vegan: SHOCKING Health and Performance Consequences

16 Mar Why Youth Female Athletes Should NOT Go Vegan: SHOCKING Health and Performance Consequences

For young, growing female athletes, plant-based anything ain’t it.

Sure, it sounds healthy and amazing, and like people are doing the right thing, but the deficiencies a vegan diet has for female athletes are immense. As a result, there are tons of health consequences girls may face when they pursue such a limited diet.

What’s Required for Girls to Grow

Pre-teen and teenage female athletes need several key nutrients to optimize bone, muscle, and hormonal growth. Their adolescent years are the second most rapid period of growth in their lives. Add on the amount of exercise they’re getting from practices, extra trainings, and games throughout the week, and the right nutrients become even more critical.

The top nutrients required for girls to grow and perform properly are:

1. Protein: vegan diets do no contain all the essential amino acids, namely, missing out on lysine, methionine, isoleucine, threonine, and tryptophan. These essential amino acids are critical for muscle repair and recovery, maintenance of bone strength, collagen production, and nervous system function.

Carnosine is also less abundant in a vegan diet. This is problematic for growing female athletes because carnosine plays a major role in neutralizing lactic acid, which helps delay fatigue in explosive and intense workouts.

Taurine, another amino acid, is not found in high quantities in a vegan diet. Taurine helps to delay fatigue and reduce muscle soreness. It increases oxygen uptake which allows female athletes to work harder and longer.

2. Calcium: since vegan diets omit dairy and fatty fish, it is extremely hard to get bioavailable calcium. Sure, some leafy greens contain calcium, but female athletes would have to consume copious amounts to meet their daily requirement of 1,300 milligrams. Calcium is a key micronutrient for strong bones, and if girls are deficient in it during critical years of adolescence, they’re at an increased risk of stress fractures young, and then osteoporosis later in adulthood because they missed the optimal window for peak bone density building.

3. Iron: red meat is not in a vegan diet, and it is the single best source of heme iron female athletes need for health and performance. Heme iron is much easier to absorb than the non-heme iron found in leafy greens. Heme iron is needed for oxygen delivery to the muscles for improved endurance and energy production. Iron deficiency from vegan diets can lead to fatigue and reduced explosiveness and speed.

4. Vitamin D: the richest food sources in vitamin D include fatty fish, eggs, and milk, which vegan diets omit. This is a major issue for growing female athletes because combined with calcium, they need vitamin D for bone growth. If girls are deficient in vitamin D, this can lead to stress fracture risk, muscle weakness and more prone to overuse injuries, and frequent illness due to weakening of immune system.

5. Iodine: Female athletes need iodine for thyroid hormone production. The thyroid plays a pivotal role in growth and development during the teen years. Iodine deficiency can lead to slow thyroid which can cause fatigue, weight gain, and poor cognitive function and brain fog. Iodine is only rich in animal-based sources like eggs, cod, tuna, and dairy products.

Iodine deficiency can lead to slow thyroid which can cause fatigue, weight gain, and poor cognitive function and brain fog. Share on XYes, seaweed does have iodine, but again, girls would have to consume massive bowls of it to meet their needs.

6. Omega 3 Fatty Acids: needed for brain health, myelin sheath building of the neurotransmitters, skin elasticity, female hormone production, and joint health. Foods richest in Omega 3 fatty acids include mainly animal-based sources (since they contain both long chain Omega 3s, EPA and DHA) such as salmon, cod, oysters, beef, and sardines. Some plant-based options, like walnuts and chia seeds, do have omega 3, but you would have to consume a lot to get the most out of them. Too, nuts and seeds aren’t as bio-available, meaning, some people have trouble fully digesting them and reaping their supposed benefits. Don’t believe me? Check your poop after eating nuts and seeds and you might find they come right out. I know it’s gross to see the seeds in the toilet, but this is a tell tale sign you aren’t absorbing all the nutrients from these plant-based sources. Female hormones thrive on Omega 3 fatty acids, so if girls are suffering period pains and negative menstrual cycle symptoms, this might be a sign they are deficient in these essential fatty acids.

