#624: Can Athletes Eat for Performance and the Planet? – Peter Res

0:00Peter Res: Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 624 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon and you are very welcome to the show. Today we're going to be taking a look at some of the practicalities of more sustainable diets within the context of athletes who are chasing performance, recovery, etc. And what we're really going to look at is within that particular paradigm of maximizing performance, even at the levels of elite level sport, is that compatible with some of the recommendations that one may have for a dietary pattern that promotes sustainability around environmental sustainability?

0:46Peter Res: And so to talk through this idea of whether athletes can actually reduce the environmental impact of their diet while still meeting their demands of training, competition, recovery, I'm going to be talking to Peter Ress, who is an elite level sports performance nutritionist who has worked within professional cycling. He's worked with Ajax Amsterdam, the football club, within the Dutch Olympic team, within speed skating. And within this long career within elite level sport he's also developed big interest in how we can make more sustainable food choices and then specifically his work is how those two worlds can connect within that realm of elite level sports nutrition is there a way that we can make more sustainable food choices how we can empower athletes to do that and then allay some of the fears they may have about some of the choices that may be required there so we're going to walk through this it's going to be a lot to do with some of the practicalities of this what i.e what some of those changes might actually look like what are the principal concerns that athletes typically come with and how those can be discussed with them and some of the practical changes that may need to be made in order to make those diets compatible with some of the sustainability goals that are out there so hopefully this is interesting particularly of those of you who maybe have an interest in these types of conversations around sustainability but also within the area of sport and as well as from a practitioner perspective if you are looking for some input from someone who has done this for a long period of time.

2:28Peter Res: Remember if you are a Sigmatician Premium subscriber you will be getting a set of detailed study notes to accompany this episode. They can be found either over on the website or in the description box where you're listening right now. For those of you listening on the free public feed of the podcast, if you do want to get more out of your podcast listening, then consider becoming a premium member. It gives you advantages like our study notes for each episode, as well as a premium only episode every month and some other benefits too. I'll give more details in the description box. You can click through and check that out.

3:00Peter Res: I'll also give more background context about anything that was mentioned in this episode in the show notes page which again I will link up to in the description box and then if this is a topic that does interest you and you get more deeply into some of the science on this there's a few related episodes that again I will mention in the show notes page so principally episode 320 with Dr. Hannah Ritchie where we talk all about the concept of environmental impacts on diet and go into the data on that. We also have a Sigma episode 446 where we discussed potential impacts of things like climate change on nutrient status.

3:40Peter Res: And then more recently, we have episode 584 in which Alan and I took a look at the Eat Lancer report and looked at their suggested planetary health diet and see how that tallies up with impacts on human health. So if you want to get into the data and the research on some of those topics, check out those episodes. Again, I will mention them in the show notes page to this episode. But for now, I hope you enjoy this conversation between myself and Peter Ress.

4:21Peter Res: Peter thank you so much for taking the time to come and join me on the podcast and for sharing some of your insights with us today thank you my pleasure maybe before we get to any of the things that I'm really intrigued to ask you about maybe the best place to start would be to let people listening know a bit about your background, your interests, current work you're doing, anything else that might be relevant for our topic today? Yeah, Peter Ress from the Netherlands. I'm a performance nutritionist and I've worked in different roles in different sports, ranging from professional cycling, professional football.

4:55I worked at Ajax Amsterdam for six seasons with the Dutch Olympic team. I've worked for six or seven years in different sports and now currently mainly working in speed skating and also working on different projects in sustainability and where it touches on sports nutrition.

5:10Peter Res: So you're definitely at the intersection of these two fields that sometimes people might see as disconnected and you've been at the forefront of trying to bring a bit of awareness to some of these intersections. Maybe first we should get some clarity on some of the terminology. So you've mentioned sustainability there. so when we're talking about sustainable diets or even planetary health diets things that fall within this category first of all what do you think is the best way for people to conceptualize those and then maybe secondary to that what are some of the main environmental problems that our current food system contributes to if that's not too broad of a question yeah it's i think it's a very good start and sustainability is so broad that it tends to dilute in meanings and it's really hard and people get confused.

