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The End of Carbs: Dr. Koutnik Reveals BRAND NEW Study that Ends 57-Year Debate on Performance

so this is a totally different exercise Paradigm uh to evaluate what we saw was that when comparing this low glycogenic environment of of a low carb diet versus high glycogenic or a glycogen environment of high carb diet over six weeks if you adhere to the diet and that there was no difference in performance and these highly trained competitive triathletes that at least at first glance illustrates that maybe this prevailing Theory needs to be reevaluated that high carb diets are are the Prevailing or necessity for for high-end performance on both types of exercise spectrums dude Dr Andrew cnck there is some stuff coming out on carbohydrates working out performance that is absolutely going to rock the world I mean it's going to flip people on their heads and people are going to lose their minds we start like really understanding what's going on with carbohydrates and exercise like dude go for it tell me what's going on here so for a long time Tom people have always thought and or believ that high carbohydrate diets predominate in performance and there's a lot of evidence that would suggest that's true however what we did is we took highly trained athletes very high V2 Maxes were running over 50 kilometers per week very fit lean body mass and and and just this this epitome of high athletes High performers we gave them low carbohydrate diets and a high carbohydrate diet controlled so many variables at the end of the study what we found is that doing a very glycolytic dependent anerobic exercise bout a 1em time trial and also a 6X 800 met Sprints what we saw is that these athletes performed exactly the same on a very low carbohydrate ketogenic diet versus a high carb diet now why might that be because all this evidence before has suggested that high carbohydrate diets are superior and that glucose is such an essential fuel for performance well let's let's back up for a second a lot of the evidence that has looked at performance in different domains has often looked and shown a decrement to these ketogenic diets has often look at these diets in less than four weeks in duration now there's multiple lines of evidence that illustrate that four weeks may be important for achieving certain metrics of metabolic homeostasis post diet initiation anyone who's maybe heard of a ketogenic diet can appreciate that you have these changes in Mineral load uh you may lose very quick water weight all these metabolic changes are happening very very quickly so what are those changes when someone initiates a ketogenic diet the first thing that happens they're consuming less carbohydrates we know that Within the first meal you lower the total glucose load and then start to lower total insulin secretion within the first 24 hours you start to see increases in Ketone bodies and fat oxidation and also changes in subtle changes in things like respiratory quotient which is This Global body assessment of of fuel substrate change we know that a things like glucose come down in a fast within about 7 days and kind of plateau there um but that's fast uh in this context we see that things like the fuel use changes within maybe a three to four or sorry two to three week period uh it's pretty quick insulin's quick glucose total glucose exposure it's in instant right so a lot of these changes that people have focused on thought well these changes happen so quickly you only needed to do this diet for 7 to 12 days or sorry 7 to 14 days maybe most 21 days to really test the difference not so fast okay there's a lot of signs that show that even when you go on a full-fledged fast such a powerful stimulus uh that things like Ketone production don't begin to show signs of normalization till at least 3 weeks well what if you're doing something like ketogenic diet with the stimulus is not as potent you know it's not as as much of a lever you're pulling it it may take longer than that okay and so there's all these signs that maybe we're not achieving metabolic homeostasis as so many people have have thought initially earlier on and so all these studies that have looked at less than four weeks maybe they're an adaptation period And if you're causing a stress such as an adaptation on top of trying to perform that's two stressors on this side of the arm on the ketogenic diet arm versus someone who's probably already doing a high carb diet and didn't do any change so what do you think is going to perform worse what's not surprising that within the studies that have shown less than four weeks in duration not all but many of these Studies have shown up performance decrement to very low carbohydrate ketogenic diets and we also know that those diets can uh lower glycogen content that has been shown in a number of studies so after today's video our sponsor is seed I put a link down below for 25% off their daily symbiotic so it's a probiotic and a Prebiotic in one so it has a really unique delivery system so I am a fan of probiotics when you're making a change to 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controlled their body composition okay so we had all these controls that we know change metabolism also change and cause their own form of stress and and and change overall physiology so we controlled all of that the only thing that changed was the macron nutric compensation of the diet but we gave them four weeks on the diet controlled it registered dietitian was overseeing this we confirmed uh Ketone body elevation for compliance all these things were controlled and what we saw is they performed a on M time trial to Max effort so if anyone's run a mile as fast as they can that's not an easy effort this is a very intense effort and these are an who are are Runners so like they were really going after it we also did 6X 800 met Sprints so these is like hardcore really high effort what we showed is that these athletes in these Anor robic environments very glycogen dependent very uh carbohydrate dependent a carb oxidative dependent performed exactly the same on a ketogenic diet as they did on a high carb diet why why why would that be you know everything that would suggest that you would need carbs to perform better and in these anerobic exercise bouts this led us to to have some followon work but before I described it there was other key details in the study that were very important we tracked the glycemic control of these athletes who were in middle age the reason that's so important is because you have these categories of individual that you can put into like metabolic Health buckets on a big pitcher scale globally or big pitcher general