06/30/2022
Can Athletes Go Low Carb?
Several years ago, I interviewed one of the nation's leading low-carb researchers, Dr. Jeff Volek, author of "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance" https://amzn.to/3OsLsGd
Here's what he had to say...
Dave (True Health Guy): OK, I’d like to shift gears for a minute. Studies with athletes. What studies have shown that the same athlete can perform better on a low carb diet than if s/he followed a balanced or high carb diet?
Dr. Volek: Well, it depends how you define low carb first. There’s been a number of studies that have compared high fat to high carb with athletes. And with the high fat diet, it’s usually 20% carb, but it’s not low enough in carb where you’re inducing nutritional ketosis. So you don’t have keto-adaptation. But, a lot of those studies are showing that when you give adequate time, there are consistent metabolic adaptations leaning toward burning more fat relative to carbs. How that translates into performance is a bit mixed.
Most of those studies usually show no difference in performance between high carb diets and high fat diets. There’s a couple of studies that show improved performance on high fat and you might find one with a decrement in performance, but it’s usually no difference or better performance.
But, very few published studies have examined keto-adapted athletes, which is when you take the carbs down further (about 50 grams or less per day).
Dave (True Health Guy): The only study I saw with athletes was the one by Dr. Stephen D. Phinney with cyclists discussed in your book.
Dr. Volek: Yeah, there’s really Steve Phinney’s and there was Paoli’s study from Italy that was just published.
Dave (True Health Guy): What was Paoli assessing – strength or endurance?
Patrick (post doc also attending the interview): They looked at a variety of measures with gymnasts including push-ups, vertical jump, and VO2 max VO2 max, or maximal oxygen uptake, is one factor that can determine an athlete's capacity to perform sustained exercise and is linked to aerobic endurance. The study was very regimented, had good compliance and the athletes consumed roughly 20 grams of carbs a day.
These gymnasts adapted well – vertical jump and power didn’t change. Their ability to do push-ups, pull-ups, and aerobic capacity did not change after five months of eating virtually no carbs.
Dr. Volek: My research group also performed a low carbohydrate diet and resistance training study. We focused on body composition and metabolic responses. We didn’t show a decrement in performance; in fact the participants got stronger, as you’d expect with training for both the high carb and low carb groups. But, there were differences in body composition that were favorable toward the low carb.
Dave (True Health Guy): I saw pictures from one of your presentations on YouTube featuring some athletes who may have tried low carb dieting including Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn and US professional tennis player Marty Fish. Have you researched with them?
Dr. Volek: We’ve been studying more the ultra-endurance athletes.
Dave (True Health Guy): Cyclists?
Dr. Volek: Mainly runners, actually. My research team studied runners at the Western States 100 last year. The Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run is the world’s oldest and most prestigious 100-mile trail race. Starting in Squaw Valley California near the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics and ending 100.2 miles later in Auburn, California, Western States. There were several athletes restricting carbohydrates to some extent. In fact, the guy who won the race, (Timothy Olson), was a self-proclaimed low-carb athlete. He not only won, but he set the course record.
Dave (True Health Guy): Was he keto-adapted? ( keto-adaptation – concept that the human body requires a few weeks to adapt to eating a low carbohydrate diet, roughly 50 or less grams of carbs per day.)
Dr. Volek: It’s tough to say. We did not have blood (for research purposes) on the guy who won, but we had blood on a couple of other guys that were in nutritional ketosis. Most of the low carb athletes are eating some carbs during the race, but the amount of carbs they are eating is such a low amount of calories relative to the energy expenditure. So we don’t really know, but there’s a good chance that these guys are keto-adapted even when they’re eating small amounts of carbs during exercise. However, this is something we have not studied in detail and requires further experiments.
Dave (True Health Guy): So are you looking forward to studying that?
Dr. Volek: We’re trying to, yeah. It was a great experience to establish some relationships with the event staff and several athletes that are training using a low carbohydrate diet. So, we’d like to go back. But the hardest part of doing research is finding adequate funding. It’s hard enough to get funding to study a mainstream area of science, let alone a controversial topic such as low carb. Also research funding is targeted more at clinical work that human athletic performance so it’s especially hard to fund this type of work.
To learn more about Dr. Volek's book, the The Art & Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance, click here. https://amzn.to/3ywuiBS
SuperStarch - A Revolutionary Sports Drink?
Dave (True Health Guy): That reminds me of a sports drink product, SuperStarch. (a healthy, natural, gluten-free innovation in carbohydrate nutrition). From what I read in your book, SuperStarch is a complex carbohydrate (derived from non-GMO corn) that uniquely stabilizes blood sugar and causes virtually no reaction from the fat-storage hormone insulin.
