Thought this might be interesting. It does seem -to me- as one more nail in the coffin of “hey, I do so much aerobic work all year, I can get away with eating cookies, snickers, and stuff”.
“[M]uscle tissues of the animals with high blood sugar displayed mostly new deposits of collagen, a rigid substance that seems to have crowded out new blood vessels and prevented the muscles from adapting to the exercise and contributing to better fitness.”
Caveat: I don’t think the testing involved very fit subjects (mice, or humans), but I’ll take the advice anyway
The TrainerRoad crew actually talked about this in a recent podcast. My takeaway was eat sugar during the workout when you want the blood sugar spike, skip it otherwise. As you said, don’t use the fact that you work out as an excuse to eat sugar in your daily life. But still fuel those workouts, especially high intensity.
Agreed. Chad mentioned several athletes and coaches that developed diabetes from a sugar / simple carb centric diet. Fuel the workouts and eat a well rounded nutrient dense diet the rest of the day.
Simple sugars are carbs, but carbs aren’t just simple sugars. Good sources of carbs, proteins, and fats is the key. Eat as many good sources of food off the bike as the others have said.
Most people recognise that fuelling workouts requires carbs, and fuelling races generally involves simple sugars, but I don’t know anyone who thinks they can get away with an unhealthy diet 24/7 because they exercise for 2 out of those 24 hours.
The nuanced point in the study is about effects on adaptation, not about general health considerations:
“you eat poorly, your health is likely to suffer” v. “you eat poorly, your adaptation to the same exercise is likely to suffer (and here is why)”.
Yes - my point isn’t disputing this, it’s disputing that there are significant numbers of people using this forum who “eat poorly”.
Many of us have sugar around workouts and racing, but I think most people on here at the least already understand what an overall balanced diet should look like.
Agree with your overall premise that simply labeling carbs unhealthy is super wrong. But those people are out there. I was one of them in my younger years. Exercising and eating anything I wanted and putting down the sodas. While never gaining a pound/kilo/stone and being told I’m too skinny and need to eat more.
I accept that high blood sugar leads to all kinds of problems. I don’t know that it’s possible to have high blood sugar while burning over 800kcal/hr if only 400kcal/hr can be delivered from the gut (90g/hr)
It’s interesting and ironic to me that we endurance athletes have this discussion about over utilizing simple sugars on the bike, while many diabetics out there are using splenda, whose main ingredient is maltodextrin. And they are pushed to use splenda. I recently saw diet lemonade at Chick-fil-A which was labeled as using splenda .
This question from the OP and discussion that ensues is great. Too bad the discussion can’t also happen within the community that needs it. Can’t tell you how many diabetics I’ve seen using splenda and told them to stop. They don’t believe, so I tell them to use it and check their glucose. Then they become believers.
Splenda is sucralose, not maltodextrin. Sucralose is primarily non-digestable and is orders of magnitude sweeter than sucrose, maltodextrin is essentially the opposite.
Right? Now I’m second guessing …
Well, I stand corrected … thanks a lot, Marketing!!
Wikipedia says it’s maltodextrin and dextrose and my MIND is BLOWN
Further, Splenda contains a relatively small amount of sucralose, little of which is metabolized; virtually all of Splenda’s caloric content derives from the dextrose or highly fluffed maltodextrin “bulking agents” that give Splenda its volume. Like other carbohydrates, dextrose and maltodextrin have 3.75 kcal per gram.
Honestly I think this kind of thinking is extremely common among the general population. People often think exercise is to loose weight and overweight/obese people just don’t exercise enough. Food somehow doesn’t even make it into the equation.
This is not an accident of course. It’s an extremely successful marketing strategy by the the food & beverage industry. Decades ago when scientists and doctors noticed, that putting high-fructose-corn-syrup into everything is a really bad idea, the industry responded by just blaming the consumer for their poor health. “it’s not our over-sugared, fatty products, you are just lazy”.
Which kind of spawned the whole health & fitness industry. Now these industries live in some sort of bizarre synergy.
but yeah, I don’t think anyone on this forum is really surprised or affected by the findings in the study. As Coach Chad preaches so often about the holy trinity of fitness: Training, Recovery, Diet. You really gotta nail all three for the serious gains.
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