Philip Prins - Rethinking Carbohydrates and Endurance Perfomance

0:00Hey everybody, Mickey here, you're listening to Micapedia and this week on the podcast I bring back Dr Philip Prince who is a researcher and expert in exercise metabolism, about a new paper examining one of the most widely accepted ideas in sport nutrition, the role of carbohydrate in endurance performance. For decades, the dominant narrative has been that muscle glycogen depletion is the primary cause of fatigue during prolonged exercise, and that high carbohydrate intake is essential for sustaining that performance. But Dr Prince and his colleagues revisit the evidence and ask the deeper question, is that explanation actually supported by the data? And in this conversation, which I'm super excited to bring to you, we explore the physiology of fatigue, the often overlooked role of blood glucose and liver glycogen, and the phenomenon of exercise induced hypoglycemia is a potential driver of performance limitation.

1:04We also discuss how relatively small amounts of carbohydrate can improve performance, why higher intakes don't always translate into better outcomes, and what this means for current high carbohydrate fueling recommendations. Along the way we unpack that oxidation in low carbohydrate adapted athletes, the importance of individual metabolic differences, and where the fueling strategies for endurance athletes may need to be far more individualised than current guidelines suggest. This is a fascinating discussion that challenges these long-held assumptions about carbohydrate, fatigue, and how athletes should actually fuel for performance. And if you recall, last time I spoke to Philip, which was last year, episode 348, Philip did a load to this new review paper that looked at over 600 papers and really draws together the evidence. And this is that paper that we're chatting about today. So this conversation I feel is a long time coming and definitely ruffled some feathers in

2:05the sport nutrition world. For those of you unfamiliar with Philip or haven't yet listened to his previous episodes that episode 190 and episode 348, I've linked them in the show notes, Dr. Philip Prince is an associate professor of exercise science, and he earned a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology as well as a Master of Science in Exercise Science from Georgia Southern University, and a PhD in Exercise Physiology from the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on, among other things, the practical impact of lifestyle on metabolism, and how metabolism impacts health, disease, and performance outcomes. Among his many areas of expertise are nutritional ketosis, metabolic responses to exercise, and sports nutrition. And I have links to Philip's academic page, his research gate page, and also the study that we're chatting about today, the review that was authored by Philip alongside lead author,

3:07professor Tim Noakes, and Dr. Andrew Kutnik, who is also a former guest on the show, amongst others. So if you're interested in anything related to sports nutrition or health and metabolism, I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. Before we crack on into it though, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favourite podcast listening platform, and that increases the visibility of Wikipedia in amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from the guests that I have on the show, like Dr. Philip friends. All right guys, enjoy this conversation. All right. Okay. Philip, thank you so much for speaking to me this morning for the third time actually on my podcast, which is an outside of some of my good friends, the review of you guests I've had all three times. It's just because you continue to release research, which I think is so important, and it

4:10does seem to fly in the face of what most people understand. So I'm so pleased to get the opportunity to chat to you. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me back again. You are welcome. And I was saying to you just before we kicked off that like your tomb of a paper, like I printed it out and was really thrilled it is like massive psychathesis. It is like one of the three things that has blown up the internet over the last month. Really 26 is really started off with a bang. Yeah, I'm glad there is such a significant interest in that paper. I mean, you never know right when you when you do a study or in this case, a massive review, how much interest there will actually be. I mean, you can you can hope that other people would also be interested in your work. But yeah, I mean, we think this is quite quite significant and much of the, you know, praise goes to Professor Tim Knokes since he was the lead author.

5:11And he was the person who spent most of his time working on that big review paper that was just published a couple of weeks ago in the journal and the green reviews, right? He's a special person because it takes a special person to review about, you know, 600 studies. So if you go to the actual paper and go to the references, that's, I mean, it's really the most comprehensive piece of work as it pertains to carbohydrates supplementation and performance and metabolism that has ever been done and published. I mean, it took, it took about four or four or five years to actually, you know, look, comprehensively at hundreds of studies, I mean, over, but over 160 of them are just purely performance based studies. So it's over the last 100 years. So this century of literature has been carefully evaluated in this latest publication.

6:14And I find it so interesting. And I've got like a lot of questions that I, that hopefully we'll get to a lot of them just to sort of lay that. And of course, I'll put a link to the paper in the show notes for people to be able to read themselves. But what I find fascinating for them is actually, it's just the reaction from so many people who are so, who feel like it's almost like you've, I don't know, told them that you've told a whole religious group that their God isn't real. I don't know, like you've got so much pushback. And I do wonder how much of the pushback comes from a misinterpretation of what they think the paper is saying, because like a lot of the feedback that I have seen is like, you're saying that carbs, I don't know, that carbs don't help performance. And then they've listed like, you know, athletes and papers and stuff, which clearly show these some performance benefits. So is there a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what the paper is actually trying to show? Yeah, I mean, so obviously once the paper went, went live, you know, a couple of weeks

7:18ago. I mean, there was significant, you know, interest, especially if you go on social media. So our, our colleague, Andrew Kutnik did an amazing job at putting all the different posts together and just making sure to kind of maximize the reach of the paper. And obviously there's been, the response has been, you know, very favorable right from, from most individuals. But yeah, as you mentioned, sure, I mean, they're obviously definitely some who have different views and opinions, right, on the topic. I think a lot of it goes to, you know, people actually not reading the paper, right? So it kind of just that visceral response. And it is contradicting their own beliefs as it pertains to, you know, sports nutrition or just maybe nutrition in general. So make just saying all kinds of silly things without actually reading the paper. So I think anybody who maybe have different views or opinions on the paper, the first thing

