I was listening to Kilian Jornet talk to Jack Burke ( Unsupported browser ) and he spoke at length about being a health athlete in the long term.
Lots of the research is problematic as the health risks are muddied by the simple macro / micro content of the foods that also happen to be eaten. Of course a diet high in maltodextrin is going to, in the average person, give them diabetes. But obviously this doesn’t necessarily hold true for the endurance athlete.
Similarly the definition of UPF is gimmicky and sometimes unhelpful, but it’s the easiest way to describe this.
He said that he also really only uses refined sugars for racing - and for training just relies on things like cooked potatoes, rice, fruit etc.
I suspect that the odd day of slamming gels during a race isn’t going to be the end of the world, but - should I switch from malto to unrefined sugar to be healthier in the long term?
Maybe a topic to discuss - or maybe not wanted la la la la quiet please I wanna drink my Maurten without thinking about health.
None of this scales to a useful degree, due to fibre, digestibility etc. 100g+ of carbs an hour needs pure refined sources of glucose and fructose to be viable, and not doing as many grams of carbs per hour as you can will make you lose a race.
OP uses the phrase “Of course a diet high in maltodextrin is going to, in the average person, give them diabetes.” No not of course.
This UPF talk sounds very much like anti-vax talk to me.
Eat a decent diet of wholefoods that has very little sugar in it for the bulk of your life, but to fuel for high level endurance cardio exercise, use whatever sugar sources are most digestible.
Concerns about maltodextrin seem to be a recurring theme on the forum. A search could probably find you some of the info you’re looking for.
Back when I listened to the fast talk podcasts when they were part of the Velonews podcast Trevor Connor, who holds a nutrition degree and isn’t a huge fan of off the bike sugar judging by his affinity for paleo, stated that during exercise carbohydrate intake i.e. sugar bypasses insulin and goes straight to the cells and as such concerns about insulin sensitivity or insensitivity as a result of sugar taken in during cycling are not merited. If you’re trying to carb load with gels and drink mixes off the bike then yes there might be a problem. But on the bike during intensity or towards the end of a long ride where thanks to blood shunting your body is less concerned about working the stomach/digestion and more concerned about the working muscles you might find it hard to get enough nutrition out of solid, complex foods let alone trying to convince your body to let them in. By both recommendation and my own experience I’ll usually start fueling during the first part of a long ride with solids like skratch bars and rawvelo bars and then switch to skratch chews (first ingredient sugar, second glucose) and the occasional gel. I can’t convince myself to eat anything solid towards the end of a long ride because it’s usually hard to chew and sits like a rock in my stomach. I’ll also add the stacy simms is not a fan of gels for her athletes either and tends to recommend chews instead.
If your concerns lie with malto then you can look to gummies/chews that are glucose based or maple syrup instead. The aforementioned skratch chews are good and my daughter had some gummies from easter whose first ingredient was glucose syrup so those are out there. Trevor Connor’s go-to ride food was said to be swedish fish but the canadian ones because they had no corn syrup. Untapped maple syrup packs can be used in lieu of gels, taste damn good and also have a coffee/caffeine version as well as a salt added version.
If you’re just plain concerned about sugar at this point then yes bananas and grapes both have glucose as their predominant sugar over fructose. Just make sure your bananas are very ripe so that most of the fiber has been converted to sugar. There are baby food squeezer packs you can get with banana/blueberry, sometimes beet that are easily transported.
Agree, UPF (if I read this correctly as ‘ultra processed food’) is a form of production, not an ingredient, so “UPF free” sounds a bit weird.
The definition of UPF is a bit vague, but usually means something that needs industrial-style processing. There are unprocessed foods (e.g. fresh fruit), processed foods (some form of processing, eg. peeling, cooking, squeezing), which also often includes traditional processing (eg. pickling) and stuff you could do at home. And then there’s UPF, which is the industrial stuff where foods are refined to some form of base (fat, sugar), and put together again in some other form.
If you want to avoid UPF foods, I guess you’d have to stick to real food stuff like bananas, raisins, potatoes, and home-made bars etc. (Even then, you’ll have to be careful with the ingredients)
I think both maltrodextrin and sugar fall under UPF. If you want liquid fuels, marple syrup or honey sound like non-UPF options - though both might also be processed in a way that makes them UPF.
