Low Carb diet for endurance athletes also good for UL?

Personally, i firmly believe that FAD DIETS are a bad thing.
I just eat home-cooked plain food (thanks to my wife).

Cheers

“Some endurance athletes are doing this and have been successful … ”

Besides Phinney and Volek, name a few others and what they have accomplished.

What Top 10 performances are by ketotic athletes??

And, how much of a lifestyle change do you want to undertake to the sake of a couple of two week trips?

Just asking …

If  ketosis was the most efficient metabolic state, the body would have evolved to prefer it long ago.  It is a backup system for when sufficient carbs to support the metabolism of fat in the Krebs Cycle are not available.  A fad is a fad is a fad, and this is yet another example of H. L. Mencken’s timeless wisdom:  “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the American Public’.

I’m not really advocating this.  It just shows up in my email.  The SUL application of it came to mind.

I’m not saying that this is the diet if you want to win endurance events, just that those two winning an endurance event shows that it will work.  Although we don’t know if there were other side effects.  I seem to remember that people on a diet like this find it boring so may be difficult for most people.  But the Atkins diet is successfully followed by many people which I believe has you in Ketosis.

Since fat has twice the caloric density, you could cut your food weight in half.

Lets say you wanted to do a 2 week hike without resupply – some crazy Skurka expedition or something.  Maybe 1/2 pound per day rather than 1 pound per day?  14 pounds instead of 28 pounds?  It could make a trip doable that would otherwise not be.

he he he

I remember some guy saying he had done a week-long walk on about 300 g of dry food per day – that’s 10.5 oz. I thought that was impossible: we figure on a minimum of about 750 g/day. So I challenged him about this. He did admit that he had lost over 400 g per day of body weight – that being all fat of course.

300 g of high-fat foods (cheese, salami, etc) PLUS 400 g/day of body fat – yeah, could be.

Cheers

He was just being metabolically efficient?…lol

Actually there are quite a few high level athletes who do this – Mark Allen comes to mind right off the top of my head.

There is a growing body of literature about athletes being fat-adapted and it’s a very interesting idea.  The average FIT male has more than 40,000 kCal of energy available as fat, but you can only store 2000 kCal of energy via carbohydrates (thus the bonk when those stores are depleted).  So if you can train your body to primarily burn fat as fuel (which it really can be good at) then you can tap into those stores and then honestly, you really don’t need to eat very much.

I did this on the CT last year and it was comical to compare my food bag to my friends’: my bag was easily a third of theirs, and this was the first hike I ever did where I never bonked, never “ran out of gas” as it were.  I ate a handful of nuts around 10a (started hiking at dawn), then ate some cheese and sausage around 1 for lunch, then carbed it up for dinner with ramen and potatoes and whatever.  That was literally all I ate every day, and I never, ever was hungry.  My friends were ravenous constantly…i was fine.  Full of energy, no need for an afternoon nap, it was great.

I wish I had continued it once I got home…I’m actually trying it again to see if I can make it work long term. I never felt better.

I’m going to agree with Jennifer.  A couple years ago my wife and I went low carb paleo or what ever you want to call it.  The first week is hard as you’re body makes the transition, they call it carb flu.  Once that was over I felt great.  I remember barely being hungry, never feeling like I had to eat.

From what I have read for moderate endurance work it is great, it’s not until you reach elite level performance that you have a problem.

I wouldn’t call it a fad, we simply didn’t eat bread or sugar or many grains.  Lots of vegetables and fats.

“More recently, there’s been a keto buzz among endurance athletes. It started in 2012, when Timothy Olson, a runner who follows a ketosis-friendly diet, broke the record at the Western States 100, the rugged, revered annual trail race in the Sierra Nevada. Last year, Zach Bitter, another ketones-adapted runner, set the American record for 100 miles on a track—11 hours 40 minutes 55 seconds. Data from a study conducted by Ohio State human-sciences professor Jeff Volek showed that ­during Bitter’s runs, as much as 98 percent of his energy can come from fat and only 2 percent from carbs. Your body can store a maximum of around 2,500 carbohydrate calories. But if you’re carrying around, say, 25 pounds of stored fat, that’s the equivalent of roughly 100,000 potential calories. So a fat-adapted runner can, in theory, chug along indefinitely.”