population level young healthy individuals who seem to largely be immune to most metabolic uh disease and dysfunction although not completely nowadays but historically speaking middle AG where you're in this in between period before you reach aging 65 years age or higher where individuals are at much higher reliable much higher reliably higher risk for Many metabolic related diseases diabetes uh the list I could go on a list of this but either way we looked at this in between period because we know that individuals there are changes that are occurring in this middle-age window that are putting people at risk later on they may be subtle they they may be seen but we're very interested to look at that because the theory is like if you exercise all the time you would be completely healthy but what we found is that actually 30% of these athletes who were fit very uh low body fat running over 50 kilm per week 30% of them had signs of continuous glucose monitoring so we track these individuals over the third 31 days on the diet using not just one single finger stick of their blood glucose like a fasting glucose value or a single time point we track them 24/7 for 31 days and what it showed is that their glycemic values on the a CGM which tracks very well with other metrics that are are diagnostic for diabetes with values that were in line with pre-diabetes okay including fasting Val and 30% of them that 30% also happened to be the hyperresponders to the diet so they had the greatest drop in blood glucose in this study we also showed the highest rates of fat oxidation ever reported at very high intensities so historically speaking if you were to take the this or say the audience this and you say that this line up here is car oxidation and this line like here is fat oxidation or let's flip it actually for very low intensity so this is an intensity curve okay and for very low intensities over here let's say you're you're sitting down or then you go into a walk or then you go into a brisk walk into a small slow run and all the way to like a max out Sprint that's this bottom line down here right so from low intensity to very very high intensity and you look at the amount of fat and carb oxidized during these intense exercise bout we see that Fat's very high as a predominant fuel during very low intensity and carbs are very low and it actually historically speaking and that as you get closer to around the 60 to 70% of your V2 Max it crosses over it's called The Crossover point where the amount of fat and carbs consumed flips because now you're in this very glycogenic high intensity energy dependent uh exercise or or stimulus which is exercise and so you need more carbs because it's it's more anerobic and that has been the Paradigm what we showed is that even well beyond that 70% Mark uh at be over 85% of someone's V2 Max that fat oxidation was actually at record levels in people who had adapted for at least four weeks on a ketogen diet this was over uh 1.5 grams of fat um being oxidized at a set rate which is extremely high like record levels that had not been reported before and was amazing about this is this Illustrated that individuals who adhere and adapt to a ketogenic diet for a long enough on the diet while controlling their activity calories body composition throughout it so they're not trying to caloric restrict they're not trying to increase their activity load they're just using the diet switch as their stimulus they can not only shift their substrate utilization needs to meet the demands of very high intensity levels of exercise which have historically only been thought to be utilizing carbohydrates which that study obviously shows it's not the case but it also shows that you can have equivalent levels performance in these very glycogen historically glycogen gly uh glycogen dependent um high carbox of forms of exercise are very high intense so that really flipped us on our head and I think a lot of other people on our head that maybe there's something here and that maybe the way we thought about carbohydrates in the diet being obligate for Optimal Performance may not true which then led to a theory okay if you do these low carbohydrate diets and you have lower glycogen content uh in the diet maybe glycogen is not obligate maybe there's something else that's important to dictate performance in these settings uh against low and high carb so then we initiated a follow- on study and a lot of this work was done with Philip prims at gr City College uh Tim noes who's a a world-renowned uh exercise physiologist public record numbers of paper and had some major discoveries in the field X Fizz and what this follow one study wanted to look at is okay maybe there's something outside of glycogen or that is going on here maybe the prevailing Paradigm was that you know high carb are superior right that's number one but number two is also that carb supplementation during exercise improves performance and delays early onset of fatigue especially in these long duration exercise bouts well we wanted to test that and challenge that theory so the first thing we did is we took healthy athletes these are triathletes so I I don't Bel little them these are highly competitive athletes Tri athletes who are getting close to 200 kilomet per week in cycle distance okay fit very high V2 Maxes um again this this is a highly competitive uh highly trained athlete so not you know some sary person off the street and what we found is that when we put these individuals again on this diet but this time we we put them on the diet for at least 6 weeks okay um again doing everything we can we controlled calories we controlled activity um in in this again big stimuluses that are important to control to really isolate out macronutrient effects what we saw is when we used a low carb diet which historically with lower glycogen content versus a high carb diet we're really comparing here a different model you know is glycogen potentially obligate and what we found is that what we we actually looked at very prolonged aerobic exercise we actually asked people these cyclists to hit the wall so to speak this idea that we wanted them to go all the way into the point where they volitionally fatigued so we tested their V2 Max put them at 70% of their V2 Max so serious effort and we asked them to go as long as they could until they hit the wall now the wall has often been ascribed back to the 1921 in jamama to be associated with hypoglycemia okay there was a paper that showed that when people hit the wall so to speak anyone exercise Fizz may have felt this when they did a long duration endurance exercise about like a marathon that they may start developing signs of what is called called exercise