David Carter: The NFL's 300 Pound Vegan
Last month Rich Roll did a two-hour podcast with NFL defensive tackle, David Carter. While I myself was unfamiliar with Rich Roll’s impressive accomplishments, I tuned into the interview because David Carter is a pretty vicious anomaly and I’m personally fascinated with athletics and nutrition given the role these two intertwined subjects play in my own life. This is where David Carter’s anomalous nature comes into focus: he’s a +300 pound strict vegan playing professional football for he most prestigious league in the world. He was recently a free agent coming back from a freak-accident knee injury that occurred in practice and just signed with the Chicago Bears for the 2015 season. Looking for the Cliff’s notes?
Carter, a Los Angeles native, graduated from UCLA and was a sixth round pick in the draft while his brother, Chris Carter, was a drafted in the fifth round on the same day in 2011 - both as defensive linemen; a first in the NFL’s nine-decade history. David has played for several teams during his young career as a professional and made waves when he switched to a 100% plant-based diet in February of 2014. This isn’t completely unheard of in professional football, as running back Arian Foster went vegan in 2012 (though he has not been a strict vegan in recent years), but it’s quite a feat when playing a position with an average weight of 304 pounds compared to a position averaging 215 pounds.
My first curious thought when reading that a 300 pound professional football player successfully transitioned to veganism was ‘what could he possibly be eating?’ Protein recommendations vary amongst athletes, trainers and doctors. Recommended daily values, much like Calories, vary from person to person, but the most common numbers tossed out are between 1-2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight, and unless he’s eating tofu by the crate, I couldn’t help but wonder how he’s possibly getting 300-600 grams a day, and taking it a step further, how many Calories does that ‘translate’ to? I wasn’t the only one wondering, as Carter immediately mentioned these being the most common questions he encounters on a daily basis. He currently eats approximately 10,000 Calories and just over 300 grams of protein per day.
Carter became a vegan after he “binge watched vegan documentaries on Netflix over the course of a weekend” with his wife, Paige, a longtime vegetarian that went vegan early on in their relationship. Watching Forks Over Knives and Frankensteer forced him to question whether or not his chronic inflammation, tendonitis and other injuries could be caused by his lifelong diet rich in barbecued meat and dairy. This was compounded by the fact that the “average death of a football player [in the NFL] is 56 years old…[due to] heart disease and stroke…”
Carter talks about how the transition itself has involved a lot of ongoing experimentation, which in my personal experience has been pretty typical as I dive deeper into nutrition. He surprisingly talked about the tendency of fellow professional athletes to know very little about nutrition, especially in big-money sports where nutritionists are on staff and regularly underutilized. He mentioned the teams having caterers and how pregame meals were a free-for-all,
“…just eat whatever man…eating ice cream, most people do that…hot wings, spaghetti, meat sauce, all kind of crap. Ice cream shakes!”
It makes sense, contact sports like football are brutal and the philosophy is aptly generalized as eat more to recover. He described his daily routine and likened it to being in a daily sixty miles perhour car crash. Podcast host Rich Roll interjected with his own experiences at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado where the cafeteria ironically features unlimited soda and ice cream and the two agreed that a big part of these tendencies lie in a pretty grim reality: a lot of these big-money sports have sponsors like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and that’s business as usual. Is it really so surprising that the events and athletes would be subjected to these foods to the point that their consumption is part of the sport’s culture?
But all things come with consequences, Carter ended up with chronic tendonitis, inflammation and injuries that resulted in long-term shoulder problems. The solution? Medications like Celebrex with their own negative side-effects. Upon deciding to go vegan, Carter began researching vegan bodybuilders and strongmen such as Patrik Baboumian to gain a better understanding of what to eat and why. After making the change he “…lost some weight but but was getting stronger, his tendonitis disappeared overnight, [his] arms were getting stronger.” His shoulder healed and his bench press went up to 470 pounds at a bodyweight of 265 pounds. He now weighs 310 pounds and is squatting 660 pounds. Returning to the cultural notion of meat and fast food, he was subjected to a degree of hostility for his choices:
“…it challenges their whole way of life. Eating steak, read meat, protein shakes. It’s to the point where football teams are sponsored by Muscle Milk, hot wing companies and McDonalds…it’s baffling [to them].”
Let’s recap Carter’s podcast alongside his dietary recommendations (he’s currently working with a publisher to release a comprehensive vegan cookbook):
- It’s hard to be a strict vegan in professional athletics
- Due to the culture of the organizing bodies with their individual cultures and corporate sponsors (NFL)
- Making the change due to a lack of resources for contact sports
- Requires a lot of experimentation that’s difficult for those that lack nutritional knowledge
- David Carter is 310 pounds and is currently signed as a nose tackle for the Chicago Cubs (2015 season)
- He can bench press 470 pounds and squat 660 pounds without consuming any animal products
- He uses a Vitamix to make Calorically-dense shakes several times a day, they are made from a variety of:
- Oats
- Wheat germ
- Black beans
- White beans
- Bananas
- Coconut cream
- Sunflower seeds
- Hemp seeds
- Beets
- Doesn’t eat processed foods but holds a lot of praise for the processed vegan alternatives (e.g. the substitute ‘meats’ and ‘cheeses’) that can help an omnivore transition successfully to veganism
- Continues to research nutrition in order to find combinations that give his body better access to the nutrients within the foods he consumes, from something as simple as soaking almonds and other nuts to making his own probiotics using sauerkraut
- Emphasizes creating meal combinations that yield complete proteins (e.g. rice and beans)
- He uses maca powder, spirulina and moringa as his pre-workout
- Spirulina has the highest protein content by weight of any food on the planet, and is itself 60% protein
- He tries to get 25-30 grams of protein per meal and tries to break these meals up into 500 Calories at a time
- Eats a lot of beans and rice with tomato and avocado and recommends this as a starter meal to anyone looking to go vegan and save money doing it
- Makes a variety of bean soups
- Carter is heavily involved in vegan activism, yoga and meditation
- He is working with schools to initiate simple changes such as Meatless Mondays
To close, Carter broke down his primary rationale for making the change, all due to a simple realization:
“The only reason to eat animals is for greed…where the animals are the middlemen to us.”
Original source: http://www.richroll.com/podcast/david-carter-300-pound-vegan/
Image source: http://images.newsflow24.com/557/557351/300pound-vegan-bears-dt-david-carter-reveals-his-meal-plan_1.jpg