My Personal Vegan Experiment (aka Disaster)

When something becomes trendy in nutrition, I sometimes test it out for a bout of six months to see the effects. I want to do my own personal experiment, alongside reading clinical studies, and then come to my own conclusion.

Regrettably, I tested the vegan diet.

I tried it for a six month stint in 2015. Without getting into a whole dissertation, here are cliff notes from my experience:

– Worse acne
– Period pains such as cramps and mood swings
– Severe bloating and constipation
– Thinning hairline
– Lost muscle
– Muscle soreness, decreased workout recovery
– Aged 10 years

When I began to introduce animal-based sources again, namely red meat, eggs, fish and dairy, and started to get B vitamins, essential proteins, iron, iodine, calcium, vitamin D and fats, here’s what happened:

– Acne gone
– No more period pains
– No more bloating and gut issues
– Hair grew back
– The most jacked I’ve been
– No more muscle soreness, improved recovery and ability to bounce back from intense workouts
– Aged in reverse (I’m 35 at the time of writing this):

I’m so glad I found my way back to animal-based food sources because I feel as young as a teenager, have vibrant energy, plump and clear skin, no period pains, the most lean muscle mass I’ve had in my life, and incredible digestion.

Adding on, I certainly don’t miss the vegan protein powders that tasted like dirt, and the plant-based salads with lifeless tofu that never filled me up enough. I always was starving, so I leaned into vegan desserts, which seemed healthy on the outside, but the sugar content was so high, it caused me to become extremely insulin resistant.

For more on how my health has improved now leaving veganism behind (with blood work reports included), I discuss in this video Faster At Age 35 Than When I Was A College All-American, and how the biggest change I made was leaning into red meat and animal-based foods:

Do You

Clearly, I’m not a fan of veganism for young female athletes. Well, anyone, really.

At the end of the day, though, I won’t judge anyone for going vegan. I’m just here to provide the science and be honest about the deficiencies.

Sadly, most vegans are quick to judge us omnivores for killing animals, but one could make the moral argument, ‘why slowly kill yourself?’

Why deprive young girls, whose growing bodies are starving for essential proteins and fats to develop their brains, build their hormones, and grow their muscles and bones during the critical years of adolescence?  You could argue they are killing themselves by not nourishing properly. Who has moral superiority then?

You could make a case morally for both sides – who dies first, animals or humans?

You could argue that veganism kills insects and rodents, and destroys the environment in it’s own way,  but that’s a blog for another time. You could argue that veganism deprives humans of nutrients to live optimally. Truth be told, no diet is actually “cruelty free.” Pick your cost.

The cost that isn’t worth for it me is slowly withering away on a vegan diet. The negative symptoms I experienced weren’t worth it for my sport performance and overall health.

Personally, I thrive animal-based. I love my ground beef, steak, cheese, butter, fish, bacon, and eggs. It took me years of paying attention to my body and listening to what it needed to not just survive, but to thrive.

I encourage you to test everything out. And do so for several months.

Check your performance, your health, your energy, your skin, your digestion, your menstrual cycle symptoms, your body composition, and if something feels off, then it’s time to re-assess what you’re currently eating.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Erica Mulholland is a former college 3x All-American soccer player and now Hall of Famer from Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Master of Science in Exercise Science and has been helping female athletes of all sports with speed, agility, strength, power, and conditioning for over 13 years. She has worked with soccer, lacrosse, track, volleyball, softball, and basketball girls, and has inspired her athletes to strength train not just for sport, but for life.

Her athletes have gone on to play college sports at University of North Carolina, University of Maryland, Pittsburgh, University of Southern California, University of Detroit, Mercy, Northwestern, Eastern Carolina University, Georgetown, West Point, University of South Florida, University of Charleston, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Rutgers, Towson University, and have gone on to play for professional various clubs in Europe.

Of course, she is proud of her athletes who made it to the college and pro levels, but she is most proud of her girls who stick with being strong and healthy for a lifetime. The training she does is about getting into good habits young, so girls can take these tools with them even after sports end.

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