8:27you should do is probably read the paper, that would be helpful. But yeah, I mean, the paper is ultimately, if you do read it, if you do understand what we are saying, we are proposing a paradigm shift, right? And those aren't easy, right? When you're proposing a paradigm shift, a completely different way that you're viewing a specific topic, in this case, sports nutrition, you know, that's not easy for a lot of people to accept. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And Andrew, I think, did like an amazing job of fielding a lot of the, I guess, objections to maybe the premise of the paper or what people thought the paper was about, but also, I mean, he's very good also at saying, look, this has generated a lot of really good discussion as well. And I think that's, and that's what these papers are designed to do, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

9:27And I think, for at least from what I saw a little bit on social media, not that I spent a large amount of time there, but I did see a lot of discussion as regards to, I don't have a diet superiority, right? This whole idea about low-carb and high-carb diets, and it's like, well, hang on. I think the paper really touched on that topic that much. It's not, it was not like it's a review, it's not a mid-analysis looking at low-carb and high-carb diets, right? And which one is, results in more superior athletic performance for some reason, the conversation ended up steering in that particular direction, maybe because some people assumed, right, these are the authors who typically do this type of research, so therefore the paper must be on this particular topic. So, yeah, that's if you get the paper, or even if you take it, because it's too long, and you want to read the whole thing, and you put it into chat GTP or whatever AI system

10:32you want to use, like, it's not about diet per se. This is not necessarily about which low-carb, a high-carb diet is ultimately going to improve performance, and we can have those conversations since we've done those studies, but it does present ultimately a paradigm shift in terms of the way we view nutrition, sports nutrition in general, especially fueling strategies during exercise. And is it best to fuel the muscle with carbohydrate, right, or is it better to fuel the liver, right, with carbohydrate, is it more centrally mediated, is it more peripherally mediated? Those are the questions that the paper is more designed to answer, isn't it, to review.

11:32Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, so Philip, then actually, and I guess that does bring me to my first question, so people are out there saying that you guys are suggesting that you don't need to have 150 grams of carbs an hour, or it's going to hind up performance, it's going to harm performance or whatever, but what is the main question you are actually trying to answer with review? Yeah, I mean, the core question is really, does carbohydrate improve, especially endurance performance by supplying the muscle just with more fuel, right, so what we termed the large glucose pool, or by rather preventing exercise induced hypoglycemia, the small glucose pool, right, the glucose that's in the blood and the liver, and that's really the core question here, and the motivation is, right, decades of studies that report hyperglycemia

12:33at exhaustion, yet interpretations focus it almost entirely on muscle glycogen, and basically, if you go look at our, if I were to kind of just back it up a little bit, our research of the last 10 plus years has focused on models, has focused on mechanisms, and this goes back to this other question that you were asking, right, you know, about the paper and how people are viewing and interpreting the paper, and maybe some misconceptions there, because a lot of times when people are looking at this type of work, they're just looking at maybe, what did the diet do? When instead looking at mechanisms, right, because ultimately what we've done over the last 10 years, we've used different dietary approaches to study different mechanisms in different models, and obviously, especially in the field, in this field of exercise science

13:34and sports nutrition, we know that there's this very high carbohydrate mentality, and but that goes back to different models and mechanisms, so obviously in some of the previous podcasts that I've been on with you, we've talked about some of those different mechanisms and models, especially the crossover concept, right, or this whole glycogencentric view of exercise performance, right, this belief that muscle glycogen is obligatory, it's essential when it comes to especially endurance exercise performance, so those two models, right, one of them, the crossover concept is basically saying that carbohydrate is essential for your higher intensity exercise performance, but then the other one, right, muscle glycogen, we go, well, that's obligatory, especially for your longer duration exercise performance, because once your muscle glycogen gets too low, then your fatigue, there's fatiguing symptoms goes up and you get tired and you

14:35want to slow down or stop there for as a result, so actually what we've done over the last 10 years is we've studied these different models, right, we've done studies where we specifically put athletes right on a low carbohydrate on a ketogenic diet, we increase fat oxidation, so that's the idea, we're purposely significantly increasing rates of fat oxidation by putting athletes on these diets and then seeing, well, is it not possible that they can perform high intensity exercise, we've done five kilometer time trials, we've done one mile time trials, we've done repeated sprints, all of them well above the crossover point, right, crossover points usually about 60% for obvious to max from those athletes, so all those studies have gone well above that and we've shown performance is not impaired, meaning fat is not an inferior metabolic fuel, it is able to actually support higher intensity exercise performance, right, it's able to shift that crossover point to the right, and then we've also done studies looking or more challenging this more glycogen

15:40centric view of exercise performance, right, because all that you, basically what you're doing there is, again, now you're putting athletes on a low carbohydrate, but because that is going to lower their muscle glycogen, usually I mean if an athlete goes on a low carb diet, their muscle glycogen is now 40% 50% lower in most cases, it's significantly depressed, and so now the idea is, now that I'm on a low carb diet, my muscle glycogen stores is enough for me lower, now if I do, especially in some form of endurance based exercise, immediately right from the start, my muscle glycogen level is going to start to go down, so which means according to that particular model, once my muscle glycogen level gets too low, I'm going to hit the wall so to speak, right, the symptoms of fatigue is going to become accelerated, and I'm going to slow down or stop as a result, so we've done studies where we've actually done repeated spreads, and right, because you can also repeat your muscle

