Dr. Peter Brukner - 'Carbs. Fats. What Should The Elite Athlete Be Eating?'

I'm going to talk about what we should be eating for high performance and there's a lot of controversy a lot of emotion about should we be eating carbs should we be eating fats so I'm going to have a look at that and hopefully give you some answers by the end of the of the presentation my disclosures as rod said I'm the founder of sugar by half which is a not-for-profit campaign in Australia I'm also the author of an upcoming book called a fat lot of good which will be out in May the royalties of which are going to sugar by half so it's it's also a not-for-profit book as rod said I'm a sports now okay I am one of those guys who opens a newspaper and goes to the sports section first rather than the news section I thought when I was a young child I'd know when I'd finally grown up I'd read the front page first but hasn't happened yet but maybe one of these days so I thought I'd sort of look at this in a sort of a sporty analogy now it's Saturday afternoon in the United States so what do people do on Saturday afternoon in the United States between the months of about September to December they'll watch college football correct well done okay now the the climax of college football is the bowls okay so at the end of the season every team tries to get into a playoff which is called a bowl now these bowls have really interesting names a lot of them have sort of nutritional names there's the the Peach Bowl now my favorite is the Idaho Potato Bowl and the sweetest one of all the Sugar Bowl so they're really a big deal in this in this country as you know so I want to tell you about a bowl that you may not have heard of it's the diet Bowl heard of it No okay it's a ball that's played out every year and I only have two the same two contestants every year and it's team fat and team carbs they play off of the diet Bowl every year and as you know for the last sort of a generation really it's been it's been the cards generation Antibes carb has really dominated it's a it's been out there and everyone's been supporting team carb and largely do they've had two legendary coaches team carb they've had Gary Gatorade he's been a sensational coach and Paddy Power eight who's also a great a great coach and they're really two legends of the diet Bowl they've had an enormous success so I just want to show you some of the stats of the the licious this century anyway the winners of the diet bowl since the year 2000 the winners each year team carbs that's pretty pretty boring really isn't it pretty monotonous and they've won pretty clearly especially in that first decade of the of the century and what about the MVP the best player in the ball game every year well every year it was a guy called Tim Noakes now you may have heard of him he was a carb Legend right back your way back from 1991 he'd been saying that there was clear evidence that the provision of exogenous carbohydrate at high rates was essential to delay fatigue so Tim Jim Noakes is a is annulled diet Bowl legend it's a carbs super hero is a multiple MVP winner he's written this book the law of running that's gone through numerous editions and it's known as the Bible of running anyone who's serious about running has read the law of running and in that book there's lots of good stuff about carbs and then in 2012 breaking news the biggest trade in the history of diet Bowl Tim Noakes was traded from Team carbs to the perennial underachievers team fat [Applause] will this be the turning point now really can you believe that team carbs would have traded their number one superstar MVP zero in fact nobody thought was a good idea so even the great man himself figured it was a really bad bad deal now we just had a little hiccup before with the audio/visual so my my assistant here is going to just show us something here I'm responsible for writing all this and I don't believe it anymore that was Tim Noakes if those of you who don't know I'm explained ripping the pages of the out of the law of running that said that carbs was were the right fuel and and he says if you've got the law of writing tear out the section on nutrition and since then Tim admits that he knew nothing he's now an advocate for a low carb high fat diet and many of you would have read the real meal revolution so what did Tim joined Tim joined Team fat our team fat was didn't have a lot of superstars but they did have a couple of great veteran players who've been working hard all through that period so they were the start the previous storwatts have team fat if you like and of course that's jeff Volek and Steve Finney so Tim Noakes joined joined them so after 2012 did things change well let's have a look at the results since 2012 so who are the winners been since 2012 oh dear things haven't changed really but I can say that the results are getting much closer every year and the team fat is not far away from winning and who knows what will happen in 2018 our you can't wait now what about the MVP well there's been a new MVP it's a lady by the name of Louise Burke now some of you may not know Ann Lewis but Louise Burke is the sort of best known sports nutritionist dietician in the world really she's written all the main textbooks she's published numerous articles and she's really the Guru of of sports nutrition she happens to be an Australian which is not surprising of course and she and she works at the AIS which is the Australian Institute of Sport at the High Performance Centre and Louise has had a magnificent career she was the first dietitian to be appointed to our Olympic team she's played a huge role in the development of this force nutrition in Australia now I should add a little rider here that the little our friend Gary Gatorade is everywhere and he actually sponsors the the AIS not that that's relevant I just thought you might like to know but anyway and Louise claims and I I believe her that she's always tried to find - she's always tried to prove that fat is actually a good fuel but she's never been able to and and so she's been a big promoter of carbs and she got really really upset when people like myself and and Tim started to promote the idea that maybe fat was an alternative fuel for high performance and in fact in a lecture in Melbourne three years ago she got up and said Bruckner and Noakes should be in jail pretty radical well to be