6:03But one of the easiest metrics is greenhouse gas emissions. It's definitely not the only one. You briefly mentioned the planetary boundaries and that's a concept from Potsdam that defines nine planetary boundaries and that's already a bit more nuanced idea about what sustainability is and how nutrition impacts those boundaries or those limits. And then you come to, for instance, fresh water use, toxins in the environment, plastic use, land use, which is also a big one in sustainability. So I think that's a good framework to work with.

6:39Peter Res: I do want to get into some of the impacts and some of the things with our diet that can influence some of these. But maybe to touch on one thing you've just mentioned, and I'm sure we'll come back to a bit later on, this intersection between thinking about sustainability, specifically in the context of elite level sport. And can you maybe talk about your interest in looking at these two things and what it means to you? Yeah, that's a bit of a personal story. I became father in 2022 and about that time I read an article a Dutch journalist Rutger Brechman wrote an article like no you're not good the way you are and it was basically saying we could do more with the time that we spend and that you spend in your career and how you how we're gonna make impact with your career and I was thinking well I help a lot of athletes I don't have a bullshit job but it's not maximal impact either.

7:34And at the time, I also read some articles about the impact of the food system. Well, I was always working on a micro level in the human body and looking for performance gains. And all of a sudden, there's the macro idea of the food system and impact in the world. And I connected those two. And I thought, well, two things. I think athletes can shift in their diets and most of them would benefit actually from that. And also maybe we can find some role models within the athletic community who can really make a big societal impact as well.

8:08Peter Res: I do want to return to how this plays out within sport and the implications for not only athletes, but maybe many of the performance nutritionists listening here. But before we get to that, if we think about broadly how some of the potential dietary changes that we could make could have implications here on an environmental and global level. There are many different things people may have heard about, different types of changes that could be made. For you, what are the ones that are likely to create the greatest amount of change, or at least we have good evidence that would create important change, compared to others that maybe might not be as important?

8:49That's pretty easy. The number one would be reduce the amount of beef that we eat. So that's the environmental impact and the land use of beef and other ruminants. But we eat the most beef. That's on a league of its own. So to say it's just way bigger impact than anything else that you could do. And then specifically in the case of nutritionists and athletes, talk about it. That's maybe not a dietary change, but we could multiply our impact by showing our concerns and show the things that we changed because of these reasons.

9:23Peter Res: One of the points that this reminds me of is on a previous conversation I talked with Hannah Ritchie who published a lot of data around this. And one of the things that was surprising maybe to many people is one point she made was that certain things, for example, like buying produce locally as opposed to one that may be imported. People may rank that as a much more important thing from an environmental perspective than it necessarily is in all situations. Can you maybe talk about some of these things that maybe there's a bit of confusion about? That's a very good point. I did the calculations on that because if you have your local beef versus beef from, say, you have it from Argentina and it comes by boat, the local beef still has 99.3 % of the environmental impact.

10:12So that just is only a dent. So I think it makes a difference in the produce and the fruits and vegetables when it's local combined with in season. So that helps and that's very good to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables that are local and in season. So in that context, local can be important, but not when we're talking about beef. And other things, organic for instance, very complex on toxicity. and that helps a bit because it depends a bit on what you have, but it's slightly less efficient. Actually, the worst thing you could have is organic beef because beef is in itself a very inefficient way to feed people and then organic is even less efficient.