induced hypoglycemia and this was originally shown back in the 1920s in a in a journal of American Medical Association um very prominent Journal at the time and then then showed that it was glucose levels that were low and that the patients who were doing these marathons actually had signs of hypoglycemia uh well established signs of hypoglycemia shaking irritability paleness and that if they gave carbs in the form of food they didn't have this response so originally there was this thinking that okay if we mitigate hypoglycemia using carbohydrates that may prolong exercise in this long duration exercise B so the first thing we tested of course was just the comparison of this prevailing Dogma that not just doing on the study I referred to before was this highly glycolitic Anor robic exercise where we saw no difference between ketogenic diet and high carb diet now we're switching the Paradigm we're looking at very prolonged endurance exercise at decently High intensities Till people hit the wall until they couldn't go any further volitionally uh and they fatigued out on objective metrics of not able to maintain the power output or they just they they they gave out so this is a totally different exercise Paradigm uh to evaluate what we saw was that when comparing this low glycogenic environment of of a low carb diet versus high glycogenic or a glycogen environment of High car diet over six weeks if you adhere to the diet that there was no difference and performance and these highly trained competitive triathletes that at least at first glance illustrates that maybe this prevailing Theory needs to be reevaluated that high carb diets are are the Prevailing or necessity for for high-end performance on both types of exercise spectrums now the second thing to that was that we wanted to evaluate if you gave carb supplementation again we talked about this idea of exercise induced hypoglycemia well to my knowledge very few or no one has really looked at this in the context of a very low carbohydrate ketogenic diet because there's this idea that you can kind of go on forever on a ketogenic diet and you won't Bonk at least some people say that whereas the other theory is that well if you're in a low glycogen environment and you're also taking no carbohydrates and and we know that these diets can lower blood sugar wouldn't it put you at more risk for hypoglycemia in theory it would actually put you at higher risk and so we then said okay we want to provide carb supplementation not just on a high carb diet which is the prevailing performance optimization protocol you do high carb diets and you give a certain amount of carbohydrates at set intervals usually about 20- minute intervals and you're usually shooting for anywhere between 60 grams per hour so that's 20 grams every 20 minutes or up to now in some recommendations up to 120 grams per hour okay so a ridiculous amount of carbohydrates that are consumed what we did instead is we actually provided only enough carbohydrates 6 to 12 times lower than those uh re those optimization uh carbohydrate protocols with the thinking that we're only going to give enough carbohydrate to mitigate exercise induced hypoglycemia we're isolating out the glycemic effect by doing the diet and actually prolong fast of up to 15 hours before exercise and then we're going to give carb supplementation across diet what we saw is not only did people perform exactly the same on a low carb vers high carb over six weeks of adaptation to hitting the wall prolonged exercise kind of rethinking this whole Paradigm of high carb dver Superior for prolonged exercise but then we gave carb supplementation on both approaches only up to 3.4 gram approximately because it's weight based every 20 minutes for these athletes so very very minimal levels not only one was it able to mitigate exercise induced hypoglycemia so exercise induced hypoglycemia happened in almost the majority of both diet groups okay okay it completely eliminated that across both diet groups and led to a 22% performance increase in prolonged exercise in these athletes illustrating that irrespective of diet high or low carb that you saw in performance Improvement but both improved similarly illustrating that it doesn't matter the diet you're on that carb supplementation may be important but it may not be as much as you think you need okay some the prevailing me uh uh uh thinking is that you need 60 to 120 gram per hour at the very least this questions whether that may be necessary and it certainly requires future evaluation because we're only giving 3.4 gr 3.4 to 3 six gram every 20 minutes which is 6 to 12 times lower than is recommended we also put continuous glucose monitors on these athletes as well over the 6- we period no surprise here we saw this Improvement and and mean glucose reduce mean glucose reduce standard deviation and this happened over the duration of the 6 weeks but then when we dissected out the week by week glycemic impact we actually saw that over the whole diet glycemic control was improved if you consider lower mean glucose and lower standard standard deviation Improvement but at the four-week Mark after four weeks we saw that glycemic control when looking at 24-hour glycemic control Norm normalized on the low carb diet in these normal glycemic athletes what that seems to suggest is that four-week time period is in complete alignment with the prevailing theory that four weeks may be important for an adaptation period on a low carb diet in order to have equivalent levels performance to high carb diet so this adaptation time period but what we also saw is that Ketone levels reached a peak level at the four-week time point and then maintain that peak level so reach of peak and maintenance which aligned perfectly with this normalization of glycemia so this isn't to be confused with someone who has diabetes goes on a low carb diet and then sees this reduction in glucose that is maintained these are a normal glycemic athletes who don't have any signs of pre-diabetes because we we actually looked at that and they had a lowering of glucose in theory that might actually put them at risk for early early exercise induced hypoglycemia but that went away after four weeks so maybe there's something to some metabolic signatures of adaptation that we were observing here that may be related to glycemic control which aligns with the the Ketone level Peak and also maintenance which also aligns with prior literature so this is a very very interesting study which ultimately leads us to some key conclusions one it seems to suggest that when we did a study to actually look at low glycogen environments versus high glycogen environments there's no difference in performance