Ryan Vail thinks beef jerky is the perfect food for runners - Nutritionists, what do you think?

Peter n Lois wrote:

Hours prior to setting my 5k pb, I was getting hungry as the meet I was at was around an 1.5 behind schedule. One of my teammates had a bad of jalapeno flavored beef jerky. As I needed something I tried it. Set a 10 second pb. I can't say it was because of the jerky but that's what happened...

I'm so happy you included that last sentence. I had an old teammate who ate McDonalds, got drunk, and ran a PR the next day. He swore that was the reason why he PRed. After attempting to duplicate the process a few times he failed miserably at PRing.

RedBloodSells:

Did you not read the articles that you linked up for everyone to read? They do not mention diet.

The three articles reference the same set of stats and the second one suggests that it is anything but diet:

"Analysis of the 2001 Census data revealed lower levels of education and income and poorer housing conditions for the Inuit-inhabited areas compared with Canada as a whole. Any or all of these, in addition to lifestyle risk factors and environmental conditions, could be at least partly responsible for the lower life expectancy in those areas.

In the three five-year periods studied, from 1989 through 2003, the infant mortality rate was approximately four times higher in the Inuit-inhabited areas, compared with all of Canada. However, the absolute difference in those rates fell by 30% from 1989 to 1993 to 1999 to 2003."

So they have a shorter life expectancy from skewed stats to do with infant mortality rates being higher and reading between the lines alcohol consumption as well as risk-taking behavior.....

They also make an assumption that the 20% of non-Inuit people that live in the traditional Inuit territories have regular life spans and then extrapolate that number from an assumed lower figure. The stats do not indicate Inuit life expectancy, but people who live in those areas. So they take a bit of a leap there.

I maintain, the Inuit survived history well with a diet of no plant-based food or an extremely low one.

Much of our longevity (statistically-speaking) is to do with factors such as being able to keep people alive with modern medical intervention, where they would have died a century ago, infant mortality rates dropping - I mean do the math - a baby dying is 0 years, that's a big hit to an average.

I would argue though that a vegan diet is probably healthier today because we have an abundance of whatever the heck we want to supplement our diet with.

Saying that, I went and bought some beef jerky the day the article was published and absolutely loved it.

The Inuit do not survive forever. Their life expectancy is substantially shorter than average Canadians. See citations below.

Just like how you could survive on only eating garbage; you can also survive only eating meat. But you will not live as long as others who eat a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, and grains.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18457208

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/080123/dq080123d-eng.htm

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2008001/article/10463/c-g/4149054-eng.htm

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-229-x/2009001/demo/lif-eng.htm

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In my childhood home, the front door foyer opened into a quasi living room replete with couches, table and tv, china cabinets and tons of bookshelves! We had a wide window facing our front lawn, with a long couch in front of it. A few paces prior was a ceiling hanging bookshelf. As a very young boy, my brother and I used one of the hanging bookshelf modules as a pretend basketball hoop. We did lots of make pretend activities. I even held pretend press conferences in kid sized NBA team warmups.

With the indoor pretend "hoop" I would run up and perform dunks. I was also fond of Beef jerky. Pretty soon I was pretending to be an all-star who landed beef jerky sponsorship, probably inspired by shameless tv ads. After performing

Bone throttling air acrobatics, I would turn around and sink my teeth into some beef jerky, looking at the imaginary camera and pronouncing the brand name and it's slogan.

Vail is savvy. He should continue to pursue this. Flip convention on its head and embrace the nitrates with jerky. Tastes a lot better than beets.

I didn't read through this entire thread, so maybe it's been mentioned, but there have been legitimate studies done at the university level on this exact subject. I was a subject (there were 10 of us) at UConn in 2011-ish (give or take a year) and we tested beef jerky as a recovery tool for endurance runners. I don't think it was elite runners because I'm certainly not that but it was I would say experienced runners.

You had to have a vo2max above 60 so again it wasn't Olympic athletes, but I know I was the slowest, heaviest and tallest in the study. I think my vo2max was like 65 or so and I was way behind the other guys in the study. From what I can remember we were given beef jerky and powerade after some of the runs, then just beef jerky, then just powerade, and occasionally nothing as a recovery. We would run like 10 different tests on the treadmill, they tested our urine (had to carry it around all day for days at a time - got awkward at work) that we were collecting on our own. Then there was a time when they collected our sweat after a run. I never really followed up on what the conclusions of the study were but in my opinion I think it was a good recovery tool, and some of the other guys in the study now swear by it. It was actually not the easiest $600 I ever earned.

Long story short, somewhere at UConn there must be a published study on this.

I heard that Harvard is wicked smart:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate/

Beef, not so good for you. Jerky, high in sodium.

Jerky must have medicinal properties. I just bought a few doses at the dispensary

anotherrunner wrote:

We would run like 10 different tests on the treadmill, they tested our urine (had to carry it around all day for days at a time - got awkward at work) that we were collecting on our own.

This sentence is puzzling to me.