Manchester United’s Chris Smalling credits his wife Sam, a model turned photographer and animal rights activist, for showing him the way in his diet. Sam, a vegan, was eventually able to convert her husband to the same strict dietary practices, and the central defender sees this switch as instrumental to his recent durability.
Smelling has been better able to avoid injury, recover from fatigue faster and make the transition from offseason to regular season much quicker. The England international saw action in 46 games for United last season, and he believes his veganism has played an integral part.
“My wife is vegan and has been for a few years,” Smalling is quoted in the Telegraph.
“She’s often tried to persuade me. She cooks a lot at home and half the time I was eating vegan anyway. I wasn’t fully vegan, when we ate out, I would have what I normally have. After a while I started to cut out red meat, because red meat causes quite a lot of inflammation and I had a lot of tendinitis in my knee, which many footballers get.”
“Red meat causes a lot of that inflammation and when I was cutting that down, the tendinitis started to go. It used to be a problem in terms of warm-ups, because getting going was a bit of a nightmare. My tendinitis has got better and better.”
“Now I’ve gone fully vegan and normally the start of pre-season can be quite a tough time, but I haven’t felt it at all.”
“At first, I was half and half, so I was cutting out red meat but still eating other meat. But then the missus throws a lot of documentaries at you and it opens your eyes a little bit in terms of different industries and that persuaded me to go full vegan.”
Chris Smalling and the rest of his Manchester United teammates have a slightly shorter offseason than most of the Premier League as they will open the regular season in the very first match, as they host Leicester City Friday night.
Much has been made of United’s desire to find an improvement over Smalling at the centre back position in the transfer market this summer, but the 28-year-old has said that he’s not phased at all by the transfer rumors.
Smalling said this happens every summer, and yet he retains his place in the first team. Perhaps it is that vegan diet, at least partially, helping him maintain that competitive edge.
Right now it looks like United are running out of time to find an upgrade over Smalling. It doesn’t appear that they’re going to be able to land Harry Maguire or Toby Alderweireld or Jerome Boateng, so their chances of actually signing someone on their top list of targets seems to be dwindling by the day.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, is currently a regular contributor to SB Nation, WGN CLTV and Chicago Now.
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