so it leis alludes to this idea that glycogen may not be obligate for performance and this was in prolonged and prolonged strenous endurance exercise for people to hit the wall the second thing it also seems to illustrate is that carbohydrate supplementation on the batch of a low glycogen environment seemed to be sufficient to improve performance substantially 22% on both dietary paradigms and completely eliminated exercise induced hypoglycemia which was observed without carbohydrate supplementation so that seems to suggest that that is a key determinant of performance in this study which was designed to isolate out that impact okay so it seems like uh glycemic control and exercise induced hypoglycemia is a performance determinant not and again this goes all way back to that 1921 paper that shows that if you give carb supplementation that it's important but the levels of performance Improvement we were seeing although we can't draw a direct line of of overlap to these other studies if you look at some of the Met analysis looking at 30 gram to 80 grams of carbohydrates um with exercise the amount of performance improvements are largely analogous to what we were seeing so this opens a can of worms do we need 120 grams per hour uh you know maybe these Elite athletes maybe there's something maybe they truly do but let's back up for a second 99% of people are not elited athletes okay anyone who is the normal person out there even myself like and Tom you you work out all the time I work out all the time um you may be pretty close to that Elite category but what I'm talking about here is like someone who dedicates their entire life to Performance and they are in the top 0 1% of their Endeavor they're biologically and phenotypically different okay what we're talking about is the rest of the 9% what happens to the rest of the 99% of the world in these studies and we were even looking at the high end of that these highly competitive athletes and we're not seeing this prevailing Dogma that high carbohydrate diets are obligate for performance optimization in fact if you habituate to a diet long enough what this is largely telling us is that you have options maybe you don't need to do a high carb diet if it doesn't fit for you maybe if you're someone who strugg strling with pre-diabetes maybe the health considerations of a dietary approach like a low carb diet to lower glucose control should predominate because this idea that you need to pound carbohydrates and then supplement all the time during your your Marathon that you're running isn't necessary it opens up choice for the athlete to make decisions not just about performance but also about health dude so it makes so much sense that the decline in performance would be more of an issue with going hypoglycemic than being low on glycogen it makes so much more sense that that is the case right that is a that is a I know I overuse this term but it seems like that is just a bigger lever that would make you feel something much more so than glycogen just logically it just seems like we have so many systems in processes to protect us like when that happens and when if glucose gets low then yes that's an alarm that's an alarm right so but you're it's happening at such like a a high performance scale that you might not think of it as like a metabolic alarm saying emergency in your body you're just registering it as performance decline because that's the lens in which you're looking at the world y so performance decline performance decline when in reality it's just metabolic alarm sounding but it's manifesting in performance decline but that's the that's the lens that you choose to view it in because that's what you're concerned with at that time rightfully so you're an athlete and it makes sense because what the amount of blood or sugar that we actually have circulating through our blood at any point in time is such a small so much smaller than people think right I've always almost always called on the fact that like what good and okay full disclaimer I eat carbs I I'm not afraid of carbs I don't mind carbs I don't say I particularly like them but I don't mind them right I've never it's never made sense to me that having a bowl of oatmeal before going into a workout would do anything for you it has never made sense to me because I'm just like how much do you actually need to elevate your blood sugar and how much is that going to change like and your and that's not going to to absorb into glycogen anyway in that like it's not going to be synthesized into glycogen in a short amount of time anyway so I've always kind of called I'm like that doesn't make sense that doesn't add up to me anyway and there's some evidence to back that up and now I'm like I see this like it makes sense all we're trying to do is just stop the hypoglycemia so what is the bare minimum that you can get across and then it's probably opening up Pandora's box of all kinds of positive things now you're eliminating GI stress you know in these athletes I mean that's the biggest issue that I have if I'm doing an ultra or something like that is like how do I get fuel in uh but I My Philosophy even when doing an ultra has always been what is the not even with glucose everything what is the bare minimum amount of fuel that I need to get on board I don't want to digest like I want to just keep myself alive yeah and that's just Earth shattering man I mean it makes so much sense and I also want to State you know I think it's important to to caveat this by saying you know there are studies that have looked at 60 vers 90 vers 120 gram per hour and then they show that there's some indications that as you go higher and higher and higher there's a better performance output in those studies what we were specifically trying to do here in this design was eliminate glycogen and a key contributor in fact actually have a comparison between low and high carb um specifically utilizing a diet approach to lower glycogen content along with a 15-hour fast before the exercise which would further lower that you know these are both reliable strategies in literature to do that and then we were trying to isolate that across diet and then also give carbohydrates on top of that and and it really allowed us to answer a key question which is exercise induced hypoglycemia is a known determinate is a determinate of performance and that we maybe should re considerer how important glycogen not that it's not important there is some evidence that suggest that glycogen is an important determent of performance I'm not saying it's not I'm just saying that we isolated out that as a key variable and showed that if you compare these across diets that you're you're allowing yourself to