“If  ketosis was the most efficient metabolic state, the body would have evolved to prefer it long ago.”

Tom, just for conversation’s sake – could we not argue that the excessive consumption of carbohydrate in the standard american diet is the cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemic? Perhaps we ARE evolved to prefer a low-carb high-fat diet, but because it’s so difficult to maintain in our culture that’s why we have so much obesity related disease.

Mark Allen was the first to come to mind also Jennifer.  There’s something to be said for metabolizing fat vs. carbs for fuel.  I’m not certain you have to live in constant ketosis to do it though.  Not to speak for Tom, but I suspect the constant ketosis idea is more of what he has an issue with.  Because I know from experience hiking with him that he has a very interesting and well-dialed system for minimizing food weight and relying on fat burning to an extent.

Very interesting discussion about fats. I discussed this with my wife Sue. Her favorites when walking are cheese and butter. I go for salami as well – but it might be more appropriate to think of that as meat-flavored fats too! We do have (myog) muesli for breakfast, which has a lot of carbo, but it also has a lot of nuts. The dried fruits are a quick sugar hit. A succession of energy sources.

Cheers

It’s not just ultra-distance endurance athletes who are converting to low carb/healthy fat nutrition. The All Blacks (New Zealand rugby team) appear to have switched from high carb/low fat to low carb/healthy fat in the last couple of years. There may be a link between diet and their performances over other teams in the past couple of years where they consistently out-perform their opposition in the last quarter of the game.

The link below shows the evolution of their nutrition over the past 8 years

ruckscience.com/blogs/learn/the-all-blacks-world-cup-winning-diet

Craig has it right, as regards my aversion to ketosis.  I just don’t see it as being a very healthy state to be in constantly.  I am currently carrying 1 pound of food per day that yields ~1900 calories, 1200 of them carbohydrate, and it has worked out very well for me.  My organizing principle is to carry enough carbs to efficiently burn body fat, without going into ketosis.  I have been experimenting for years with this and have gradually dialed my requirement in at ~30% carbs, 65% fat, and the exercise physiology constant of 5% protein.  On a recent 7 day hike that included a traverse of rugged Gardner Basin, I lost 7 pounds, most of which was body fat, without any of the metallic mouth and sluggishness that indicates ketosis.  Works for me.

@ Jen:  Yes, we could very definitely have a conversation about excessive carb consumption by a disgustingly sedentary American population, and I would agree with you 100%.  It is a distortion of a natural mammalian preference for carbs when they are available, for the simple reason that they provide quick energy critical to survival in the fight or flight, tooth and claw environment in which they(including us) have evolved over millions of years.  Witness what bears will go through to obtain honey, or lately chocolate, gummy bears, etc.   Other mammals as well, as has been demonstrated in countless lab experiments.  And then there are the honeybees, many other insects, and many birds.  Carbs are also necessary to facilitate the efficient metabolism of fat in humans, and, I presume, other mammals.  Yes, you can obtain energy from fat with a less than optimal supply of carbs, but it is not as efficient, and is much harder on the kidneys, because additional protein will be required for gluconeogenesis to supply at least a minimal amount of carbohydrate.  The nitrogen stripped from the protein molecules will have to be eliminated through the kidneys.  Everything I have read about athletic performance during ketosis indicates it is pretty much limited to much longer, slower endurance events.  That makes sense to me simply because fat requires a far greater amount of O2 to oxidize it.  This puts an athlete who is in ketosis(incompletely oxidized fat) at a disadvantage when competing with athletes of equal cardio vascular capacity who include carbs in their metabolic input, as long as carbs are available.  In an unsupported environment, ketosis adapted athletes would have an advantage, but I would submit that an unsupported environment in modern times is analogous to a starvation situation back in our hunter gatherer days, and not what the hunters and gatherers would have preferred.  If they were caught out by an unfriendly group who was “carbed up”, they would have been at a potentially fatal disadvantage.  That is my take on the issue.  I note that Jenn mentioned carbing up at night, which I interpret as glycogen replenishment sufficient to support the next day’s hiking at a pace that allowed the efficient metabolism of primarily body fat, supported by an adequate supply of glucose from stored muscle glycogen.

