Potentially dumb race-day nutrition questions

Nutrition
1

  1. How does one determine the ratio of glucose to fructose in a given item of food?

  2. What category does maltodextrin fall into?

2

For (2), maltodextrin is made out of glucose.

3

Does that mean it falls entirely into the glucose bucket when looking at the glucose/fructose ratio?

4

Correct. All grams of carbs from maltodextrin are glucose.

Grams of carbs from table sugar, cane syrup, or high fructose corn syrup are 50/50.

So for example to get up to 30g of fructose and 70g of glucose per hour (100g of carbs total, and the upper limit of what you can probably actually get into your system), you could consume 60g of carbs from sugar, plus 40g of carbs from maltodextrin.

If the particular product has both maltodextrin and sugar, or maltodextrin and fructose, it’s hard to tell what the makeup is just from the ingredient list / nutrition facts, though. You’ll have to research the product literature and experiment with it.