Vegan diets : practical advice for athletes and exercisers.

With the growth of social media as a platform to share information, veganism is becoming more visible, and could be becoming more accepted in sports and in the health and fitness industry. However, to date, there appears to be a lack of literature that discusses how to manage vegan diets for athletic purposes. This article attempted to review literature in order to provide recommendations for how to construct a vegan diet for athletes and exercisers. While little data could be found in the sports nutrition literature specifically, it was revealed elsewhere that veganism creates challenges that need to be accounted for when designing a nutritious diet. This included the sufficiency of energy and protein; the adequacy of vitamin B12, iron, zinc, calcium, iodine and vitamin D; and the lack of the long-chain n-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA in most plant-based sources. However, via the strategic management of food and appropriate supplementation, it is the contention of this article that a nutritive vegan diet can be designed to achieve the dietary needs of most athletes satisfactorily. Further, it was suggested here that creatine and β-alanine supplementation might be of particular use to vegan athletes, owing to vegetarian diets promoting lower muscle creatine and lower muscle carnosine levels in consumers. Empirical research is needed to examine the effects of vegan diets in athletic populations however, especially if this movement grows in popularity, to ensure that the health and performance of athletic vegans is optimised in accordance with developments in sports nutrition knowledge

A first look at open charm production in Indium-Indium collisions at SPS energies

NA60 is an experiment at the CERN-SPS devoted to the study of dimuon production in heavy-ion and proton-nucleus collisions. The main topics under study are low mass vector meson production, J/psi production and suppression, and the sources of the dimuon continuum in the mass range 1.2 - 2.7 GeV/c(2). In 2003, NA60 collected similar to 230 million dimuon events from Indium-Indium collisions. We present preliminary results of the analysis of this data sample in view of measuring the open charm contribution to the dimuon spectrum. Although we are still working on the final background subtraction procedure, we can already demonstrate that the detector performance is good enough to allow the separation of prompt dimuons from muon pairs originating in distant D (D) over bar decays