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Notes -
I think he has said that it's mainly for recovery and weight management reasons. It's very difficult to gain weight when you are primarily eating high volumes of vegetables. Tour riders probably have much more effective ways of maintaining and losing weight with precision that semi-pro athletes like Dylan Johnson don't have access to (mainly thinking a team of nutritionists). In terms of recovery, the same is probably true, although that does suggest that there aren't any particularly big advantages to maintaining a strict vegan diet. The healthiest cohorts in pretty much any dietary meta-analysis aren't vegetarians or vegans, but pescatarians or people who follow the mediterranean diet, which contains some amount of eat. This suggests both that some amount of meat is healthy for you, and also probably that most of the recovery/reduced inflammation gains come from cutting down on meat consumption, not eliminating it. I doubt that most riders have a very meat heavy-diet (they need lots of carbs for performance reasons, and meat has almost 0 carbs), so Dylan's alpha by being more strictly plant-based is likely quite low.
In terms of my own performance, I'm starting to think that it's time to think about locking down a source of eggs from local chickens that I know are treated-well and thinking about introducing fish low in the food chain (like Sardines or anchovies) that I don't feel ethically conflicted about and seeing if that makes any difference. For now though certainly going to keep eating oysters.
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