On a technical note related to timely posting.  My belated response to this thread is due to the fact that I am unable to receive PMs, or notification of new posts to threads I am subscribed to and have “favorited”.  Manage is well aware of my plight, has been for some time, and yet nothing has been done to remedy the situation.  I am mentioning it once again, in a public forum, in the hope that at some point they will be shamed into doing something about it.  It is indefensible.  Period.

I think the main thing to remember is that we are all different. Yes, there are some basic biological fundamentals of nutrition – but interestingly, carbohydrate is NOT a mandatory macronutrient. ie look at the inuit – nothing but seal fat and certainly no grains or fruits or other veggies and they don’t die.

Some of us will be insulin resistant and will do better with fewer carbohydrates and living in ketosis; some of us have no trouble with insulin and can do just fine and thrive with a carbohydrate centered diet.

personally I couldn’t believe the difference when I limited my carbs to 50g/day – i was so energetic, felt great, not sleepy in the afternoons, and rarely needed to eat. I just wasn’t hungry and I didn’t even crave stuff.  At least until I got back to my apartment anyway…….

Ketosis for endurance or UL treks is sort of far out, might be useful, mostly just something to think about or even try it.  I know of a few people that have tried it to lose weight, which was successful, but for some reason didn’t stick to it permanently.

for real life, having half my diet being fruits and vegetables, limited sugar/white flour/white rice/potato chips/… seems like a good thing.  A little hard to do this backpacking, but I come close.  Especially if you can call beans or peas a vegetable.  If you dry a serving of tomato/pepper/onion it weighs very little.

Jerry I think the reason people don’t stick with it is the fact that we are surrounded by grains and sugars.  Personally my family made a huge deal about it.  Constantly making comments about what are we going to eat.  It’s almost impossible to get take out food that fits the bill.

Once you break the cycle and start eating carbs again it’s really hard to stop, they are like a drug.

True enough, Jen. Carbs are not mandatory, but they are preferred. Fat is not mandatory, either. Witness the hummingbird, which subsists almost entirely on flower nectar due to its extraordinarily high rate of metabolism(heart rate in excess of 1,000 bpm). The vast majority of humans have evolved to use a mix of both, depending on their activity level, metabolism, and cardio vascular fitness level. The higher the activity level, the higher the percentage of energy derived from carbs. The Inuit evolved in an environment where carb sources were almost non existent, and so adapted to metabolize fat very efficiently. I have not read any studies on their metabolic mix, but I could speculate that they obtain a minimal amount of carbs by synthesizing them from amino acids in the liver. I do not dispute that ketosis provides energy, but only for activity at a relatively slow pace, as in endurance sports. It is not the most efficient pathway for metabolizing fat. In any case, this is pretty much a hypothetical discussion, for me anyway. As you said, everybody is different, and if ketosis works for an individual, have at it. Over very long distances, it will carry an individual farther than a diet utilizing a constant supply of carbs to efficiently metabolize body fat, but at a price in health from what I have read. And experienced on a 16 day unresupplied hike long ago. I would never want to repeat that experience.

something i did not see mentioned above (unless i just missed it, my apologies):

one key aspect of a ketogenic diet for athletes is when to consume carbs, not just how much. plans for athletes tend to follow the ‘train low, perform high’ maxim. because you need a certain amount of carbs for high intensity activity (different based on the individual and what they are doing), and much less to just maintain normal body functions, many athletes will train when carb deficient, refuel after, and incorporate carbs in their mid-activity meals.

for example, there are several videos on the Global Cycling Network’s (GCN) youtube page about nutrition during the Tour de France for several teams. low carb off days, low carb at night, train in the morning, refuel with limited, complex carbs immediately after, repeat. then plenty of carbs during stages. i know other athletes (endurance, team sports, climbers, etc…) use similar plans, but cycling may be the closest equivalency i can find with video support.

my diet is mostly set up this way, though i do cheat more than any pro would, and it does help in several areas. most applicable is the amount of food i take on long cycling trips (3-4 hours) is much less than it was before, and i incorporate a lot more solid fats and proteins. and water. lots of water.

and like Tom and others mentioned, fat will only take you so far. you can train your body to use fat more efficiently–use a higher percentage of fat at higher levels of intensity–but you will always need carbs, not just for energy, but for other body functions as well.

side note, if you dive into a ketogenic training plan, it can be a great motivator. i have to work for my chocolate milk, ice cream, and biscuits.