honest there's no one I would rather be in jail with than Tim Noakes I mean imagine being able to pick his brains 24/7 he wouldn't be able to escape me it'll be fantastic God what an education that would be but it seems that the Louise is not the only person trying to put Tim Noakes into jail but that's that's another story anyway so anyway enough of that what is the best fuel okay is it fat or is it carbs now obviously that team team fat has been relying a lot on on anecdotes on anecdotal evidence and there's been a lot of it there been a lot of very elite athletes who have come out over the last few years and talked about the changes they've made in their diet and the improvement that it's that it's resulted in and it's been some famous triathletes it's been all true endurance runners it's been true to France cyclists and they're all very endurance related sports but not just endurance related sports some of the high intensity intermittent sports such as basketball we've got some of the big names of basketball who embraced that that diet even NFL even the NFL linemen who you would think be the last people who'd want to lose weight they've they've embraced it as well and we're we're in brick and Ridge so it's appropriate to point out that for two greatest American skiers of the last decade of both advocated a low-carb high-fat diet and finally two of the great American athletes of course there's Kourtney and there's Haley so so that's fine I mean there's lots of anecdotes but you know we're scientists so let's just review the science and let's have a look at the carbs versus fats and we start of course with that store would have team fat Steve Finney see that wasn't how you looked in 1983 but at seven a photo I had um but Steve published this this study in 1983 it's a long long time ago he was only three at the time but he and this was really the first study that proposed that fats could be an alternative fuel for endurance performance and it was a study done in in cyclists and it's been a landmark study but it's also been much criticized there are only five subjects they had two outlier outliers one with very positive results one with very negative results so there's been a lot of criticism of that of that study but the thing it did do is it drew people's attention to the possibility of using fat as fuel and so since then they've been a number of other studies of varying quality looking at this question of whether fat or carbs is the best fuel for mainly in endurance sport so there's been one consistent message in virtually all those studies in that it doesn't work so this is a study by Helga which showed that a fat rich diet was detrimental of quickly run through this who don't have time to go through the mall but they're all pretty consistent they're all largely showing that using fat as a fuel was not helpful for performance decreases the ability before high intensity work the New Zealand study ketogenic diet benefits body composition and well-being and that was pretty consistent but not performance and a study by Louisbourg herself looking at also showing that fat did not provide clear benefits the performance of prolonged endurance exercise so this prompted Louise to write an editorial in 2006 putting the nail in the coffin for fat adaptation she said those at the coalface force nutrition ie her Kenda nice fat loading and high fat diets from their list of genuine eugenic aids for conventional endurance and ultra endurance sports pretty radical but that's what she decided in 1906 and in 2006 the nail in the coffin now I'm not sure whether this was the coffin she had in mind but you know there's some coffins we quite liked as well anyway after that a very strange thing happened some studies started coming out that may be reducing carbohydrate availability might be an advantage to performance and this is some of Louise's colleagues suggesting that deliberately training in conditions of reduced carbohydrate availability can promote training induced adaptations of human skill to a muscle and this data led to the concept of training low but competing high where selected training sessions it's completed in conditions of reduced carbohydrate availability would promote training adaptation and then carbohydrate reserves would be restored immediately prior to an important competition so this led the ways to re-examine the nail in the coffin and ask the question did we call the nail in the coffin too soon and in that same paper she suggested that the current guidelines for carbohydrate intake in that athletes training diet appear to be poorly understood ten years earlier she thought it was pretty simple sports nutrition experts do not promote a high carbohydrate diet for all athletes would spend 20 years doing that but nevertheless we've all changed their mind haven't we over the years and she's allowed to do the same so what has started to be talked about a lot in the sports nutrition literature was this concept of personalized sports nutrition or adapting your carbohydrate intake depending on your training load for that particular day and thus this strategy of training low and competing high and there's been a number of and what she said in that article was that the athlete should follow an individualized approach whereby carbohydrate intake is periodized now the interesting thing is there's never any mention of fat because Louise is part of that profession the dietitians who take the dietitians oath thou shalt not mention the f-word so they talk all the time about reducing carbohydrate but never about fat and what she concluded in that that article was that there was a need for ongoing research to identify a range of approaches for optimal training and competition diets now to Louise's credit she's an excellent researcher and what she did was she did quite amazing study this is a study where she got together so it's very difficult to do research in elite sport but you can't control things you know you can't go into an NBA basketball team and say well you know you're all going to eat that you're all going to do the same amount of training and they were going to change it over there it just doesn't happen so the amount of quality research done in elite sport is virtually zero but what Louise Louise had worked with the Australian national racewalking team for many years you know racewalking it's a you know stupid sport and