Description
As an athlete, it’s important to maximize the intake of protein in order to rebuild and repair muscles after long workouts. Many plant-based athletes consume legume products, such as tofu and tempeh, in order to meet their protein macros. However, cooking legumes damages the available proteins, and some of the amino acids that are normally present in the living plants are destroyed by heat. There is an alternative way to increase protein intake, involving a very simple change to how food is prepared: don’t cook it!
In addition to eating protein, which requires the body to break down the pre-built proteins into their constituent amino acids and then rebuild the proteins needed for cell repair, basic amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, can easily be included in a plant-based diet via sprouting. This reduces the amount of energy needed to digest and assimilate the amino acid chains.
There are 16 amino acids used by the human body, and 8 of them are only available from food sources. Eating pre-built protein is less efficient than eating amino acids, since the body has to break the proteins back down to amino acids first before assimilation. Ingesting amino acids in addition to pre-built protein speeds up recovery and allows the body to use the energy normally expended in protein digestion to be used for other purposes.
The best source of amino acids is sprouted legumes and seeds. As the young plant is developing from seed into a seedling, it needs to build cells quickly, and produces amino acids so that its cell walls can be built. Eating the high concentration of amino acids available in a growing plant allows the body to use them immediately. Sprouts are the perfect workout food!
The goal of this book is to make sprouted and seeds fun to eat, and the recipes eliminate many of the high-fat and sugary ingredients (such as cashews, nuts, avocado, oil and sweeteners) that impede optimal athletic progress. These recipes are meant to deliver the highest protein content possible while still enabling a top performance diet to be both delicious and sustainable.