10:57So we need even more land and that's not very sustainable. So we can only talk about organic when we first reduce the amount of meat and specifically beef. So those are, yeah, I think also amount of plastic. Plastic is in a sense a wonderful material, very thin, and we don't need a lot of it to have it waterproof. But that's what people see. And for instance, in sports nutrition, you see the wrappers and people think that's a big impact, but that's relatively low also. And of course, again, rather less plastic than more plastic, but there's research showing the amount of food waste is also reduced from using more plastic for instance when you have cucumbers and then the greenhouse gas emissions from the food waste is about five times higher than that from the plastic so in those kind of cases plastic could even be beneficial so that's people get people get confused but the big thing is what you eat is far more important than in how it's produced or how it's packaged many times we

12:00Peter Res: have assumptions about what is likely good from a sustainability perspective whether it's organic or not, or whether it's local or not, whereas we really need to take a look deeper and see, based on the data, what are these types of changes, what are the types of foods that would likely create some benefit. So we've mentioned on an individual level, let's say, beef having this huge negative impact from a sustainability perspective. If we go to the dietary pattern level, many people listening may have heard about the, for example, the recent reports, the Eat Lancet report and their option from a dietary pattern perspective.

12:35Peter Res: So for the overall diet, in addition to those changes along with beef, what are some of the things that you think would characterize a good dietary pattern to move towards in order for us to have more sustainable dietary patterns? I think the Dutch Health Council suggested at least 60 % of the protein from plants. The E-Lancet, when you calculate it, comes down to around 80 % from plants and there are several examples and when you do a complete like 100 vegan diet that could also be very very healthy when it's done in the right way so i would say somewhere between 60 and 100 percent of the protein coming from from plants that would be ideal and dependent on where you are i always advocate small steps and that that usually works a lot better than changing everything all at once.

13:29I've seen a lot of athletes completely went vegan overnight, maybe did that for a month or so, and then afterwards returned to how it was. So I'm a big advocate of small steps and put that in your routines and move on from there.

13:44Peter Res: So if we do think about that context of sports nutrition, athletes, even performance nutritionists, I think now with this increasing awareness, there's maybe many athletes for a variety of reasons who do want to have diets that would be more sustainable or would agree with many of the benefits of going to a more sustainable type of diet. But typically some of the assumptions they have or some of the narratives we hear is maybe a fear from athletes that making some of these changes is going to have a negative impact on their performance or on their recovery. And they typically hear this from the same claims you hear around, oh, it's going to be more difficult for them to consume enough overall energy, to get enough protein, etc.

14:30Peter Res: For you and from all the athletes that you've worked with and hear them reporting to you, what do you think are some of those principal fears that stop athletes or nutritionists from moving in the direction of some of these more sustainable diets? Well, the number one and probably number two and three as well is a protein. How do you get enough protein? Because in the heads of people and athletes, the animal source foods have protein and plant sources do not have protein. And of course, this is a big misconception. And actually, when you do the comparison on a per calorie basis, because that's eventually what counts for the body.

15:14If we have 2 ,500 calories, kilocalories per day to spend on food, then the percentage of protein is what counts and not so much as it's stated in all the nutrition tables per 100 gram of product. So when you calculate that back, actually the plant sources are very comparable to animal sources. That also implies that when you meet your daily energy needs, Which is, and we have to be honest about that, it's a bit harder on a fully plant-based diet because it's less energy dense, more fibers, more bulk. So just the sheer volume of food that you have to eat is bigger. But when you meet your energy requirements, usually the protein requirements also fall in place.

16:00Peter Res: So with the protein issue, there tends to be two related but distinct issues that athletes bring up. One, as you mentioned, is the how do I get enough total protein? and as you mentioned if we have a diet that is designed appropriately the athlete is consuming a sufficient amount of energy typically it's relatively straightforward if we're making the right food choices to get that from the these plant sources one of the other fears that they hear about and and people tend to use is that that may be the case but these plant proteins are inferior and people bring up digestibility scores or quality scores often with a bit of a a misinterpretation.

16:37Peter Res: Can you maybe talk about some of those misinterpretations you've seen around protein quality from plants and what would be the most important things for people to actually know about the quality coming from, say, plant proteins? A lot of these misconceptions come from earlier work. For instance, the Jason Tang study 2010 or so, where they compared 20 grams of whey and casein and soy, and then you see that soy is inferior in muscle protein synthesis. But subsequent studies show that if you just eat a little bit more, also I've worked in the Luke van Loon lab in Maastricht, a series of studies on plant-based proteins consistently showed when you give enough protein, so around 30 grams or so for one meal, and you combine sources of plant-based proteins, and then the ceiling of muscle protein synthesis is the same.