It’s a revolutionary sports drink?
Dr. Volek: Yeah, that’s another fascinating discovery.
Dave (True Health Guy): Based on the positive reports I’ve read about it, it seems as though it would be more mainstream eventually.
Dr. Volek: Yeah, it's getting there. UCan is a relatively small start-up company that launched about five years ago. They are a slow but continuously growing Connecticut based company.
Dave (True Health Guy): Have there been studies with it? I saw the difference in how the drink affects insulin in a much slower, more subtle and longer lasting way than traditional sports drinks with sugar (glucose, sucrose, maltodextrin).
Dr. Volek: The product was developed initially to help manage kids with glycogen (stored carbohydrate) storage disease in which they lack the enzyme glucose-6-phosphatase in the liver so they struggling maintaining blood sugar levels. It’s a rare, devastating disease for the kids and their families. These kids need to be fed every couple of hours because the risk going hypoglycemic (low blood sugar). This is day and night, everyday of a kid’s life and you can imagine what stress this causes to families to get up in the middle of the night to feed their kid. A lot of them have feeding tubes.
There was a researcher in Scotland who was interested in this disease and he was screening a large number of carbohydrate sources with various processing techniques to find one that would provide a sustained maintenance of blood sugar. He discovered superstarch and has the patent on technology. So that is how it was discovered. It’s a waxy maize, high amylopectin (a soluble polysaccharide and highly branched polymer of glucose found in plants) corn starch. But that’s not what’s unique about it.
It goes through this meticulous 24-28 hour heat-moisture application that changes somehow, and we don’t know exactly how), the way it’s exposed to enzymes in the GI tract so that it gets slowly absorbed. It’s not a resistant starch, which would get stuck in the GI tract and not get absorbed. Instead, it is fully absorbed so it has 4 kcals/gram, but the absorption is slowed down considerably. There’s been two published studies in the glycogen storage disease literature showing the starch extends maintenance of blood sugar. This is validated by real-World clinical results that allow kids to now go 8-10 hours now in between meals.
And there’s one clinical study with Type-1 diabetics who often have problems with nocturnal hypoglycemia (when they go hypoglycemic at night). The results showed that superstarch before bed resulted in less hypoglycemia.
And then there’s one study in athletes that the company funded a couple of years ago at the University of Oklahoma, which is probably the one you may have heard about.
Dave (True Health Guy): When I first learned about these products, I was surprised more athletes weren’t using them.
Dr. Volek: Well there’s no doubt this starch gets absorbed very slowly and because of that it has distinct metabolic and hormonal effects.
Dave (True Health Guy): So could you see it becoming more popular long term?
Dr. Volek: It’s clearly a better choice than sugar, which is pretty much 99% of the other sports drinks out there. Whether it’s glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltodextrin, it’s all fast-acting carbs. I don’t see a lot of benefit to spiking glucose and insulin levels, even if you’re an athlete who can tolerate it to some extent compared to a person who has insulin resistance.
The sugar-based supplements are problematic in many of the ultra endurance runners who have to consume a lot of gels and drinks to complete their training and events. We are beginning to learn that over-emphasis on sugary fuels and carbohydrate oxidation can lead to GI complications, inflammation, oxidative stress (a condition of increased oxidant production in cells characterized by the release of free radicals and resulting in cellular damage) and cell membrane damage. It’s well known in that community (ultraendurance athletes) that a lot of them are known as ‘vomiters’ because they just can’t tolerate the carbs. They know they need the energy and there’s no other alternative so they keep chucking it in, but then a lot of them just vomit multiple times during these races.
Anecdotally, when athletes switch to superstarch, they don’t have that problem. Partly because I think superstarch is such a huge molecule it has an extremely low osmolality (concentration of a solution) and that is one of the big factors in palatability. The higher the osmolality, the longer it will sit in your stomach and potentially cause gastric problems. So the superstarch is extremely hypotonic and gentle on the stomach.
There are also a lot of the athletes restricting carbs that may not be using Ucan’s product. They also experience benefit from not taking all these gels – in terms of GI symptoms and faster recovery. I did not appreciate that because I’ve only been recently exposed to this elite group of endurance athletes. My background as an athlete and as a researcher has been in the strength and resistance training world.
To learn more about SuperStarch products, including drink mixes and bars,
click here. https://amzn.to/3xZsCPO
Thanks for reading - Likes, Comments and Shares are welcome!
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