Long Run Nutrition - How To Fuel And Not Feel Exhausted 

This is fascinating @NutritionTriathlon and I am grateful for your insights. It is a complicated subject though. I am prone to blood sugar spikes and crashes if I eat white bread, cakes, potatoes etc and I used to find this quite disruptive. I found that by going for a low sugar lower carb diet I felt much better and on an even keel. I emphasise lower carb, definitely not keto. But I have to balance this with proper fuelling before longer runs and races. I'm still working on it...

Thank you, really appreciate that!

Thanks Joe, appreciate that!

My pleasure, thank you too!

Thank you! 🙂

Thank you! 🙂

You're welcome 😃

Awesome, glad to have you along! Thank you 🙂

Thank you! 🙂

My pleasure!

Thank you! My pleasure :)

Thank you! 😊

Sorry to hear this! What's your recovery nutrition like? Adequate carbs after your morning sessions? Including some complex, slow digesting carbs? If you're still struggling then it would be worth chatting with your family physician or a dietitian to try to improve it

Have you tried high carb low fat though? what have you tried and what are you eating? vegan/plantbased ?

Possibly, if you're drinking a lot of water without any sodium. If you don't drink fluid with sodium then it's worth checking but I would also speak to your family physician to run it past them

Hey, great question. It might a little bit, but it's not the primary energy source. As your body runs out of carbs it increases its fat metabolism instead. Protein is a poor energy source and your body prefers to use this for other functions such as building and repairing muscle tissue, and heavily involved in all your hormone signalling.

​@@NutritionTriathlon Fat metabolism sounds like a great thing, as fat stores are nearly unlimited and unlike carbs it's a stable energy source - the sugar spikes and crashes are minimised. So would it be best to try to maximise it by adapting our bodies to it over time?

@@aliasgharkhoyee9501 Hey, good question. It's awesome in theory, but the reality doesn't hold up. As I mentioned in the video, the best way to increase your fat metabolism is to train consistently over time. Current evidence suggests that a carbohydrate rich diet is the healthiest to support an active individual and also contributes to better performance. Because of the basics of energy metabolism, there is never any scenario where fat metabolism is going to be more efficient than carbohydrate metabolism, simply because of the amount of oxygen required to liberate energy from fat. This is the reason why you'll usually see worsened performance on low carb diets, despite increased fat oxidation rates.

@NutritionTriathlon I realise fat burning won't get athletes the highest performance (maybe apart from endurance) but for the rest of us who are looking for improvements in health and fitness (rather than records), would you say it's a good way to do so? By getting adapted to increased fat burning over time, for example by fasted running, the health benefits seem to be immense.

I'd put this back to you here and say what do you mean by "The health benefits seem immense"? Because there's a huge amount of evidence to show a diet like the Mediterranean diet is probably the healthiest, which includes a balanced amount of carbohydrates (not low carb). So using carbohydrate in training simply supplements what's required from exercise. Another point is that the biggest fat burning improvement you can get is by training consistently over time. Fasted training on the whole does not show significant health benefits and conversely can be incredibly risky for a lot of athletes. In short, no, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone unless they had a specific, clinical/medical reason

Hah I'll consider this for the future! It's slightly outside my norm but let's see ;)

Yep, pretty much!

Scientifically proven that low carb high fat yields much much higher fat oxidation and is bonk-proof.

@@RC-qf3mp Sure it leads to higher oxidation, but in broad terms it also leads to worsened performance 😉

@@NutritionTriathlon higher fat oxidation leads to improved performance for endurance athletes. Proven by Phinney and Volek. Their work on fat oxidation is ground breaking and requires all the textbooks be updated and rewritten. The ceiling of fat oxidation for high carb is totally different from the ceiling of keto adapted endurance athletes. Huge difference. Astounding. Eye popping. If you get somebody on a keto diet for two weeks, no, it won’t improve their performance. 8 weeks? Maybe. 12 weeks, probably 6 months almost certainly. A year? Definitely.