It is at the very least goal post moving. People said no processed food! that was countered with things like cooking an egg is processing it, peeling a banana is technically processing it. So they moved onto ultra processed and that seems to be vague and entirely depends on who you are talking to what it means.
That link has a graphic of the process and that seems pretty involved, it might be one less or one different step than the conventional way. Calling it not UHP seems like very sketchy marketing.
Understanding that the UK might have strict regulations is some of the issue possibly there is no real definition of UPF there and they can get away with it?
As someone who rolls their eyes anytime they see/hear UPF, even my meter pegs after looking at that graphic that it would be pretty darn processed.
Who are these “people” and “they”? This sounds like an kindergarten level argument.
It’s hard to believe that anyone would think that peeling a banana is “processing” it.
Almost all foods humans eat are “processed” to some degree - farmed, harvested, animals slaughtered, fermented, washed, peeled, cooked, salted, etc, etc.
It’s pretty easy to distinguished between shit food and whole foods.
They if you mean who was saying no processed foods would be supermarket walkers that walk through stores and tell people not to eat XYZ, usually while selling foods with those ingredients in it just for more money and many times with more processing.
They if you mean the people pointing out a banana being peeled is processing would be the people who counter the POS supermarket walkers.
But this has existed pre social media so those are just modern examples.
It is funny you said that because I kind of said it as a joke, but have heard that said as an example, then the link to the protein powder company above actually used peeling a banana as an example of processed food.
Personally, I wouldn’t take health advice from Kilian Jornet or any pro athlete.
Use common sense. I get it, some A type athletes have no common sense. More is always better. They’ll drink 100g of sugar for every single hour of training because it’s “better”. But one can use common sense and a sliding scale.
For easy endurance that isn’t extremely long you can eat a breakfast and then take a couple of bananas and maybe a bar in your pocket and then eat whole food afterwards. If the ride is longer, you can supplement with lower levels of sugar if needed. If you stay in zone, you’ll be burning a lot of fat anyway.
If you are doing a vo2max level workout, threshold workouts that burn a lot of kjs, then go for more sugar. 60-80g is probably fine. When you are trying to win the Triathlon world championship or the Tour de France, then train your gut for 120g, optimize your gluecose/fructose ratio and go for the gold.
Eat clean outside your performance window. When you need to perform, it’s fine to use sports nutrition products in my opinion. You run into all kinds of other issues trying to only “whole food” your way through huge calorie/carb requirements.
No doubt being a performance-focused endurance athlete isn’t likely to be the healthiest thing for you long term, but as long as you’re committed to it, be committed to it. When you decide that performance isn’t as important to you as your long-term health, you’ll make other changes including likely reducing how much you train and the type of training you do relative to what you do to be a high-performance endurance athlete. I’d rather be all-in on performance or all-in on health and longevity than half-assing both at the expense of each other. JMO, but if performance is what you’re after, don’t worry about the random labels influencers put on products that help you perform.
There’s a lot of straw man and whatabboutery going on in reply. Maybe I phrase my post badly.
I wasn’t starting a thread about high carb Vs low carb - I didn’t say anything about insulin sensitivity or otherwise, nor the impact of refined sugars on diabetes in sportspersons. I was suggesting that the research about food processing is muddied by the impact of the content of the food as much as the residual chemicals used in manufacturing and preserving.
The question was more about finding high carb sports nutrition sources that don’t fuck up your gut microbiota and / or fill you with preservatives and chemicals.
Has anyone tried to hit 120g/h without using malto / fructose powder?
I wouldn’t take health advice from kilian Jornet
A strange flex given that he’s been a part of and written and probably contributed more to the science of sports performance and nutrition than any other athlete alive. He’s very much a sensible person to listen to - especially as he’s directly quoting primary research .
Concern about pesticides, chemical additives and preservatives is equivalent to being an antivaxer
Sorry for the misunderstanding. When someone mentions UPFs that’s a whole weird hornets nest. Junk food has always been junk food regardless of “processing.” Sports food is just junk for with purpose, doesn’t mean it’s “healthy.” I’m going to have to look more into Kilian Jornet. Sounds interesting.
