Great thread idea. I needed a soapbox to stand on. Thanks, and enjoy!
Unpopular
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More fructose in your fuel will make your gut feel better, your current power output easier, and your health better.
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Caffeine is not a meaningful diuretic.
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Sugar is better fuel than 90% of the products on the market, and is roughly equivalent to the rest.
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Sodium is the only electrolyte you need for 99% of your riding hours. Probably 100%.
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Glycogen matters less than blood sugar during exercise.
Shots fired
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Existing and upcoming product nutrition facts have more influence on science, than science.
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Branding & marketing teams have more influence on product ingredients than scientists do.
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Pepsi’s Gatorade Sport Science Institute (GSSI) is a marketing wing more than it is a science wing.
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Existing product nutrition facts have more influence on nutritional recommendations in the media, than science.
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Companies decide on product nutrition facts and ingredients before they hire the scientists who should be making those decisions.
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The best sport & sport nutrition scientists end up working for very large food and technology companies, where they no longer do the best science.
SUPER unpopular
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You should never sweat test. Even if it’s free, easy, and accurate.
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Most variables tracked and calculated in sport, if used for prescriptive purposes make people worse at their sport. Most benefits of said tracking are placebo or psychologically mediated by increasing user adherence to consistent training. Most monitoring and tracking is an effective psychological hack to get humans to improve their choices, not to inform their choices.
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A liquids-only fueling & hydration approach is the best for performance, for all durations of exercise activity, up to, but not limited to, 36 hours of continuous exercise.
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Keto may not meaningfully harm performance or health for some people. It may work as well as they are ever able to make high carb fueling work for them.
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Keto does harm health and/or performance for other folks, sometimes catastrophically.
Triggering
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If there is a name assigned to sugar and salt, like “Speed Nectar” in our app, then you are much more likely to try using sugar and salt as all or part of your training and racing fuel than if we do not associate those two ingredients with a name. This remains true for even the most analytically minded and rational folks with advanced nutrition education.
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The most analytical cyclists still make most of their decisions almost completely based on subconscious emotions and then do post-hoc rationalization to justify their emotional decisions. Data is emotionally comforting to many cyclists and provides a convenient means of rationalization.
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There is no chronic metabolic benefit that confers performance enhancement in any scenario, from periodically limiting carb intake, at any time, under any circumstances. The only exception is: “I just don’t want to bother with the logistics of fueling well on my race day so I’d rather be more fat adapted” which is a perfectly valid reason to periodically limit carb intake.
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There is someone reading this who does not feel comfortable interacting here because they fear judgement, ridicule, or that some level of social conflict might happen if they do, because they have seen a lack of empathy and lack of emotional validation in other threads. Only you have the power to make that person feel more comfortable because TrainerRoad does an excellent job moderating the forum. It might mean pondering your engagements a few seconds longer to consider a wider audience. Many of the audience I am referring to right now are women.
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You are dramatically more likely than population average to have ADHD and/or be on the autism spectrum if you are reading this post.
(don’t worry. the author of this cycling forum post is reasonably successful and has pretty okay-ish QoL even though he has both ADHD and is on the spectrum, and is now talking about himself in the third person. He’d like to inform you that you’re in good company, FWIW. YMMV, just my 2 cents, grain of salt, n=1 [insert other sign-off abbreviation commonly used by impatient ADHD autistic forum users].)
This was fun. Hope you enjoyed! 