This weekend, Lewis Hamilton announced that he’s recently turned to veganism. The BBC reported him as saying that he hasn’t touched red meat for two years, stopped eating chicken at the beginning of the year, and recently gave up fish in favour of a plant-based lifestyle.
But unlike many athletes, he hasn’t done it simply for performance purposes.
Endurance athletes like Ross Edgley like to cut out animal products and up their micronutrient intake ahead of events to prepare the body better for undergoing a lot of stresses.
But Lewis says that his decision to go vegan is an environmental one. He doesn’t actually mention which documentary has spurred him on, but for those of us who spend our evenings glued to the vegan section of Netflix, it sounds like he’s been watching stuff like Cowspiracy and What The Health – two of the most terrifying films on the net.
‘As the human race, what we are doing to the world… the pollution [in terms of emissions of global-warming gases] coming from the amount of cows that are being produced is incredible,’ he’s reported to have said.
‘They say it is more than what we produce with our flights and our cars, which is kind of crazy to think. The cruelty is horrible and I don’t necessarily want to support that and I want to live a healthier life.’
