MANN ON FIRE
Dublin star Paul insists going vegan hasn’t held him back...instead it has upped his performance
PAUL MANNION smiles when he says it’s been a year now since he went “cold turkey”.
Because the Dublin forward hasn’t let turkey or anything like it pass his lips for 12 months after deciding to commit to a vegan diet.
Even last month’s Christmas dinner wasn’t an exception.
“I had a lovely kind of ‘shepherdless’ pie that my mother went to an awful amount of trouble to make!” he said.
“But, yeah, instead of meat… it’s very similar to mince actually, it looks like it, there’s loads of brands making meat replicas, for lack of a better word.
“It’s soya-based some of it – seitan, which is like a wheat protein, then mixed with lentils and beans and put a nice little sheet of mashed potatoes on top of it. You wouldn’t know the difference, honestly. It’s good.”
Banishing such a rich source of protein like meat from his diet was a concern for the Dublin team’s nutritionist Daniel Davey but Mannion has successfully managed to work around that. The 26-year-old said: “He wasn’t too impressed at my initial decision to go for it!
“But, yeah, I just made sure to stay on top of what I was eating every day, making sure I was getting the right intake of protein and all that. And it’s been fine – I love it now. I still have a protein shake, one or two a day. So does everyone else on the team, they just have a whey protein. I just have this plant protein.
“Lots more nuts, legumes like beans, lentils, soya milk, soya yoghurts, tofu, tempeh, seitan, there’s loads of really. You can get creative I guess. In that two to three-month
period after I’d started it was the best I’ve ever had in such a short period of time.
“I gained muscle mass, lost body fat and it was really good so once I got that it was a bit of a relief and I felt comfortable with it.”
Mannion insists that he didn’t pursue the diet in a bid to “gain an edge”.
His decision was based on climate and environmental issues that have been brought into a sharp focus by the fires that have been engulfing Australia in recent months.
He said: “It’s just a more sustainable way of eating
– environmentally sustainable. I read up a lot about and I’m sure you all know yourselves the talk around climate change and the crisis that we’re in in that sense.
“To me, to change my diet was the easiest thing that I could do. People will drive electric cars or not drive cars – there’s lots of ways you can contribute.
“Australia is virtually on fire. Last year Chicago and North America was covered in ice sheets. People tend to think that it is far away but it is something that does affect Ireland.
“Last summer and the summer before, there was a drought, hose pipe bans and all sorts. I think it’s certainly something that is taking a hold in Europe, in Ireland, but more drastically elsewhere.”
As yet, none of his team-mates have followed his lead. Mannion sad: “I don’t try and convince any of them. I think people are more interested in it and I try not to be pushy about it because I know that people tend to just really hate pushy vegans.”