I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced an increase in the serum cholesterol, LDL, or Apo B since starting high carb training.
Since starting a plant-based diet 8 years ago my baseline total cholesterol has been about 130, with an LDL of 72 and an Apo B of 67. These are all relatively low. My most recent labs were drawn 18 months ago. Before my diet change (8 years ago) my total cholesterol ran near 200.
So I was surprised this week when my total cholesterol came back at 200 again with an LDL of 115 and an Apo B of 96. I’m still on a plant-based diet. I have meat maybe twice per month and cheese (pizza) about 4 times per month so dietary cholesterol intake should still be low. My triglycerides were fine even though I have a personal and family history of high triglycerides.
My theories: Maybe I’m no longer eating as well as I did 18 months ago? Or, maybe I’ve been consuming too much espresso on my recent ride days, which is known to increase cholesterol compared to filtered coffee?
But by far the most obvious diet or lifestyle change has been my now consuming 90 grams per hour on most rides. I’ve read about some concerns about insulin resistance but my A1C is still below 5 and insulin levels were normal.
Ultimately I may repeat the lipid panel just incase there was a clerical error and my blood tubes were switched with someone else’s.
This is a great question that I think needs further study. I haven’t seen any studies on the impact of high carbs while cycling on blood lipids, etc. but it seems to me that taking in that volume of carbs must have an impact at some level.
TrainerRoad recently did a podcast (https://youtu.be/5JgYEA7BIm4?si=8dGnmLXmvQueXDAQ) talking about it from a pre-diabetes / diabetes angle, but if I recall correctly they didn’t really come to any conclusion on cholesterol side of things. They talked more about the potential impact on A1(c), insulin resistance, and other items related to diabetes.
Did your lipid profile improve and stay improved until the most recent one where you saw an increase? What I’m wanting to know is if you had a consistent improvement or did you have a one off good result? Diet probably only contributes about 10% to our lipid profile. The rest is genetic and ageing.
I had a similar finding recently, but unclear how much of it was high carb vs dietary changes. I recently went from mostly plant-based back to omnivore and my cholesterol went up quite severely. I also started training more seriously the last 8 months and was taking in a lot more high carb mixes while riding (skratch high carb) mostly.
My general understanding is that lots of carbs while training on the bike is ok, but still need to be somewhat careful after the fact. I’m definitely curious if later on it’s going to become apparent that thish high carb fueling strategy does have some bad consequences. I’m speculating, but it does seem like ingesting a bunch of pure sugar is not really something the body was designed to do,
I’ve seen a few people have reported stuff like this on the forum over the years. I seem to recall that it was usually triglycerides spinning out of control after they tried to implement 90g of carb per hour for every single hour of training.
There is a middle ground - no liquid carbs for smell the roses recovery or easy endurance rides. Just take a banana or two and water. Reserve the liquid cards for higher intensity rides where you burn through the kilojoules at a fast rate.