17:28And that's what research consistently shows. One of the misconceptions is, like you said, that people say that the amino acid composition is not good or they're lacking amino acids. Well, no, plant-based proteins do not lack amino acids, only the composition is a bit different. So when you combine different proteins, the one protein source has a bit less of the one amino acid and a bit more of the other one. And then when you just give it a little bit more, 30 grams in one meal, 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day then we don't see any difference anymore even compared to the

18:06Peter Res: gold standard way within contexts like team sport environments particularly do you see any practical barriers that can sometimes make this more of an issue because oftentimes some of the nutrition practices are based in maybe either the certain culture of a sport or even of an organization or just what other players are around people are doing do you see any kind of practical challenges there that you have to talk through with any of the athletes you've consulted with yeah traveling is often an issue when you're somewhere abroad and that can be really challenging to to have plant-based options there so i would usually recommend to have it also very flexible and when there's nothing else just eat animal source proteins that's also fine and it also depends on on the athlete and the reasons why they want to eat this way and if there is a strong ethical component about animal harm that's a bit more complicated and then athletes have to bring a lot of their own food that's also a solution and otherwise I think also a lot of nutritionists are still pretty anxious about this and can hold athletes back if athlete wants to change and the nutritionist is not convinced that this is a good idea and also from sporting bodies well especially international circuit then sporting bodies often give guidance to what should be on the plate for the athlete and that's also that's often very meat or fish or at least animal source eccentric one of the things you mentioned earlier is that in the case of someone moving towards a more plant forward predominant diet that would fit in with some of these dietary patterns we've mentioned related to sustainability typically for a lot of people in the general population that has the effect of being often quite satiating.

19:55Peter Res: Again, depending on the types of foods they're including, they may even end up consuming a bit less energy. There may even be a bit of weight loss that on a general population level isn't too much of a concern. When we're talking about athletes that tend to have generally high caloric demands, again, depending on their sport, and we need to make sure we're getting enough energy. You've mentioned already that some of these things can present a bit of a challenge from getting in an appropriate amount of calories. what are some of the things that they can be aware of or some of the things that you think could be useful in a sports nutrition context to allow for them to make some of these changes whilst getting enough overall energy and then maybe dealing with some of the other issues with increased food volume whether that's gi distress etc smoothies is a nice one to to increase calorie intake without the having a lot of bocal volume and also especially on hard training days have white bread or white pasta or white rice and i've had athletes that were had really trouble with the idea of eating white bread that would be helpful for them because that's such an unhealthy connotation but in their context that was actually the healthiest thing to do because that was almost the only way to to get the energy in on that day you could pull back on some of the more unhealthy foods which are unhealthy in the context of if there is there insufficient fibers and and other things but not in the elite level context of maybe consuming 5 000 kilocalories one of the things that also comes up here relates to the micronutrition component there are many athletes who would have came across much of the content that is now going around the internet and social media that would very much promote certain foods like for example beef saying it's very energy dense you have all this micronutrition within it that if you take that out of the diet that could be a problem they might talk about bioavailability is better from some of these animal sourced foods than plant-based foods and all these other types of claims that athletes tend to come across from a micronutrition perspective what do you think are some of those concerns they have that maybe are overblown?

22:07Peter Res: And then the other side, what are some things that might be worth paying attention to if they are starting to make some of these changes? Depends a bit on the context and even the country. Like as an example, iodine could be a problem, but in the Netherlands, our bread is fortified with iodine. So it's never a problem. So that's an example of how context specific that is. Iron in theory is a lot better absorbed, but what you see over long-term is that the body adapts and can take up more of the plant iron when body stores are relatively low. So that's often less of a concern. And also research doesn't really show a lot more iron deficiency in vegetarians or vegans.