Except... It's not. Most recently, Noakes and colleagues demonstrated that fat oxidation could support exercise up to around 85% of vo2 max, which by their admission was the highest ever seen in research. But that's still 85% of vo2max and because of basic physiology it will never support exercise the way carbohydrate can. And again, so what if fat oxidation becomes better? Because of efficiency, even with significant improvement in fat metabolism it cannot match carbohydrate in efficiency, and as such it will never be better for performance in a broad overview. And your argument about timeframes is kind of laughable. First of all it was 1 week for ketogenic improvements. Then it was 1 month. When this was matched in research, the low carb proponents moved the goalposts again. So then it was 6 months. Then a year? How far do you want to move them until it fits your agenda? In the meantime, you follow a diet which has clear increased links to cardiovascular disease based on current evidence, comes with other health risks associated with low carb intake (see RED-S and low carb links) and is incredibly hard to support high volumes of training. For what it's worth, I'm NOT discounting the fact that fat metabolism IS important for everyone, for health and sport. But not via low carb approaches and instead a balanced, healthy diet and regular endurance exercise

I hear ya! Not easy is it?

Hey, thank you for highlighting this! You're absolutely right, unfortunately this managed to slip through. In my carb load videos and the free carb load guide it's per kg per day!

Haha what makes you think that?! No 🙂

@@NutritionTriathlonbecause you have a relaxing, somewhat monotonous but not boring way of delivering your message. Hhaha… This is a compliment by the way.

😂 thank you!

Of course you'll be tired, but why make it harder than it should be and risk poor performance in training, which is actually then going to negatively affect your racing? And suggesting practicing in racing and not training is a very poor approach to nutrition - you're so much more likely to run into problems during your race if you take that approach!

That is like saying you will at some point crash on a bike... so, practice crashing.

Love the analogy Joe!

This guy sounds a danger to himself 🤷🏼‍♂️needs to carb up….🤗

Just straight up bad advice mate 😂.. have you ever done long distance before?

😂 Sorry not sorry! I feel like I've got to make sure I get all the necessary info in 😉

Hey, thanks for stopping by! This is a big topic and it's hard to distil it into a few key points, but I'll try: - Regardless of how fat adapted you are, fat is always less efficient than carbohydrate and carbohydrate [glucose] is the preferred energy source of your brain - Peak performance is fuelled by carbohydrate, shown multiple times in multiple studies. The best current evidence we have shows a clear worsening of performance for the majority of people when following a ketogenic diet compared to carbohydrate rich diet (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32497061/ - Sugar as a broad term does not cause inflammation, this is misinformation. Especially when used in an exercise capacity, sugar/carbohydrate is simply used by the body for energy - GI issues can happen regardless of diet, and fat is much harder to break down and digest = higher risk of GI issues. When a nutrition strategy is followed properly, you can minimise this risk. The world record marathon holders are carb fuelled as seemed to do ok...! - Long term safety data of low carb high fat diets is lacking. Typically these diets are high in saturated fat which is positively correlated with increased cardiovascular disease risk. However, balanced diets like the Mediterranean Diet show clear benefit in various health markers. In short, there is no good evidence to show that as a broad approach a ketogenic diet should be encouraged above a carbohydrate rich diet. Sorry!

