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STUDY: High-Carb Diet Outperforms Low-Carb in Endurance Study
An excerpt -- "In an intriguing new report, Louise Burke and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Sport have replicated and extended an important previous study. They have shown, for the second time, that a Low-Carb High-Fat Ketogenic-type diet significantly reduces oxygen economy and race performance (when compared to a High-Carb diet) among world class race walkers, even as it more than doubles fat-burning among the LC walkers. Burke is widely considered a world-leading endurance nutritionist, and last fall ran 3:38:56 (at age 60) in the NYC Marathon."
Even if low carb helps you burn more fat, it reduces your oxygen economy and negatively impacts your race performance. #longlivecarbs
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The author of this article (not the author of the study), Amby Burfoot, is a smart, very experienced marathoner (won Boston in '68, wrote for Runner's World for decades, and attended college with yours truly) who concludes: "Most endurance athletes seem to train and race best on healthy high-carb diets. There will always be exceptions to this rule, but it’s a good general guideline. " I myself have never left the hi-carb bandwagon thru multiple multi-day bike trips (including across the USA), 20 years of triathlon success (including KQ x 11), and marathoning (3 x BQ).
My bias: I have never understood why deliberately starving oneself - for that is what a ketogenic diet is - should be a good long-term strategy for healthy living. As the article states, "Little is known about the long-term effects of a low-carb diet on immunity, the bones, the microbiome, heart health, and more." Carbs work better than fats for delivering power through the muscles, and can do so when continually re-supplied after local and liver glycogen stores run out. Again from the article: "Meanwhile, the LC group showed a reduction in economy and had to increase their oxygen use by 6- to 8-percent to walk at the same speeds. This was explained by the biochemistry of burning exercise fuels, where carbohydrate produces more ATP fuel units than fat for any given amount of oxygen that can be delivered to the muscle." If you wanna go fast, you need to burn CHO and fat efficiently. The faster you go, the more important CHO is.
Low-carb might be something to consider for extremely long events, which to me is anything longer than an Ironman. But for IM or shorter, it's not the way to go, IMO.
Thanks for posting this. I could never live keto, but I tried to live lower carb for awhile (<100gms). It just wasn't sustainable. I tend to eat 80% WFPB, and it's very difficult to do that lower carb. I'll take my healthy carbs, thank you very much!