22:49So of course, in an elite athlete context, it's always good to monitor that. But that counts for omnivores and athletes with a more plant-rich diet as well. B12 is something that should be supplemented when fully plant-based. But also, again, depending on the context and how much of fortified foods people eat. With maybe, well, if you have fortified foods with plant-based dairies, then it's easy to get your calcium intake. Without it, it's a bit harder. Also for B12, here we have it also in the margarine and in the meat replacement. So, yeah, it depends a bit on how much other food you take. But in general, I would say take a B12 supplement, maybe an omega-3, and we could skip the fish.

23:36We could have it from algae directly. So that could be a plant-based option as well.

23:41Peter Res: Ultimately, with most of these concerns, it's more about having the appropriate planning, i.e. there's not a specific nutrient that we must consume from meat, which is, I think, sometimes the confusion that some athletes come with, right? That, oh, I have to get this to get this nutrient, whereas... No, there's no nutrient that there's no solution for in another way. Are there any points where you think for certain athletes there would be any performance or recovery concerns or some type of trade-off with their performance? Because that's probably their main concern a lot of the time. And we have mixed research and most of it shows neutral effects and some show beneficial effects.

24:25especially on power to weight type of exercise that's probably related to energy density and the bulk of food and maybe that they people tend to eat a little bit less but yeah for some athletes that can be beneficial and some intermediate factors like blood flow antioxidants and bioactive substances in fruits and vegetables that could be interesting and could work anti-inflammatory which indirectly help performance and the carbohydrate intake is a lot better on plant-rich diet so there are numerous benefits and when planned well not really that much downside

25:02Peter Res: so with some of these changes i suppose there's three different perspectives we could look at we could have the conversation that relates to health benefits overall there'll be a second conversation that relates to ethics from the impact on animals that we mentioned earlier and the third maybe is which our focus today is if we're purely looking at this from a sustainability point of view and if we focus in on that one for right now and something you mentioned a bit earlier for athletes who are thinking about okay in order for me to make some changes that would have some type of benefit from a sustainability perspective how far might that athlete need to go because that might be an individual decision for each of those how far do you think they would need to go to at least get most of the potential benefit from their own perspective to creating this more environmentally friendly or sustainable dietary pattern if they're thinking about their own contribution like i mentioned i think the minimum would be 60 40 60 percent plant-based protein 40 percent animal based that would help a lot already depends a bit on on which sport but research shows around 25 to maybe 40 percent of plant-based protein in the current situation on average in athletes so that 40 60 should switch from animal based to a plant protein based that's sort of the minimum and it really depends on the athletes and where they are and like like i said i believe in small steps and incremental changes that's really hard to put a number on that one of the things you said towards the start of this discussion is that beyond the actual changes each of these athletes can talk about some of these issues and they can also depending on the athlete can function as a role model for others can you maybe elaborate on this point and talk about its importance and how you see that playing out yeah i think there's a big role for people with high societal status so to say and it could be movie stars it could be musicians and it could be athletes and maybe compared to a movie star an athlete has the extra benefit of showing that they can perform and be super healthy let's say so i think that those could be very powerful role models and so yeah we are i'm currently also working in in a project in the uk where we where we help athletes with their social media content and where we the athletes have two to four posts per month or so with plant-based either recipes or posts at least without pushing the idea that everyone has to become vegan because most of the athletes aren't vegan themselves but but just to show in a positive way okay this can be done and it looks very nice and very tasty and a sort of natural idea that okay athletes eat a lot of plants and thrive on it one of the other things you mentioned earlier is relation to your own work and thinking about with your career some of these things that you can do to have more of this impact in some of these types of issues.

28:01Peter Res: From your own perspective, what does success in that vein mean? In other words, for you, what are the things that you would like to come from the work that you're doing? So when we work with sporting organizations, I think it should be relatively easy to be vegan when you're an athlete and traveling and in all those kinds of competition situations. So that's one thing, that it's normalized, that people eat fully plant-based. And also that the norm shifts and that people, it shifts a little bit in the Netherlands, in the general population, but it's still like 55 % animal protein or so, but that we go to at least 60 % protein of plant-based sources.