16:41glycogen fairly rapidly by doing these very high intensity exercise, and the idea was maybe here by the halfway through third, fourth, fifth interval, now that they're on the low carbohydrate diet, they would have depleted their muscle glycogen stores quite significantly, and performance would have been impacted, and that it wasn't, but then we also did studies where athletes are now cycling for a couple of hours, so if they're cycling for a couple hours, but with starting off with low levels of glycogen within the muscle, according to that theory, their performance should have been negatively impacted, so it's all these studies we've done over the years looking at different models, different mechanisms, showing that once we put an athlete on a low carbohydrate diet, we significantly increase the rates of fat oxidation, or we reduce the rates of carbohydrate oxidation, but at the same time we're also reducing their muscle glycogen levels, then hang on, why isn't their high intensity exercise performance impaired, why isn't

17:43their more longer duration exercise performance impaired, maybe there's something wrong with these mechanisms that we apostulate with these different models that we use to ultimately base recommendations on. Yeah, it's super interesting isn't it, because of course as you talk about your higher intensity work and the research that we've discussed before in the podcast, sort of almost adjacent to your work, or a little bit beforehand, there was of course the West Birk and her research that did a similar study, but there, and they found there was performance detriment, and I think I was listening to a podcast this morning actually, apparently it was like 2% detrimental whatever in their performance, but there was still performance detriment being on a ketogenic diet versus being on a high carb approach, but their adaptation was just 3 weeks, and I'm sitting here listening to this, and so therefore what people

18:44doing is they're like, well you know Birk et al, they're very well renowned in sports nutrition research, like they're like gold standard researchers in this field, they've been doing it for decades, if anyone's going to know, they're going to know, for whatever reason that's been sort of put on a pedestal of, well ketogenic diets don't work, and in my mind, I'm like, if only Louise and colleagues actually adapted her athletes for like six weeks, I wonder what they would have felt if that adaptation period was a bit longer, because I believe that's what you and your team did, you sort of adapted them for a bit longer, and looking at the concentration piece, yeah. Yeah, I mean our studies have never been shorter than four weeks, so we make sure that in all of the studies, the adaptation period is usually between four and six weeks, obviously we wish in some cases it can be longer, but it's always been between four and six weeks, and none of

19:44those studies have performance ever been negatively impacted when the adaptation period is between four and six weeks, I'm actually working with some others on a systematic review and meta-analysis, just looking at this adaptation time period. So there's still a lot of work to be done with that, but we're just looking at, here's all the low carbohydrate or ketogenic studies that measure performance or some marker of performance at the same time, and now let's group them according to the duration right off that adaptation period. A lot of the older, more historical studies was just like a couple of days, right? So once there are just a couple of days, a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, all the way to eight weeks, 12 weeks, in some cases, and so what is, when, if you now put all these studies together, when you get much more of a clear sense of when exactly is performance much more likely to be impaired, when is performance

20:46more likely to be maintained, or maybe is there any indication of where performance seems to be more enhanced as well? So even though it's more early days kind of do that work, it's still pretty clear that you're much more likely to find impairments and performance for the studies that are less than four weeks in duration. Yeah, which, I mean from a transition point of view, it makes perfect sense. And I would just, I would just add there one thing, because one of our previous studies actually also looked at that because we measured, we measured blood glucose for ICGM and then also blood ketones as well. And we found that blood glucose kind of was stabilized at about the four week mark. And so was blood ketones was also peaked at about the four week mark as well. Evidence for metabolic homeostasis. And then obviously performance as well. So yes,

21:50absolutely from a metabolic standpoint or obviously from a just purely performance standpoint, at least four weeks or more seems to be the minimum. Yeah, nice one. And then of course, you mentioned the glycogen depletion model of exercise performance. Now I, and you need to school me on this Philip, but I remember knowing that bonking wasn't related to glycogen depletion. I think we've known that for about 10 years, haven't we? That, you know, they've done studies looking at cyclists and they're testing the theory that you bonk when your glycogen is depleted. That's what we always thought we knew. And then I remember, I'm sure many of the studies that have actually tested that there. And they're like, that actually, there's something else going on. It's not the glycogen that's the issue because glycogen's not depleted. So is that where that central fatigue model comes from? Yeah, well, so yeah, we can go a little bit further back. So it was really in the 1960s. So this group of Scandinavian researchers, right, they developed this needle biopsy

22:58technique. And so really for the first time in history, they're able to biopsy glycogen that's in the muscle or liver. So that, that was, that's really a landmark paper that spurred much of this conversation. That was published in the late 1960s by Berkschrom and colleagues. And basically what they, they did, right, they did these biopsies in these athletes looking at muscle glycogen. And then what they were trying is for these athletes, their muscle glycogen pre-exercise. So the pre-exercise muscle glycogen levels, right before they started to exercise was elevated. And then these guys within exercise for a prolonged period of time. And at the point of fatigue or exhaustion, right, they would measure their muscle glycogen levels again. And, you know, it would be well very low. And so therefore that idea started that, well, muscle glycogen depletion, right, seems to coincide with fatigue or muscle glycogen is an important factor when it comes to endurance exercise