@@NutritionTriathlon Fat isn’t an energy source for the brain - ketones, produced by fat burning, are. Ketones are extraordinary for the brain as shown in brain scans of people with Alzheimer’s (comparing ketones to glucose in the brain). Ketogenic diets were invented for epilepsy - why? B/c ketones are great for the brain. And reduce inflammation. The very process of using glucose for energy creates reactive oxygen species - inflammation. Ketosis as primary source of fuel is anti-inflammatory - and one of the main reasons, again, why ketogenic diets are great for Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, autism, Parkinson’s, ADHD, etc. See Dr. Ede and Dr. Palmer at Harvard for their extraordinary research on this. Palmer cured the son of the tech billionaire of his extreme bipolar depression and has now gotten a ton more funding to continue this work. So maybe look at the research. but the research on epilepsy goes back about 100 years. And the kids who went on a keto diet to stop their seizures kept that diet throughout their lives. Scientists looked at their brains in old age and couldn’t believe how ‘young’ the old brains looked. A better way to think of it is that a ‘normal’ brain has had a lifetime of inflammation and junk from carbs. Too many elite athletes (among the very small pool of athletes who even try keto) do keto. It works. You know the names. Sugar absolutely causes inflammation in excess…and a ‘normal’ diet has sugar in excess. The body needs glucose, but the liver can produce it. I’ve done multi day fasts and I always had glucose in my body, despite going on hikes fasted. How can I have glucose in my blood if I’m consuming NO FOOD, let alone no sugar or carbs? The liver. This has all been studied in depth. GI issues can happen on any diet, tha’ts true, because people need to adapt. But the ultra processed high sugar junk in a high carb athlete diet (most of them at least) is junk food. GI issues should have a Whole Foods anti inflammatory diet. On keto, you only poop once every 3 days or so - why? B/c the food you eat isn’t wasteful food. Poop is waste. There’s not much waste in a steak or eggs or fish. Your body uses it up, which saves the bowels a lot of trouble. Countless people had GI issues cured with carnivore. I’m not saying people can’t do well on carb-fueled diets…there’s a huge bias in that 99% of athletes are following the bad ‘conventional’ wisdom that you were perpetuating. The real question is how well would THOSE athletes had performed if they had a higher fat oxidation rate? Long-term safety data of low carb high fat is plentiful - look at the Inuit. NO heart disease. Everything we know about the heart, now, is that cholesterol was overrated, and inflammation was underrated. Pretty much all chronic disease leads to chronic inflammation. The most anti-inflammatory diet is a clean keto diet, and among those, a fish-heavy keto diet (sardines, salmon, cod liver). 1+2=3. Less inflammation, the better. This kind of keto is the most anti-inflammatory. You get all the nutrients , esp Omega 3 (the good omega 3 found in real fish, not supplements, not chia seed, not flax seed - that’s the weak ALA omega 3). That diet is basically a Mediterranean keto. I have multiple doctorates and have done the research and seen the results. There’s no comparison. We eat lots of carbs in the standard American diet b/c it’s cheap, low quality, gov’t subsidized garbage by huge industries that are known to have bribed officials and scientists for the past 75 years or so. No race is worth destroying your teeth, gut and body eating garbage. Oh yeah, sugar is really bad for the microbiome. That’s another topic. Look into it…sugar feeds all the bad stuff.

The article you cite used ‘elite’ walkers who only did keto for 25 days! That’s nothing. Phinney and Volek’s research would’ve predicted these results. Furthermore, most people have way more body fat than ultra walkers, so the benefits they’d experience would be far more dramatic. But the main thing I’d care about is overall health, longevity and the brain (for which keto is hands down the best - not just for general health, but for treating serious mental diseases)

Everybody is different, i recomend try a glucosemonitor on a long excercise and fule with smal amount of carbs when you start to get hypoglycemic. Dont need carb if its not 4h ride. And sugar couse inflamation 100%.

Wow my friend, that is a lot of waffle you've just put out. You are clearly cherry picking and are not realising the importance of nuance, and also trying to just put as much of the classic scaremongering stuff in that you can. There are also so many factually incorrect parts of your comments but unfortunately I really don't have the time to debate via RU-vid comments on this. Suffice to say to anyone reading, please do not take what this person has suggested as actually accurate. I'll copy and paste this to your other comments too because I just cannot reply to these at length but it's important for my viewers to see this: I appreciate your point of view and clear interest in low carb/ketogenic approaches. While it's definitely a fascinating area and deserves more research, there is absolutely NOT enough evidence to say it is either 1) Healthier than something like the Mediterranean Diet with adequate carbohydrates 2) That it is better for performance than a diet supply adequate carbohydrates. Honestly, at this point in time it's not even close and unless someone has a specific, medical reason, I would not recommend perusing a low carb or ketogenic diet. Instead, focus on APPROPRIATE carbohydrate intake to match training volume - which is what I teach in my videos. I'm happy to do a deep dive into this in the future because it's an important topic,

See my replies to other comments. The whole "fat adapted" thing is hugely overrated and is the cause of significant problems for many runners. Use current evidence - which suggests to fuel your training properly with adequate carbohydrates