see some isolation that some people may criticize it and say well that was a low carb diet and you're fully subsidizing that lower glycogen with fat oxidation but that would then require people to acknowledge that fat oxidation is a key determine of performance both in our original study at very high intensity levels and also in prolong exercise so which this is less controversial but the original is for was definitely controversial well so um there's a lot of reconsideration that I think this literature on these unique diets these very low carbohydrate ketogenic diets uh has opened our eyes to a reevaluation of some of our understanding of the crossover point and is that in fact the true crossover point because even some evidence in high carb diets don't actually match up with that that that range that crossover point when when I was doing the V2 Max test with with um Andy Galpin yeah he was like dude you're he almost went so far as saying like you are U carbohydrate intolerant like he was like because like my fat my fat oxidation rate was happening at such a high intensity he was pretty blown away he was kind of like that's I almost wanted him to just do a muscle biopsy and I want I want right then and there I was curious what my glycogen was at you know like point is is that as someone that has and further follow on stuff to probably uncover like how long do some of these adaptations last even you know for example I spent years close to you know a decade on a ketogenic diet yeah and I still fast regularly although I'm not on a ketogenic diet and I would imagine I don't want to go too into the weeds that I've preserved a lot of that adaptation by continually fasting and almost exclusively training even ultra distance training in a fasted State I've probably maintained some of that adaptation um to the point where like when I take a V2 Max test I'm not even surpassing a one re until pretty much the test is done and I'm going into oxygen you know debt and Recovery afterwards yeah then I'm surpassing that and was that test done let me ask a question was that test done while you were on a ketogenic diet or not on ketogen fasted about 18 hours fasted but were you on a ketogenic diet prior to that um no no interesting okay yeah I'd say about 100 grams of cars a day so yeah there's there's some interesting evidence um by Flockhart and larsson's group uh actually looking at athletes who adapt via exercise so like individuals who do these very long duration aerobic exercise bouts and are engaged in exercise on a regular basis independent of dietary Paradigm that when they start flipping towards higher levels of fat oxidation um one that's OB very predictive and associative at least on the high carb Paradigm in athletes if you have higher levels of fat oxidation during exercise it's often associated with better performance but he also showed interestingly enough that when you start increasing fat oxidation these athletes that they also had poor or glucose tolerance test glycemic control and so um again this gets back to the conversation we had uh a different point about physiologic insulin resistance and there's different stimuluses to pull here nutrition is clearly one of the most powerful and that the most powerful in shifting carb to Fat oxidation um and particularly on the extreme ends of saying really lowering carbohydrates you can get fat oxidation levels that you wouldn't see an extra exer size based stimulus um but you know they're they're both facilitating similar things and so uh it it's it's a very interesting conversation uh in your case where you have been on a ketogen type for so long there was some evidence although it's your scenario is so unique that when someone was on a long adapted ketogenic diet that if they reintroduced carbohydrates that they didn't necessarily break fat oxidation in ketogenesis now if someone were to be doing a ketogenic diet for like 5 6 seven days they did that yeah you might like totally obliterate that but in your so that study did it in someone who prolonged adherence to a ketogenic diet and so that at least alludes to this idea of what you are potentially seeing which is these remarkably high fat oxidation levels although you know it it you have to be blind to see you're not fit okay and I also worked out with you earlier so I know you're actually in shape shape on an exercise level and so maybe there's an exercise component to that that's also playing into this in fact argue there's no doubt both are playing into it we know both are important to it but the degree to which one predominates the other is an interesting question but at least when we talked about fat and carb oxidation that you know if you do something like ketogenic diet that will lead to Fat oxidation levels that I don't think many other similes or any can actually match and I love that you had uh you know Tim involved in this like I've uh fortunate enough to have you know Tim interview Tim I mean one of the few I couldn't get in person but was one of the few that I was like yeah I'll do a virtual interview with you been a fan of his work for such a long time and he talked about even in that interview um heck for the sake of it we can even cut to a chunk of that interview because it so interesting yeah let me just I must take one provisor there to our discussions currently I'm I'm writing a paper which I've been working on for about a year and it looks at all the studies of carbohydrate ingestion during exercise or before exercise before during and there are a number of studies where you can't explain the carbohydrate effect and the only effect you can use is that it's a central stimulant that it's a drug and I'm very certain that the that for example one hour time trial no question ingest carbohydrate during the race you'll do better I would never argue that metabolism doesn't change no no measurable difference the the the way carbohydrates work is your experiment you have to set up the experiment so the control group The Blood GL glucose drops during exercise I the placebo group then you'll always find an effect of carbohydrates if the blood glucose doesn't fall you won't find an effect that's in a longer event in a short event you you'll almost always find an effect of carbohydrate but it's now metabolically doesn't do anything so what is it doing it's acting in the brain so I I honestly think carbohydrate is a drug and that's why torron cyclist use it so much because when you're cycling six hours a day you often need a stimul and I think that's the I think that's the key stimulant that they use or and that's why I've got in a sense as you've said triathlete friends who are high high fat diets but they said sometimes in the