24:01performance because the next thing they did is, well, hang on, how can we then manipulate these athletes muscle glycogen? Let's put them on different diets. Let's put, so that's, that's what they did. For just a couple of days, they would put athletes on high carb diet, a moderate carb diet, and a low carb diet. And they would have these guys again exercise at some moderate intensity until exhaustion. And they look at, you know, pre-exercise muscle glycogen. So as you can imagine, if you're consuming more of a high carbohydrate diet, then you're, you're stuffing more glucose glycogen in your muscle and liver. So pre-exercise muscle glycogen was obviously a lot more on high carb diet, a little less on the moderate carb diet, and far less on the low carb diet. And then they want to see, okay, well, how does now that we manipulated the pre-exercise muscle glycogen concentrations, now let's see how that impacts endurance exercise performance. And what they found was that when they're on a high carb diet, higher pre-exercise muscle glycogen, and that seemed to help, that seemed to extend endurance exercise performance compared to,

25:04obviously, on the lower carb diet, lower pre-exercise muscle glycogen concentrations, and fatigue, right? Fatigue set in sooner, because now you started off with lower levels, and now it's not going to take me that long to, to burn through you. Yeah. Exactly. And now reach that point, right? Because that was the whole idea, that once your muscle glycogen gets to two low levels, then fatigue sets in right to RPE goes up, or your affect goes down, or like you were describing, like bonking, or hitting the wall, etc. But what, so that's kind of the history of where that originated. And actually, so even a couple years then after that, because that was 1960s and then 1970s, I know there was another pivotal study by, I think, was salted in colleagues, where they would then carb load athletes, so three days before, in an effort to significantly ramp

26:04up, right, to pre-exercise muscle glycogen concentrations, and then would have these guys, I think that was a 30 kilometer time trial. And their performance was significantly improved in the 30 kilometer time trial. So it's all those early studies that seem to indicate that hang on the muscle glycogen seems to be an essential or an obligatory fuel, and, or the pre-exercised muscle glycogen concentration seems to be very important, but the determining factor there that seems to influence that is the diet, so we've got to make sure we're consuming or telling athletes to be consuming a lot of carbohydrates before an event in order to maximise that pre-exercise muscle glycogen concentrations. And then obviously, during exercise, we're going to be recommending athletes consuming a lot of carbohydrate during exercise in order to, then the idea is a little bit different, right, because you want to spare, quote-unquote spare, this essential fuel. So all the recommendations, whether it's before, during, or after,

27:08right, consuming a lot of carbohydrate before, during, and after, is geared towards, you know, essentially a glycogen. How high can I get it before exercise? Can I spare it during exercise? Or can I replenish it after exercise? And so if you read the big review paper, you'll get that historical sense, but you'll also understand that if you actually go back in the 1930s, there was another group of Scandinavian researchers also doing some different work, actually finding that exercise induced hypoglycemia seems to be the exercise stopper. So that was like in, I think, 1936 or 39, there was an old study by Boje and colleagues, another one by Christensen and Hansen, and a lot of these times these guys were just basically their own subjects. They did a lot of the experiments on themselves, but they would just cycle

28:09or exercise for a long time, and at the point of exhaustion, and just a large ballast of carbohydrate, and then that seems to restore exercise performance. So it's interesting how that happened in already in the 1930s, and they even said in one paper, I even wrote this down, is that fatigue is a hypoglycemic symptom of cerebral origin. So that was in the 1930s. fatigue is a hypoglycemic symptom of cerebral origin, and then a couple of years later, then that seems to change dramatically with the muscle biopsy technique, and then all the focus shifted to glycogen, and obviously industry stepped in, and we know what happened really there afterwards with a lot of the recommendations in the exercise science and sports nutrition field, but yet, and so now

29:12we come back to that topic, basically a 100 years later, evaluating all the scientific literature over the last 100 years to see, well, hang on, is it more about fueling your, what we term your large glucose pool or the small glucose pool, which one is more important? Yeah, because I have a few, when I'm listening to you talk about that, and it's almost like the muscle glycogen, it's like they sort of missed the wood for the tree, so to speak. So they were looking just at muscle glycogen, but did they look at liver glycogen? Did they look at blood glucose? Were they able to make those decisions with those earlier studies? Yeah, most of those studies are not looking at liver glycogen, that's much more difficult to assess from an exercise perspective, but what is interesting is a lot of those studies actually did measure blood glucose, it seems they weren't very much interested in interpreting

30:14the blood glucose values, so even that old study, in that foundational one by Berkscherman colleague, that was so pivotal where they put athletes on these different diets, low, moderate, and high, and they're checking muscle glycogen before exercise and then at exhaustion, so yes, they measured muscle glycogen, but what most people are not familiar with is they also measured blood glucose, and so hang on, so at that point of exhaustion or the point of fatigue, yes, I mean muscle glycogen is low, but that wasn't the only thing that was low, blood glucose was very low, it was definitely exercise induced hyperglycemia, and this is the interesting part for that study, if you're saying that if the theory is that it's well, it's all just muscle glycogen, and then you go look at that study by Berkscherman colleagues, at the point of exhaustion,

