“Veggie” diet blamed for poor performance of China’s women volleyball team MercoPress 27th July 2012
Fearing tainted meat, China’s women’s volleyball team has stuck to a strict vegetarian diet for the last three weeks, which the team’s coach is now blaming for his athletes’ abysmal performance.
The Chinese team lost four of five matches at a world tournament that ended Sunday in Ningbo, China, falling to the United States, Brazil, Turkey and Thailand.
While Brazil and the US are powerhouses in women’s volleyball, Turkey and Thailand didn’t even qualify for the 2008 Olympics, where China won bronze.
“They have showed significant decline in their strength and fitness” coach Yu Juemin said of his squad after Sunday’s defeat to the US. “We are wary of meat tainted by lean-meat powder, and we didn’t eat any during the game period,” Yu told the Shanghai Daily newspaper.
Muscles need protein, complete protein or muscles will atrophy. Loss of bone density follows.
A veggie diet that includes all needed essential amino acids is easily done. Screwing up a veggie diet is easy, too. Blaming the diet doesn’t work. If it was in fact what the team ate, the problem wasn’t that it was veggie. Except that a diet that includes meat is alot harder to screw up.
I’ll agree. This is nonsense. Either they had a poor person planning nutrition or it’s a foolish excuse.
How many people are going to take the time to research alternate forms of complete protein over fish or animal sources?
I should think the coach of an Olympic team would.
When people become truly spiritual they wont kill animals for food. In the meantime some of us gotta have meat. But I wouldn’t eat meat tainted by “lean-meat powder” either. Why didn’t they get themselves some Aussie grass fed beef?