triathlon I need that carb to give me that lift that stimulus so I think that's where we've got wrong carbohydrate Metabolic Effect is to prevent your blood glucose falling that's it and that you can only do by taking carbs during exercise so that's why you have to take a little bit of carves during exercise otherwise the main effect is on the brain it it makes you perform better because you get it a lift and that lift can be achieved by just often putting the the sugar in the carbohydrate in the mouth as well yeah we've seen that in some interesting data I've seen that you know recently like just uh just swishing it around in the mouth and even spitting it out can have a a similar effect um and that is I mean we we're seeing that replicated that wasn't just one or two studies I've seen that few times and then uh and even with if I recall I might I don't want to butcher this but it was basically uh straight mted extr or something that wasn't even sweet if I recall so it wasn't even something that was sweet where we we could we could hypothesize that yes the the taste of something sweet might kind of amp you up a little bit but even in cases where there were carbohydrates that were not sweet um am I mistaken or did I I mean I think I think that's what I saw that's that's right yeah uh where he talks about basically just swishing carbohydrates in the mouth like having right in you know even even like potentially malted extran that has no sweetness to it right like just like swishing it around and mouth rinse and I know that's we're seeing more of that coming out I know the military's done some stuff with that um where just it makes us wonder I mean that independent above just avoiding hypoglycemia how much of it is up there well I I I so the best answer I can give to you is one of the most reliable performance enhancing tools anyone can ever have is a pretty solid placebo effect okay so if you wanted to improve your performance you better start believing that whatever you're doing works that is the most reliable way to improve performance every study has pretty much reliably showed this right and so um if you you say hey how much of this is in your head there's no doubt a huge component this is in in people's heads um that will always be a factor uh isolating that you almost have to you know cut the brain stem and and and you know is an impossible thing right um and so that's why we in a lot of studies we try to control as much as we can so in this both these studies we did um volume taste uh you know sweetness matched based uh com comparatives right so we can try to um analogously control as much of this as we can this is also why in these studies we try to do everything we can to control calories physical activity uh uh when we can body composition and you know because those are such powerful stimulus Al to the point where you bring up the idea that you just swish your mouth with carbohydrates without actually consuming them and per it causes performance enhancing effect so yeah I mean you do everything you can in science to really isolate out factors and not always can you do that but as much as you can and and actually in both these studies that we did this was actually a crossover design and so what that means is that we have the same athlete doing both diets so it wasn't like we did parallel groups we actually ask these individuals to in the first study engage in a 10-week journey with us right four weeks on one diet cross over four weeks on the other diet and in this case six weeks and then switch over to the other diet and so they're really on this for for the Long Haul but what that allows you to do you're isolating out you're eliminating the genetic factors the environmental factors except for food obviously that was changed but their you know their house environment their sleep environment all that is you're able to control that when you do these crossover designs so we did everything we could to really try to answer this question as well as we could is what is the macronutrient specific effect uh in these different performance context and it does appear that at least prevailing take-home from both of these studies is that as long as you adhere to a diet long enough you appear to have equivalent levels of performance that one diet doesn't predominate over the other are so it gives you choice and the other end of this the other take home is that um that we know that there are multiple key determinant of performance but it appears that we were able to isolate out and really hone in on the idea that exercise induced hypoglycemia while we're not the first to ever demonstrate that matters I mean that was demonstrated in 1921 to matter what we're illustrating is that in low glycogen environments uh and very minimal levels of of carbohydrates that this this can have a meaningful performance impact by completely being in alignment with elimination of exercise induced hypoglycemia and so this does open a lot of questions you know there will absolutely be people who view the studies differently and have different interpretations and so I'm really excited to to to have uh everyone's feedback on this and really start taking that feedback in advancing our understanding of science even further we link to the study too because I mean in just FYI I mean to get you know good eyeballs on a study helps helps get the study in front of more people because there's algorithmically based too even on putet so I'll link out to the study so that everyone can check that out um it was interesting when I talking with uh Andy Galpin a couple of months ago he actually um kind of acknowledged even what you're talking about before this study even come out because he was he said and I haven't CLI with it basically he's like you know there's not a whole lot of a difference in performance between low carb and high carb he's like what we did notice is like a lot of times when people would selectively go on a low carb they would end up um inadvertently reducing their calories MH and he said what we did notice was that there was a performance decline when their calories were lower yeah and he's like so he's like that's just kind of what inadvertently was happening and so he's like I pretty much convinced that like if you calories are high enough like you're going to be fine it's like most people when they like get rid of an entire macronutrient they don't realize they're also cutting the calories down too and that's the one thing again I go back anecdotally but like that's what I noticed too is that I on a lower carb diet my satiety is so high I end up F getting to the end of the day and being like like I really didn't even eat that much yeah then I will see a performance