31:15there is variability, there is variability in glycogen, at exhaustion, I mean, meaning at the point of exhaustion, sure glycogen is low, but it's not to the same extent, like it was a little bit higher on the high carb diet compared to the moderate or the low carb diet, so hang on it, so if muscle glycogen is really causing fatigue, then why at the point of exhaustion do you find great variability? It's not unanimous, now in that same study, yeah exactly, in that same study, you go, what is more consistent, and that is blood glucose, I mean blood glucose, in that study for the moderate low and high carb hydrate diet, if I remember correctly, it was in the 50s and 60s, milligram per deciliter, I mean clinical hypoglycemia is 70 or below 70, those guys were 50s and 60, so that should have been the main finding of that study,

32:21look, like glucose level is at very low levels, that exercise that used hypoglycemia, that seemed to be the common denominator, not so much muscle glycogen depletion. I'm really interested to know if anyone has any idea, as to why that was not reported, like is there any, like, maybe, I guess I said you had this new technique, the process of technique, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, I mean, I think that happens a lot of times, when you have new technology and new techniques, and that kind of takes center stage, and then your other variables, the more traditional variables kind of takes the back seat, so to speak, so I think that's more than likely probably what happened, and just resulted in this kind of hyperfocus view and attitude towards glycogen. It's interesting, I was listening to, I think it was Andrew talking on another podcast as well, about the history of sports nutrition,

33:24and how we fueled athletes prior to this explosion of sort of like carbohydrate, and visible just to be clear, like, I don't think that, like, I mean, I use carbohydrate when I train, you know, I reckon, when my athletes do as well, I'm not up at 120 grams an hour or anything, I'm definitely more of a lower carb style approach, you know, maybe 30, 40 grams an hour, but even like, back in the day, they used to fuel Olympians on protein, I understand. Yeah, so if you go read the paper, kind of more towards the beginning, as we're kind of more describing, or detailing the historical aspects of it, absolutely, so for, if you go look at the Olympics over the last 100 years or so, a lot of the focus was on protein rich foods, and that's how, you know, animal-based foods, protein-rich foods, and that seemed to be the standard for a long

34:29time, up until, really, kind of the 1996, you know, Atlanta Olympics here in the US, that's kind of when you started to see more of a shift, to more carbohydrate-based foods being more highly recommended, so yes, there's, you do see that, absolutely. We'll be right back with the conversation after I give a shout out to sponsors of Wikipedia. All right, team, let me tell you about newsest, clean plant-based nutrition products to meet the demands of modern life. With over a decade of experience and a presence in more than 20 countries worldwide, newsest has emerged as a leader in providing innovative solutions for those seeking healthier and more sustainable choices. In a world where people are looking for clean labels, easily digestible ingredients, and allergen-free options, newsest delivers, and totally has you covered. Clean lean protein is a plant-based protein powder and contains all nine essential amino acids. It encourages recovery,

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36:36that supports its use for both endurance athletes and your everyday person. From an endurance perspective, it's been researched to show a wide variety of benefits, including three times faster recovery, improved performance, and most recently it's been studied for its role in helping protect the gut from heat stress symptoms, which is so important for any endurance athlete who will be training and racing in the heat. Currents is an informed sport certified supplement and one other benefit which I haven't mentioned is the research that shows it upregulates fat oxidation and you know that being able to burn more fat is so important for an endurance athlete. I use Currents. I recommend it to my clients, both endurance athletes and your everyday individual and I personally notice a difference when using the product. So pick up yours by using the code Wikipedia and you'll find that in the show notes. All right, now back to the show. Philip, can we

37:38can we talk then about the exercise induced hypoglycemia before we crack on into muscle glycogen, liver glycogen, but you mentioned the study in the 1930s, you mentioned the sort of mist data in the 1960s. What other research supports the idea of this exercise induced hypoglycemia? Is there a lot out there in the studies that you that you reviewed? Yeah, I mean if you that review article includes data from over 160 performance-based studies and we when we reviewed them all put them all together. We found that you know close to 90 percent so close to 90 percent of those studies showed that you know when carbohydrate improved performance right when carbohydrate was organic right and improve performance that's because blood glucose was significantly dropping in the placebo group. So when you when you notice

38:41right meaning if if you're if you have you know two conditions right there's the placebo group or a control group versus the other group is some form of carbohydrate supplementation whether it's 10 or 60 or 90 whatever many grams for hours given the carbohydrate is improving performance by helping to stabilize blood glucose concentrations because typical what you see in the control group or the placebo group is when you'll much more likely to find exercise induced hypoglycemia so blood glucose starting to decrease to low or very low levels. So that's what it seems if you go look at all these performance studies 90 percent of them are are clearly you know showing or seeming to you know indicate that that is the mechanism through which carbohydrate supplementation is ultimately improving performance by helping to prevent exercise induced hypoglycemia and this

39:41goes back to the whole idea behind the small and the large glucose pool right so the large glucose pool is just referring to your muscle glycogen right so all that glucose that sort of glycogen within the muscle I mean you can you know that's about for typical person about 500 grams or or so the small glucose pool that's the that's the glucose that's not being stored within the liver as glycogen or just within the amount of glucose that's within the circulation so what what we're saying and by valuing all of those performance based studies it's the carbohydrate ingestion it's not so much impacting the large glucose pool but it's impacting the small glucose pool because the small glucose pool that is ultimately kind of the the key factor there in the sense of blood glucose regulation so it's not so much so it's not so much if if my muscle glycogen levels are going down during exercise it's more if my blood glucose levels are