spend 50 you spent for them you spent 50 kilometers trying not to run but you know we're pretty good at it we're good at lots of stupid sports in Australia so what we're good at and we've won lots of medals and Jared chalant won the arrow and the gold medal in the London Olympics and paid credit to Louisbourg the first person he paid credit or after you won the one at for her help in his nutrition program so because of her contacts in the in the walking world Louise managed to get together a group of elite international walkers who were very happy to leave the northern winter and come out to Australia at in January and enjoy some warm weather training and she did this quite remarkable study in this group of very elite race walkers it was a three week study looking at adaptation to a low-carb or a high-fat diet and looking at changes in metabolism and performance in these world-class endurance athletes so she had three groups one with high carbohydrate availability consumed all the time the identical macronutrient intake periodized within within or between days alternating days of low and high carbohydrate availability and then the third arm was a low-carb high-fat diet so what it showed and I got time to go into detail it showed that there was an increased oxygen cost at various levels of performance and that the time to 10k time trial performance was impaired in the low-carb high-fat cohort so which led her to believe - to conclude that in contrast of training with diets providing high carbohydrate availability and apt ation to a low carb diet impaired performance in elite endurance athletes which confirms her feeling that low-carb high-fat was not appropriate for elite endurance athletes now one point that's important to remember is this is a three-week study and there was a very interesting blog that came out a couple of weeks ago from Jeff and Stephanie they keep popping up don't they about keto adaptation and what they suggested in that that blog from the virtus ID is that while the ketogenic diet can put you into a state of nutritional ketosis in a matter of days so we can measure blood ketones and measures of fat oxidation that can happen in if in days to a couple of weeks it can take weeks to months to become fully keto adapted and they provided this little chart which suggested possible reasons why it may take time moderate matter of weeks before you become fully keto adapted and no one had really tested the low-carb high-fat diet in elite performance with a prolonged period of low carb high fat well as it happens there's been a recent study by a group in in Ireland combined with with Geoff Ollis group in Ohio at Ohio State looking at a similar looking at keto adaptation and sighs performance after 12 weeks have died in training which is about the time that voila kin Feeny was suggesting in that blog that it might take to be 40 tutor adapted and again I don't have time to go into it a great length but what were the results of that of that 12-week study well first of all in the low-carb keto diet group it decreased body mass quite significantly 5.9 compared to north point 8 kilograms what's that in pounds that's 14 15 pounds compared to two and percentage body fat was markedly reduced as well what about performance I mean the thing we're really interested in is did it improve performance well there was no change in the hundred kilometer so this is a group of cyclists it was a hundred kilometer time trial they used as their as their measure however there were some interesting results within that cohort and you can see there the group on your arrow your left is the as the high carbohydrate diet so there wasn't a lot of change in the in the time trial but in the in the low-carb Kiro group there were two athletes in particular who've markedly improved their reduced their time trial improved their time trial time and initially enough they were the two with the slowest time to start with interesting doesn't prove anything but it's an interesting result as far as their the other measures that they did they looked at their six second sprint peak power and that was improved and the peak critical power test was improved but their average powers were not change so the ability to have peak power improved average powers not and the last thing was there was a significant change in their asperity exchange ratio as you can see there the bottom line is the low-carb Aikido group at the end of the of the study so what were they able to to conclude it was certainly a reasonably positive performance result they did say that the low-carb trudeau group noted a drop in energy levels and performance during the first seven to ten weeks and a lag in performance in the first four to six weeks but then things started to improve they did point out one important factor that the low-carb keto diet may not be suitable for everyone five of the participants found the low-carb diet too difficult and two were unable to complete the post intervention testing so that's a sort of a summary of the the research has been done on high carb diets compared to low carb diets largely in endurance performance there not been a lot of research done in other areas of performance but what I want to spend a little bit of time on now is what are the additional advantages of a low carb high fat or keto diet to the athlete well the first one is weight loss it's always amazed me how many elite athletes are actually overweight there's been their whole time training virtually and yet men obviously not grossly overweight but so many of them are too you know three four five six pounds overweight and by losing that they very when they go onto a low-carb high-fat diet they Vera lose those few pounds without any change in their lean mass or their power so their power to weight ratio improves and that's incredibly important in many sports that power to weight ratio so that's one advantage of a low carb high fat or keto diet obviously we you know we hear a lot about metabolic health and I have real concerns about the high carb diet and the long term effects we have a generation of serious athletes who in the last 10 20 years have had massive amounts of carbohydrates a lot of them in form of simple carbohydrates and sugars in in the sports drinks what effect is that going to have on them later on in life surely they are prone to developing insulin resistance and all the other things