decline when I have carbohydrates and as again I referenc all these people I've interview but Dr Mike is Rell he said something things was so powerful he's like he's like carbohydrates are great for inducing appetite are they good for building muscle maybe not necessarily directly in fact there is that ribosomal paper that just came out that just basically demonstrated that like it doesn't really do anything additional for muscle growth but he was just like they are a great appetite stimulant so he's like if you want to eat more and you want to put on more muscle he's like you know calories being fairly high on the hierarchy of building muscle he's like increase your carbohydrate content I'm like that that is a logical way to put that you know because yes when I eat when I eat carbohydrates I tend to just my calories overall are higher yeah all that being said I have a question I know I keep bringing this stuff back to some of my anecdotal stuff but I think yeah I might be mistaken but I think that's why people like this General is because I I experiment on stuff myself and then I I talk to The Experts about it I've done a lot of Fairly extreme events um usually just self-inflicted somewhat masochistic weird things um you know for example well I don't even want to my own horn so I'm not going to go there but long endurance events that are also extreme they're not like zone two like I'm talking like we're getting into zone four possibly even five major altitude changes I don't feel good when I have carbohydrates when I do it so I don't I've attempted doing these things fasted but I do reach a point where I'm like okay after you know 8,000 feet of vertical gain like fasted it's not working too well start to cramp or something um so I've experimented just being like okay have a Chomp stick or an epic bar or something even like crazy lean protein even chicken breast brings me right back to Earth and I get performance Improvement and I'm right back and that's with zero carbohydrate intake and very minimal if any fat intake is this in my head or is there anything to reinforce this I haven't seen a lot of like protein intra workout protein studies well so two things one is uh and knowing some of the types of climbs you're you've done and have shared before you know these are extremely long duration right and you're also fasted versus having some calories so the first thing people might say is well you're having calories okay so that's helping you by giving you some caloric needs during the exercise bout that's the first thing most people are going to focus on especially in the ex Community that's why but there's also something else we talked about exercise induce hypoglycemia we we did a study that seemed to uh demonstrate as well as prior work that that's an important terine of performance and so we know that protein in of itself has its own glycemic response it is obviously much lower okay but you can look at multiple data going back to Coler in 19 81 and 1983 where they show these acute protein carbohydrate and responses to food and protein does have a glycemic response uh so what so it is possible that you might have been having you know uh early hypoglycemia while you're fasting on indor low carb or high carb doesn't really matter um at least our data says that it shouldn't matter and that you had protein during that and that should maybe help support you know some elevations of glycemia so maybe that's another factor that was playing a role here and you feeling uh better or or having the energy or you know attenuating the decline you were feeling uh it's actually a well-known strategy in the context of type 1 diabetes to have more normal and prolonged glycemic control because carbohydrates had this this potent and Rapid impact on glycemia in fact the the peak endogenous car insulin response to carbohydrates at least let's say you say 50 grams of potatoes that's going to be at the 30- minute Mark the peak um whereas protein it actually Pro it the peak's much lower about 2.5 fold lower and it also is prolonged and it's lower the peak happens later and it stays higher for longer so in theory when you're doing something such long duration and let's say that maybe exercise induc hypoglycemia was a factor protein may be a ideal strategy in your case uh to maybe mitigate some of that more so than just having a huge BS of carbohydrates uh would although carbohydrates clearly would increase your blood sugar level no doubt about that but maybe in this case um this helped in some way with that well you and you being type 1 diabetic maybe you can answer this this is interesting so I did one event it's called um Cactus to clouds it starts at the floor of Palm Spring so you're starting at sea level and you're going up to 11,000 feet and you're knocking this and then down and you're knocking this out in in a day so it's a lot of vertical gain so 11,000 ft of vertical gain uh no water on the trails you're packing all your water so you're you know carrying carrying 30 lbs at least um my I attempted to do it fasted I like I want to do this whole thing fasted granted I'm at that time about probably 5 and a half% body fat so not a lot to pull from anyway and I knew it was curious you know um got up to 8,000 ft and you know intermediate started started cramping body basically started shutting down right it like no you're not doing this like okay I need to eat so I hit the panic button and I had a bunch of jelly beans not only sticks my stomach but chills like no weather I feel like I had the flu I mean I Goosebumps like it was scary so interesting yeah I didn't wasn't able to test my blood sugar but I'm assuming that I don't I don't know did I go Skyhigh or did I have some weird insulin response where I crashed even worse after that um but I mean that was like okay Thomas when you hit the P that was my lesson learning there that like no next time protein this out instead of because that just did not respond so just out of curiosity any idea what may have happened in that case the chills that chills that's that's an interesting thing I don't have an answer for the chills although I actually think it's to back up for a moment and actually speak about um your your you started to cramp that's an interesting point because when I was talking about the 30 minute time point with carbohydrates and then proteins more prolonged they both come with an insulin response too although protein's clearly much lower again this is around 2.5 times lower only 40% of the actual total insulin requirements for a gram per gram match and they're calorie match because they're both for K Cal per gram and obviously when you have insulin you're going to shuttle in more water right so