40:44during are decreasing during exercise that is what's then triggers central or cerebral mechanisms resulting in those fatigue symptoms not so much glycogen depletion and that obviously you know as I'm sure we'll talk about later if you're going like what's the so what of that well there's significant implications if you're if if if if you think the large glucose pool of muscle glycogen and somehow regulating exercise performance or resulting in fatigue versus you're going well hang on maybe maybe it's rather the small glucose pool totally that that interpretation will result in completely different practical applications and recommendations to athletes well I mean let's go there now because you I mean we we've talked about this probably on the last couple of podcasts as well as this shift to these higher carbohydrate intakes of you know research is looking at 90 to 120 grams of carbs an hour people in practice are doing 150 grams of carbs now

41:46David Roche on the he's he's like a you know he's one I'm going to say leadville I think a couple of times you and did he win I think he record we did he the record at Western states maybe and apologies if I'm getting the races wrong they'll sort of bring them to one but I should know better but um but on 150 grams an hour and he he attributes his success to the super high carbohydrate amounts and so but in addition to that though if I'm listening to you Philip which I do an Andrew and of course my friend and your friend two damn blues like like he's he looks at the research and he's like well you know the higher the carbohydrate goes the more you're actually breaking down muscle glycogen you know you're giving an accelerated breakdown potential muscle glycogen where is that all that carbohydrate going even because we don't even think you're oxidizing it all so so how does how does the the research actually um how does that stick up to to what we're seeing

42:47out there in practice now because it's because it's absolutely you know um in contrast yeah again if if if your belief is that you know um it is that muscle glycogen is obligatory to exercise performance um then your the practice is about again as I said earlier maximizing the large glucose pool before exercise and then during exercise as you were just suggest you know discussing uh these very large uh uh uh intakes of carbohydrate during exercise right because any idea is well um I'm I'm using I'm rather instead of using the large glucose pool instead of using energy as being tucked away as as glucose within the muscle I'm using right the um uh uh what I'm ingesting right the gels power a gatorate whatever right that's exhaustionous uh carbohydrate uh oxidation oxidizing the carbohydrates that I'm ingesting

43:48early for fuel and therefore I'm I'm I'm the hope is that I'm tapping in less I'm sparing the essential fuel because I don't want that to run out I don't want that to become depleted because then I'm going to experiencing those fatiguing symptoms so so again as the it's a lot of to have to do with just the way you interpret it is it the large glucose pool is it actually the small glucose pool but yes um exactly as you were saying um um just now but those large it's it's interesting there's evidence there studies out there that shows it's actually paradoxical uh there studies out there that show especially at these very high intakes that these very high intakes um 120 grams or or more that that actually accelerates um um uh muscle glycogen usage uh because the idea there is or the way that that would work if your um carbohydrate ingestion is so high obviously now your blood glucose goes up your blood insulin goes up that suppresses

44:51significantly suppresses fat oxidation and so the emphasis is obviously on carbohydrate oxidation a lot of glycogenol is uh is taking place and so you're you're you're you're using up um paradoxically the the so-called essential fuel that's that's in the muscle so yeah so that should be considered and obviously the other thing that you got that you mentioned is um and we've published in this article I mean if you're consuming such large amounts 120 or whatever it is it's not like you're oxidizing that um it's probably only about 50 percent of of that large large amount that you're ingesting is actually getting oxidized for for fuel so some of the unused amounts right is getting either stored or remaining in your circulation or for a lot of athletes remains in there in their gut causing those gastrointestinal symptoms which obviously is a is a big issue for a lot of athletes especially when they start to uh ramp up their uh you know carbohydrate intakes do such uh very high amounts now the the other thing um um uh kind of mentioned

45:58is even one of our previous uh studies because you were asking also earlier about just other you know studies look at this distinction between large and the small glucose pool and so and again that's I think that's it's it's a great you know example for this kind of distinguishing factor of of is it rather the small glucose pool is it EIH is it exercise induced hyperglycemia is it's a more likely contributor or fatigue or again is it is it the large glucose pool should I rather be focused on stuffing my muscle and uh with as much you know carbohydrate as as possible and I think we did discuss this also in the in the last podcast but especially I think it's important for these conversations because what we did in in in that study again we habituated athletes to high and low carb diets and that was six weeks and then we looked at their endurance exercise performance so if if if you're in that study athletes were either consuming you know

47:03hundreds of grams I think it was like 400 or 500 grams of carbohydrates per day or about 40 grams per day so that's all impacting the large glucose pool and then we made them do endurance exercise for a couple of hours no no significant difference in their endurance exercise performance even though for when they were consuming the low carb diet right there their large glucose pool would have been obviously much lower compared to on the high carbohydrate diet so again how could it be so just another clear example there how could it be about the large glucose pool if you can clearly manipulate that and yet you don't see any meaningful impacts on physical performance so we did that but then we also looked okay well now let's see the the small glucose pool so they would do endurance exercise either on a placebo right so it's just basically flavoured water or minimal carbohydrate supplementation and that study we gave them 10 grams per hour

48:06the reason why we gave them 10 grams per hour is because well it's been a long time in the lab trying to pilot ace what what carbohydrate dosage can be ingested during exercise to help maintain blood glucose level but at the same time not significantly impacting substrate metabolism because there are metabolic consequences clearly of ingesting large amounts of carbohydrate during exercise obviously as soon as the the carbohydrate intake starts to go up then fat oxidation goes down and carbohydrate oxidation goes up so in that study was what is just the mental amount of carbohydrate we can give these athletes during exercise with with the idea of helping to maintain or stabilize blood glucose levels but without significantly impacting substrate metabolism right carbon fat oxidation rates during exercise so that was the whole idea behind that plus the fact that you only

