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Want to get the most out of your food-exercise relationship? Instead of packing your diet full of typical meats, try experimenting with some amazing plant-based foods like the Hench Herbivore!
We met him in the boxing ring to find out how his muscle is getting towards being 100% plant-based!
Here are five delicious and nutritious plants he has picked out which make great additions to a fitness-focussed diet.
Beetroot
Beetroot is full of nitrates, which, once transformed into nitric oxide by the body, are powerful vasodilators. This opens up the blood vessels, allows oxygen and nutrients to more easily delivered to working muscles, plus helps to clear waste products from the body. The result is more stamina and you can get more work done!
Quinoa
Quinoa is a nutritionally dense grain (pseudo-grain technically). Hench uses it often to fuel his workouts. Relative to brown rice, it has much more of the minerals copper, iron and magnesium, with the added benefit that it has a whopping 14g of high-quality, muscle building protein per 100g dry weight!
Lentils
Lentils are the most protein dense of all the whole plant foods, with a 240g can containing a whopping 21.6g. A recent study found them to be the most antioxidant-rich of all the legumes. This is because of their high surface area (where many plants concentrate their antioxidants) to mass ratio.
Berries
Berries are the ultimate antioxidant powerhouses. Not only do antioxidants protect against cancer and slow the ageing process, they also help massively with recovery from exercise. Blackberries top the chart as the most antioxidant-rich local berry. However, Amla powder, made from the Indian Gooseberry, is the single highest antioxidant food in the world, with somewhere between one and two hundred times the power of the oft-lauded Blueberry!
Flaxseeds
Flaxseeds (Linseeds) make the list for both their extremely high levels of anti-inflammatory omega 3 essential fatty acids and their ridiculously high amount of lignan pre-cursors (100x more than any other food)! These polyphenols are transformed into cancer-fighting lignans by healthy gut bacteria. 50% of men that make it to age 85 will have prostate cancer. The men with the highest levels of lignans in their prostate fluids have the least incidences!
Visit the Hench Herbivore’s website here and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
The Plant Based Podcast 