that we've talked about there are certainly a lot of anecdotal sort of stories of former elite endurance athletes having heart problems at a fairly young age that's always been attributed to the strain on their hearts because of their incredibly high training load but I would suggest that there's another important factor in that and that's something we need to look into and that is a great concern to me about such a high carbohydrate intake of the long term effects you've also got recovery now recovery if you're not involved in sport you probably think i'll you know recovery you know we all recover but recovery is a really important component of our each sport and sports go to great lengths you know jumping into ice bars and and having all sorts of protein shakes and so on to improve recovery so you can then get back to training or performing quicker so instead of taking two or three days to recover you take one or two days to recover you can get some good quality training in before the next game or if you're playing sports with a play or a couple of games you're a better recovered for the next game and there's certainly a lot of evidence now that recovery is improved on a low-carb high-fat diet and that may be largely due to reduced inflammation and Steve spoke yesterday about inflammation so I don't need to to repeat that but certainly a low carb diet is associated with reduced inflammation and then finally the the practical aspects of reduced need to refuel during activity if you're running a marathon or an ultra marathon or some endurance event on a purely carbohydrate intake you've got to take massive amounts because you're going to run out of your carbohydrate stores even if you've maximized them after approximately two hours and you need to keep replenishing those those supplies okay so let's summarize what do we know okay we know that low-carb high-fat keto diets dramatically increase fat oxidation it's very effective of that we know that anecdotally some athletes especially endurance athletes perform better on a low-carb keto diet it seems that in many cases high-intensity activity appears to be compromised with a low-carb diet a lot of your athletes will say let's say you're a cyclist and they'll say yeah I feel really good doing my steady-state riding but if I want to sprint or avoid a climb I just feel I haven't got that that extra gear that I have what I'm Matt I'm carbohydrate using carbohydrates as my stores so maybe there's a an intensity of exercise that requires something more than just fat as fuel and as usual the research evidence is not clear we need to do some more high-quality studies like the last couple that I talked about to answer some of these questions okay what we don't know we don't know as we as vol Finney pointed out in that blog how long does it take to fully adapt we might get good fat oxidation within two or three weeks but there are other things that need to adapt and with when we do adapt fully does endurance performance improve what about the other sports okay all the research really is done on endurance athletes pure endurance athletes but what about strength athletes has really been only one or two studies studying gymnast that was quite positive but what about the common sports you know that the various codes of football basketball hockey and so on what I call the high-intensity intermittent sports okay that really require a mixture of endurance and speed and high intensity what about them we don't really have much or any good research on on what's happening there what I suspect is their considerable individual variation I have athletes in both high-performance endurance sports and in high-level football codes who manage perfectly well on a low-carb keto diet don't require anything further yet I have up many others who find that they need that extra cab for high-level training or high-level performance and I think there's a lot of individual variation we'll call them responders and non-responders I think that generally speaking and low-carb keto type diet is better for the ultra endurance moderate intensity you know maybe 60% of your vo2 max something like that is you find on a low-carb keto diet for high intensity most athletes seem to need some additional carbs and this concept of training love competing hi I know a lot of elite sporting teams now football teams basketball teams at the highest level have more or less adopted this approach that in their training phase especially that the football teams who only play maybe once a week that's a bit different for a basketball team but let's say you you're training once a week okay so you probably only have one really hard training session during the week the rest will just be moderate intensity so many of them have gone low carb high fat as a general sort of base for their diet on their hard training day and particularly on their competition day they'll have not a huge amount of cars but a moderate amount of cars maybe the night before or the morning of the game and then following the game they'll revert back to their their low-carb high-fat diets so this concept of trained low compete high the best of both worlds you can say is becoming very popular among among elite athletes so do I tell my athletes I tell them to their basic diet should be a low carb healthy fat real food diet avoiding sugar processed foods and seed oils I say give yourself plenty of time to adapt to the change you know three weeks out of a major competition is not the time to change from a from a high carb to a low carb diet I tell them they may find they need to top up with some carbs before or during their higher intensity activity but I'll tell them that everyone's different and they've got to play around and experiment with that and find out what works for them finally I'd like to tell you about my latest piece of research appropriate because we're at altitude here and most recently I did a study of low carb high fat diet among a group of elite young skiers some of the best skiers for their age in the world and we haven't published yet but on light report the results were excellent thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 28,358

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Low Carb Breckenridge 2018, #LowCarbBreck, #LCB18, A Fat Lot Of Good, Peter Brukner

Id: jtE_PNedBuE

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018