49:07have about four to five grams of glucose right in five liters of blood right that's that's normal that's how much sugar you have in your in your yeah exactly and so that that in fact that the small glucose pool and that we that extent that extended that improved exercise performance on average by about you know 20 20 percent because if you go look at that data when those when they were on the placebo their blood glucose was going down because the other thing the other thing the other thing that we did is we asked these athletes to come in in a fasted state meaning they're more prone to to EIH they're more prone to hypoglycemia they would do a 15 hour fast before they come in because that's been shown to the pleated liver glycogen not muscle glycogen so they're already coming in you know obviously being more sensitive to to experiencing EIH and now they're either just they're taking water nothing or 10 grams of carbohydrate per hour and I think average blood glucose

50:13when they were on the placebo with like 70 milligrams per deciliter I mean that's the cutoff for for EIH compared to blood glucose average blood glucose for when they're consuming 10 grams of carbs per hour was like 90 or 95 milligrams per deciliter so a lot higher and that that that stabilized blood glucose and extended exercise performance so even just a simple study like that was specifically designed to look at mechanism right is it all is it all about the large glucose school is it is it is it muscle glycogen is the muscle glycogen depletion or is it rather a reduction in blood glucose or EIH that's the predominant factor especially during endurance exercise how much glucose do we store in our liver about 100 so because it is interesting isn't it so a couple of things like I know of a few athletes who've done the done their sort of metabolic

51:14cart testing once they've been adapted to a lower carb approach and what they've found is that their fat oxidation doesn't isn't that suppressed when they take on board carbohydrate after that adaptation period like initially when they're adapting if they put glucose into the system they do suppress their fat oxidation the way that you talk about fill up that and and practice what I've seen and what I don't know if you know Marco LTV like he has some excellent blogs on his low carb approach and I've interviewed him a couple of times he uses a periodized carbohydrate approach where he goes very low carbohydrate and then puts it in around exercise and he's managed to ramp up his fat oxidation levels by like he doubled his fat oxidation levels and improved a lot of his health markers and his body composition but he did a he did a test and he wrote it up in this beautiful blog about how he put in quite a bit of carbohydrate during his is or pre exercise

52:18and during exercise but in his fat adapted state he was still able to oxidize fat so there's something about that metabolic machinery that if you can get it working then you don't necessarily have to avoid this this other fuel source and I do wonder whether that's like a good approach for a lot of people actually what I'm just curious as to your thoughts well we we have published on the fact that you know when athletes transition to a low carbohydrate diet they're actually more metabolically flexible because some have some have argued that that that particular dietary approach will impair metabolic flexibility but we have actually shown the opposite I remember in one of the first studies we did we had now this is not carbohydrate injection during exercise but beforehand because we had athletes do a 5 kilometer run as fast as they can and then when they were on the high carbohydrate diet it was I think it was like 94 94% of their total energy

53:21expenditure came from carbohydrate so such a such a small amount right because the remainder is like only like 6% came from fat right I mean that that that's the kind of stuff where these beliefs come from that you know a carbohydrate right that's or glucose is the preferred fuel source especially during more higher intensity exercise in any case then we took those exact same athletes adapted them to a low carb diet that was six weeks and then I did the you know run a five days fast as you know possible in that case 65% of the energy came from carbohydrate 35 yeah 65% came from carbohydrate 35 close to 40% of the energy came from fat that obviously indicative of greater metabolic flexibility they were they were able to use now a lot more fat for fuel at a very high because that was at 82% of vo2 max so yes and we've shown this in other studies as well so that's just a good example now we've done we are currently doing an interesting study

54:23where we're we're we're we're looking at this medical if you want to call it that kind of dose those response with carbohydrate congestion and and and so we're we're having cyclists perform endurance-based exercise and there's there's really four conditions and it's either a placebo or it's minimal carbohydrate supplementation at a rate of 10 grams of carbohydrates per hour or it's 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour or 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour so we're about we're about halfway because we're working it's a multi-site design and so we have our collaborators that are high of state they're basically doing part of the study we're doing another part of the study and now you're we're about halfway through so I can't share too much but the results are definitely interesting especially as it pertains to kind of what you were you know saying and how carbohydrate congestion the the

55:29metabolic effects that that has now in in this particular study all these athletes are habitually consuming a high carb diet okay so they're all habitually consuming a high carb carbohydrate diet that's the metabolic state so that they are coming into into the lab and then it's okay now let's see how you do on zero 10 60 90 what happens not just to performance right is their endurance exercise performance better is more actually better but then also the metabolic effects and so just just I mean I can't say obviously too much but just from a metabolic standpoint absolutely like on a zero and and and 10 grams of carbohydrates per hour as you would suspect if you understand the your the physiology there is a lot more fat oxidation taking place and then when you start to ramp up the carbohydrate ingestion right fat oxidation's going down and on more energies coming from carbohydrates ingestion now the question which which you are