For what you’re looking for what sounds like simple on the bike nutrition I’m going to stan for Skratch and untapped some more (and the baby food is still useful). Skratch bars are 200 kcal per, their normal drink mix and chews the first ingredient is sugar and I don’t think there’s malto to be found anywhere in their line. I’ve just started messing with their super fuel drink mix and it’s been doing me pretty well. It uses cluster dextrin rather than malto which by the descriptions I’ve read is a glucose chain rather than the glucose/fructose combo of malto. You might shoot them a line to see what the potential gut differences there might be between that and malto. The nutrition facts on the bag has their max dose of 7 scoops listed to yield 400 kcal but at the suggested 4 scoops gets around 228. I also just got some maurten because I’ve been wanting to try high cal drinking (plus strava coupon) and without a doubt the skratch seems to be better on all fronts. Only interesting thing about the maurten is that it has bicarb in it so curious what effect that might have. Untapped maple syrup is literally boiled tree sap and you can’t get much more natural than that if you buy the straight syrup packets. They also make a drink mix which I like the black tea lemonade flavor. 80 kcal per serving so if you can take doubling that you’ll get close to 200 kcal. Would be thick but it’s like riding your bike with a bottle full of southern sweet tea. Curious if the issues with maltodextrine come from the fact it’s generally a corn derivative with all the fun to be had there.
As for your gut concerns I think this like many things is a moderation question. As @kurt.braeckel said high level athletes have to do this stuff to themselves to be able to train and compete at a high level repeatedly. We’re taking a healthy exercise to the illogical extreme. If that’s not you moderation will be key. Fueling for workouts is crucial but that’s easily done with real food prior to. Any rides under 2 hours probably don’t need much if any on the bike fueling unless you’re going all out but if that’s the case then the quick sugars are once again going to prove their use (see the recent post on the forum asking how to eat on hard rides). I don’t fuel for TR workouts of any type. I’ve stopped bothering with food in my pockets for anything shorter than 40 miles. Above that is when I consider anything and as I said it starts with bars and chews. SiS gels and calorie bottles only come in to play on long rides or during events which are few and far between. I think if you limit how often you take the full gasoline and eat well and properly during your daily life your gut will have time to recover between burn sessions. It’s safe to assume your real food off the bike diet has far greater impact on your gut biome than the junk food you consume occasionally on the bike.
Why I responded the way I did: it is incredibly hard to get good absorption from real food and even processed solid food at that level without causing other issues: GI distress, cramping, etc. If pacing is relatively low that is one thing. For ultras and such, that’s another. But the processed sugars (liquids and gels) are really the way to go for most IMO.
I learned this the hard way during training and racing my first 70.3 where I screwed up my nutrition so badly I was a full 35min off goal time due to having to walk significant portions of my run from cramping, GI distress, and lack of energy. Coke saved me and got me through it. Doesn’t get more UPF than that.
I have also had a few athletes that try to avoid sugar and gels and would eat bars and solid food (fruits and such) during hard 2hr workouts but struggled with issues and the fact that the macros in the bar aren’t nearly as readily available. The real food has to break down and that takes resources (blood) away from working muscles. At really hard efforts your body just won’t digest it and you end up with this useless brick in your stomach until the effort backs off.
It’s one thing to fuel a fully Z2 6hr ride on solids and real food. It can be done… but even then, I don’t generally recommend it. Once you introduce real intensity… don’t.
It’s just so much easier to get what you need, customized to your tastes and needs, cheaply, and without issues discussed above through the “UPF” sports nutrition products.
But again, as I said in my first post, being a high performing endurance athlete in itself isn’t the best choice for health long term regardless of fuel source so this choice boils down to priorities. What it sounds like you’re doing is “half-assing” both. If you want to perform, perform. If you want to be healthy long term, then there are probably other adjustments to make to balance your food choices with your sports training as well. I don’t personally believe you can truly optimize both simultaneously, so I’m not sure you should try.
TLDR: stick with the processed sugar for as long as you want to really compete.
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