I’ve really eased off on the carbs, I was getting to that 90g of carbs an hour for sweetspot which did feel good on the bike. I’m now doing a small bowl of oats with around 6 cherries and some peanut butter and no carbs on the bike and can nail through sweetspot work easily after a transitional period. I don’t know about the science and it’s so tricky and everyone is so different and I think anyone that tells you they know without doing extensive lab work and individual monitoring is missing the complexity of the subject… But, saying that, if I had to guess and it is just that, I’d say that there’s a good chance that taking 100g of carbs an hour on the bike may not be optimal from a long term health standpoint.
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I wonder how well blocks are digested. I’ll eat them on longer rides and it feels like they just sit in my gut.
They covered this, kind of, on the latest AACC podcast. The situation is basically ‘athletes can handle wonky diets etc much better than non-athletes, but they aren’t immune to pathologies’ and ‘what you consume during exercise has far less negative effect than what you consume during non-exercise’.
In other words, eat what you have to on the bike, but match that with high quality healthy food off the bike.
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Yes, maybe they’re right but there are plenty of athletes that have got metabolic disorders from eating tonnes of carbs on the bike. I prefer not risking it.
This isn’t a completely accurate statement. You’d have to determine whether those same athletes would have incurred the same metabolic disorders without eating tonnes of carbs, without being athletes, etc.
Yes, it isn’t completely accurate but nothing related to this topic is completely accurate.
I´m 177cm and 57,2kg eating 3110-3300 kcals (eating at least 2.2g of protein per kg) per day and still have trouble with maitaning weight.
So probably you don´t eat only 2000kcals or you are probably doing nothing (NEAT) only cycling so your body adapts to this. Try shock your body with some changes.
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Hmm interesting. Yeah, I recently started doing core (sixpack, lower back and shoulders). But what can I do to really shock my body??
How much do you ride in a week?
I put this in here, I find this work pretty impressive. They just published a second paper off this study. 120g/h!
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I’ve done both HCLF & HFLC. The latter for health reasons, the former for performance reasons. Both worked for their intended purpose. However, I would argue that if your only concern is weight loss, a HCLF diet coupled with aerobic exercise is going to benefit your overall health to a far greater degree (incl weight loss) than just a keto diet.
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This though sounds far from clear though. I take in simple sugars on the bike but always where possible take real food. I really struggle to believe we can get away with all of this… the summaries by Dr Greger on fruit vs sugar alternatives on your body is rather shocking to say the least (of course, in non-althletes).
How would fruit juice compare to malto or a fructose/glucose mix on the bike?
Something like cranberry or pomegranate juice.
Not an expert but it depends on what the sugar type is. I do know however friends here locallly who are ultra runners use apple juice with salt in and it works fine.
For all: the importance eating well outside of the sugar dumping during working out. Also, it mentions how fruit juice is in fact somewhat better for our guts in comparison to pure sugar.
Fruit juices probably have a lower glucose:fructose ratio than you want if you are really trying to maximize your g CHO/hr. Commonly agreed upon ratio for maximizing CHO absorption is 2:1 glucose:fructose.
Check out figure 3 in this paper! Fructose content in popular beverages made with and without high-fructose corn syrup - ScienceDirect
Quick note which should always be mentioned in glucose / fructose discussion: fructose is absorbed much much slower than glucose. It takes 90 minutes before it actually becomes available to the muscles.
So for long events, Beta Fuel is great because it provides 66% fast and 33% slow energy. And indeed this is possibly why apple juice + salt mentioned by @admigo works well for ultra runners.
But in a hard 1.5-2 hour workout, I’d tend to look for more glucose-dominant drinks, gels, and bars.
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I keep on reading this on the forums, not sure where this comes from. Actual data tells a different story, this is from one of the seminal papers on this:
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/japplphysiol.00974.2003
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That’s interesting. But it was produced in 2004, and I haven’t seen anything since that contradicts the scientific consensus that fructose needs to be converted to glucose in the liver before it can be used by the muscles.
The study’s evidence seems pretty sound. But I read through and it doesn’t seem to discuss HOW the fructose with its 13C molecules is oxidised so quickly. Would be interested to see if there’s been any theories on this.
While it is commonly believed that the liver is the main site of fructose metabolism, Jang et al. show that it is actually the small intestine that clears most dietary fructose, and this is enhanced by feeding. High fructose doses spill over to the liver and to the colonic microbiota.
And a more athlete centric discussion:
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Great. Will take a look when work allows time another quick deep dive…
I actually quite like being (possibly) wrong sometimes. It’s kind of fun, the process of thinking you’ve got everything sorted in your head then something new comes along and turns it upside-down.
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Maltodextrin+honey good DIY drink? What do you guys think?