28:44So I would say a shift in the big middle group on the outside and the carnivore, the people that maybe they don't want to shift and I don't want to pay much of my focus on that. But the big middle group can shift a little bit and facilitate the people in a more plant-based or vegan realm. So with regards to that goal you mentioned of for athletes who maybe are fully

29:07Peter Res: plant-based and are maybe having to travel or are training within a certain organization or a certain team environment maybe for people listening who are performance nutritionists or work within sporting organizations what are some of the things that you think they could do to actually help those athletes you just mentioned how how what things could they do to make it a bit easier that it becomes normalized that there are always those options available that for athletes who do want to consume a plant-based diet but there are less barriers what what are some places they could start with ideally change the default into plant-based and have the animal sources optional but i also realized that that is a big a big leap and that this is also very individual and like like i said depends a bit on the reasons in the context so i think the best thing to do is just ask this athlete what he wants and how he or she be facilitated in this because often they they know themselves pretty well because usually these are the better educated athletes and they have done their research and they know what they what they need and how they want it so talk to your athletes is probably the best idea so from the perspective then of athletes or even just people who are recreational exercisers or people in the general population even you mentioned that there can be a large environmental benefit to be gained from even small changes at first and then that over time people can add more if they wish.

30:33Peter Res: So with regards to that, if people are listening and they are all bought in on these potential benefits that know that there's pretty solid data of the benefit from an environmental perspective and sustainability perspective, some of these changes it could have, and they would like to start enacting those. With regards to some of those initial small first few steps, where would you point people to start? What would be the best places for them things to try first and then if all goes well they can try others what would those initial starting points be i would say choose some recipes that are that don't contain animals to start with so if you have a for instance a chickpea curry or a mexican dish with with mice and beans that's often very very tasty and and very low environmental impact if people could incorporate those kind of meals in their routine because often people have a very limited amount of recipes that they make over and over.

31:32And if you just swap at least one or two of those recipes of maybe 10, then that's already a big impact, especially when you swap your beef for something like pulses or lentils.

31:43Peter Res: Is there anything that we haven't touched on yet that you think is an important point in regards to this overall conversation or just something that you would like to make people aware of? Yeah, one thing, especially for the sporting context that we haven't touched upon is creatine. It's often as an argument for meat eating. And well, that makes sense. And we can make some of our own, but to have optimal amounts, we should probably supplement that. But again, that also counts for omnivorous athletes, because the amount that you get in meat and fish is still suboptimal. So if your sporting context requires optimal amounts of creatine, then you have to supplement.

32:21And that's for fully plantized athletes and that's for omnivorous athletes.

32:26Peter Res: Peter, before I get to my final question, for people who maybe want to follow more of your work or keep up to date with anything you've got going on or anything else on the internet you would like to point their attention towards, where are some places they can check out more of that work or that you would like to send them towards? Probably the best way to connect is via LinkedIn. I have Instagram, but I rather not spend too much time on Instagram. And otherwise, other sources, not necessarily with a performance angle, but for the sustainable nutrition, I think Dutch colleague Frank Holleman has a wonderful platform with the Fork Ranger, and he makes brilliant videos.

33:06So that would also be a good source, I would say.

33:08Peter Res: And for everyone listening, I will link to that in the description box where you're currently listening, so you can check those out. With that, Peter, that brings us to the final question I'd always end the podcast on. If you wish, this can be in relation to something else that we've discussed, but it is simply if you could advise people to do one thing each day that would have a positive impact on any area of their life, what might that one thing be? Connect with other people. And I think this is in relation to this topic. It's very important. and even on a broader level, I would say with extreme rising and they hate people that are connected and get together.

33:51So talk to other people and talk to your neighbors and preferably sometimes out of your bubble. I think that that's helpful for your own health and for the whole society.

34:00Peter Res: With that, Peter Reis, thank you so much for first of all, taking the time to come and talk to me today. It's very much appreciated and thank you for doing this. Thank you.

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