You can get table sugar for $0.07/ounce from Costco.
I currently buy pure glucose for $0.50/ounce on Amazon.
I also buy pure fructose on amazon for $0.57/ounce on Amazon.
My workout and race nutrition currently involves mixing the glucose and fructose at a 2:1 ratio totaling 60 g of carbs per hour.
My question is as follows - Can I instead take that same 60 g of carbs and have 75% of it come from simple table sugar/sucrose (45 g) since sucrose is a 1:1 of glucose to fructose? The remaining 25% would then be pure glucose.
This would reduce my cost of fueling and make one of the ingredients more accessible. I just don’t hear anyone talking about it. Has anyone also thought of this method to achieve a 2:1 ratio? Thanks!
Maltodextrin and Fructose - as has been thoroughly discussed here in the forum. A quick search of “Maltodextrin” will give you way more reading materials than you may have bargained for.
My question was more revolving around sucrose/table sugar since it’s cheaper than pure fructose. If you can link me to a discussion about table sugar and bringing it to a 2:1 ratio, I’d love to read it.
There is definitely discussion of using table sugar and/or Gatorade to cut cost in the massive thread. Unfortunately for me, it makes me sick to my stomach, so I’ve just stuck to the M:F mix which works for me.
If you want 2:1 glucose:fructose, just use 2:1 sugar:malto, by weight.
Yes, it works great.
I’d probably opt for more like 8 parts sucrose, 1 part maltodextrin, for a 5:4 ratio of glucose to fructose (ie. 1:0.8 glucose:fructose ratio), if I were going to use anything but plain sugar. 1:1 glucose:fructose ratio works just fine for lots of folks. Sucrose is just that.
Asker Jeukendrup has a good blog on the use of multiple transportable carbs. One point he makes on that is that sucrose behaves as if it is just glucose and not as multiple carb sources as one might think to quote from the blog:“Studies suggest that carbohydrate oxidation from a sucrose drink is similar to glucose and does not reach the high oxidation rates observed with glucose and fructose (or other multiple transportable carbohydrates).”
His point is that the research says you need to saturate the glucose transport path first which means 60g glucose per hour, then add fructose to utilize the secondary pathway for fructose and it seems that up to 1:1 ratio, if tolerable, is good for performance.
Since maltodextrin is metabolized as if it were glucose the 60 grams/hour can be malto and the rest fructose up to the 1:1 ratio. So this is interesting and why one might not get what you expect our to sucrose because of the unusual utilization effect.
Interesting. So if you’re bigger or have higher power and can consume 120g/hour without issue, you shouldn’t have to worry about the saturation effect? Could this explain why some riders have gut distress when adding fructose? Because that’s what’s left over if you’re not burning well in excess of 60g/hour of glucose?
I bought 12lbs of Maltodextrin for 17c per 30g of carbs with free shipping. The challenge has been finding fructose as cheap. Nevertheless I do 40/20 + a gel or rice cake an hour which gets me to 80/90.
This is what I’ve been saying all along. Up to around ~75g/glucose(or maltodextrin) per hour the rate of CHO oxidation is limited to around ~1g/min. Even though fructose is a parallel pathway it is less efficient as it needs to be processed by the liver. Even at higher consumption rates its still limited to around 0.5g/min(30g/hour) conversion to actual useful glycogen from all the studies. So while there has been lots of evidence now that people can consume up to 120-150g/hour, there isn’t corresponding evidence that this leads to higher CHO utilization yet.
yes, sorry! Edited. Thanks for catching that.