you might have been reaching a point uh just pure speculation here where you are were becoming uh partially dehydrated and maybe having a little bit of insulin on board uh because it sound like you packed a decent amount of water and having that simultaneously could could help shuttle and and compensate or or attenuate maybe is a better way of saying it some of the what appear to be dehydration if you're facilitating cramps I don't think and to a certain end to just to jump in there with that you know and I'm very very particular about electrolyte balancing and whatnot and you know like knowing when I'm cramping and when you know potassium based versus a sodium based and like I'm pretty good at that um and it seemed to make no difference which was what was interesting to me but what's interesting about that is look at Gatorade Gatorade is one of the most wellestablished best hydration tools there are it's been around for forever but it has a ton of carbohydrates it so a lot of how people uh hydrate and balance electrolytes is largely based on the theory that it's on the backdrop of a very glycemic a lot of carbohydrates along with it because that's also helping shuttle in some of the water as well and so when you're in a context where you're having a huge deficit in carbohydrates the rules I suspect are changing here and and how those minerals are going to be absorbed because if you don't have insulin you certainly would not not bring in as much water right into these tissues and so that absolutely would affect um you know osmolarity or or or or mineral uh load and we know that even with a ketogenic diet one of the first things that happens when you lower carbohydrates within the diet is that has a uh ntic response you you release a lot of sodium you lose a lot of water weight so um I've actually experienced that aot a number of times myself where if I wake up and I just have coffee and I ride it out for a long period of time I don't have a whole lot of food I I can literally physically see myself becoming uh I want say dehydrated is maybe not the term but you can start seeing the signs of dehydration you and I are like what seven hours into hanging out together we've trained facd we both haven't consumed anything except for when you went hypoglycemic and you had some Smarties and I could noticeably see when I went in the bathroom I could noticeably see my face looks your face looks leaner like dropped the water as the day goes on it's noticeable it really is noticeable like you just start the day and you just like don't like there is and I've peed and barely consumed much water today so I'm like something's happening and I can actually attest to this effect as well and I'm sure you're the case when you go these very prolong periods of fast and and just in my scenario if I have any type of food okay after that period of time my the visual change that occurs is so apparent you know the vascular it's it's night and day so um there's clearly an impact and I noticed that if I were to have food after a very prolonged period of fast I have to wait because the instant clinex in type 1 diabetes is much slower and so what I find is that you know my timing might be different than someone else um because of this but if I have that food and I'm I'm looking like two hours post okay because a lot of the insulin response it's full insulin response even the fastest acting insulin type one takes about two hours to have its full effect um that after that point if I'm working out without any food let's say I didn't need food before and then all of a sudden I introduce any food you could be just protein or carbs um any form of that that I will sweat so much more um afterwards and I don't see that with if I fast the whole period of time and don't have the food despite having the same amount of water so um I've always attributed this just speculatively I me I'm not necessarily saying this paper showed this exact thing and the patient with type one diabetes I'm not saying that here but just my personal anecdotal experience is that I definitely hold more water weight and of course that can certainly translate to things like an aoba performance you know if the tissue is Fuller and and larger even if it's just water um that can have substantial difference in leverage of those those muscles to to produce force and other things so either way um yeah I actually have very simil experiences to you in this in this case yeah yeah it's uh and I will you know I know wrap up here but I will say and hopefully people get some value out of this I will never ever do a long endurance event without having torine on board now torine torine has been it has saved my so many times if I start to feel I take it sort of prophylactically yeah um I mean the the time to exhaustion like data on it is strong anyway like uh you know 3 to six gram of torine um and I'll just pop three to six grams every 90 minutes or so during that and it's no cramping same kind of thing's the same I can stay fasted I don't totally know the mechanisms behind the cramping piece um you know massive massive antioxidant effect I mean you've seen I don't know if you've seen the literature basically when they um cross-sectional area and biopsy when they they take um athletes that are training to exhaustion like endogenous touring levels are very concentrated and high at the muscle level meaning that there's something that's going on there right yeah um so I've toyed around with it and yeah three to six I mean it's it's Game Changer but who knows maybe it's in my head too but it's just like that is the one thing that's like wow okay I won't do a long endurance event without it interesting I I do know there's plenty of data on touring you know co- administer with things like caffeine to that helps um in the Contex of exercise performance are actually vascular cardiovascular um measures and so it's interesting to hear your experience I've never taken touring by itself try who knows I mean it's going to work automatically because I said it worked but it's it's it's pretty wild so anyway man where can everyone find you uh they can find me I stay pretty active on Twitter I try to stay engaged and and and share things and and you know communicate with the scientific community at ack so a TN i k on Twitter or X however you want to refer to it I have an Instagram Andre cudnik PhD and I also have a website where I try to put out as much free information as I possibly can for people who are trying to understand metabolism um maybe they have type 1 diabetes like I do and want to understand more of that Journey uh at Andrew kick.com right on my man thanks brother all right

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