56:30alluding to is what what would happen to the to athletes consume habitually consuming a low carb diet and then doing a whether it's 10 or 60 or nine or whatever amount of carbohydrate during exercise do those do those performance their performance some are different then individual who basically consuming a high carb diet and what also are the metabolic effects and so I don't so that's you know speculation at this point because we're almost done with the one study but again the follow-up study would then be to look at okay now let's adapt these guys to a low carb diet and now let's provide carbohydrate supplementation during exercise and are the metabolic and performance effects the same so you're going to have to unfortunately stay tuned for for that but yeah I wish I could tell you from the current study right yeah because also if you read the the review paper we also talked about discuss this you know carbohydrate

57:35dose escalation and how that impacts or maybe doesn't impact exercise performance is actually a lot of well-designed studies on that especially ones that are not funded by industry and so what the goal of our kind of current ongoing study was just to to to to design one of these carbohydrate dosing studies and see what exactly is happening to performance and also metabolism if you go from if you just scale it all the way up you go from low to moderate to those to those high doses yeah that would be super interesting because I do think there is so like I have a few thoughts around it like someone like Marco who is a is a very good it's just a case studies and n equals one you know and he is he's a very very good athlete but he massively improved when he shifted his metabolic state to be one that was able to burn more fat he was able to reduce down his his carbohydrate like all the all the things you would expect for like this is not used to you and he is able to race on

58:36a lower dose of carbohydrate he still had I think it was 40 or 50 grams and he felt amazing and then he just wanted because he's he's got access to all these tools he's like I wonder what happens if I do go in and and you know have a high carb approach during my exercise what happens to my fat oxidation nothing he was great but then it was also interesting because he then flipped it up and he's like I'm going to have how long would it take me to lose my benefits of fat oxidation so he went back on his he's Italian he went back on his high carb diet for several weeks and he sort of figured out that that he could pretty quickly reverse the the his ability to burn fat but because he had built that machinery it didn't actually take long for him to to to be able to go back to how he was after a period of of low carb which which I just think even though it is n equals one and you guys are doing a great job at looking at this in the lab as well like this is just continuing to form to informer understanding of using different fuel types and

59:39and of you know time and place for maybe there is a time and place where your carbohydrate is a little bit lower depend or sorry a little bit higher depending on the type of activity you are for age group athletes like us you know I'm not talking about elite which I do want to actually discuss in a minute but but there is you know like I think there's potentially a time and a place for that just as much as there's a time and a place to be able to adapt yourself to a lower carb intake and really sort of build that metabolic machinery again for athletes. Yeah I mean all I can say is at least from from our work habitual diet doesn't seem to you know significantly impact exercise performance and that's studying exercise performance across a variety of different events you know your shorter duration higher intensity middle distance and your long duration endurance events so because that's that's what what we're saying there

1:00:44right is if if the habitual diet is not impacting having a meaningful impact on an on exercise performance that's that all goes back to the large glucose pool and then the fact that you can you can if you can manipulate that right by consuming a low or medium or high carbohydrate diet and yes that's going to definitely impact the large glucose pool your muscle glycogen but it doesn't seem to have meaningful implications to exercise performance now I say that but also for anybody listening to that remember in these all these different studies that we're doing you're ultimately looking at averages and you know if you group all the data together and then compare well here's the the average on the low carb and the high carbohydrate diet so behind those averages are people and people respond differently so and and so absolutely in every single one of those studies doesn't matter what the performance outcome were you know some

1:01:45are doing better on the low carb approach and some are doing better on the on the on the high carbohydrate approach but it's still important to just kind of you know back up there and go well sure in all these studies not just that we that we have done but also others it's still important to understand what I was just saying there like yes I can manipulate the large glucose pool by consuming obviously different types of diets but that doesn't seem to inherently be such an important factor not as as at least as it once thought was was thought to be to impacting performance so it's more about the seems to be more about the manipulating the the small glucose pool yeah for sure and I guess I just get excited thinking about the idea that people that you know the shifting between different I guess dietary approaches is maybe somewhat helpful from a metabolic health is the same reason you're you're sort of interested in it from the other health perspective like like an athletes don't have to be high carb all of the time to to experience any performance benefits

1:02:48um sort of at all which which actually on your um if I'm thinking about athletes like those who are geared more towards those higher intakes are elite athletes like but how does I suppose this is probably why you're giving all of the pushbacks because people like the Tour de France riders they have 120 grams an hour you've got the you know the really successful um um uh ultra endurance runners who are still having 80 grams of carbs an hour like does your research is that in opposition to what we're seeing in terms of performance like are you saying hey killian june is going to be great on 20 grams of carbs an hour like what's uh what's what's what's I think that this is what people are hearing I think yeah so yeah so I mean I guess that's the question I'd say for for those individuals um who are advocating or recommending or just saying from personal experience right I I uh this is this is one of the reasons why um why my performance is so good

1:03:56well is it is it because of you know is it so it's it's all because of the high carbohydrate ingestion during exercise well how do you know how how do you not know that you would also not do something similar by you know consuming 60 grams or 40 grams or 30 grams or 20 yeah like how do you yeah was that actually tested I mean when it comes to performance I mean there's so many different variables that ultimately is impacting uh you know you know performance so especially in that upper enchilon I mean those those guys right there I mean to what extent are are obviously just genetic factors coming to play um that that's obviously a you know a big one so you're trying to then tease out you know here's our here's our your your elite athletes and clearly they there's genetic advantages maybe for them uh then to what extent is them consuming 120 grams

1:04:56of carbohydrates per hour doing anything above and beyond that I agree that's the that's a hard you know a cell right there so um but because what our argument is just that look as soon as you as soon as you stabilize the small glucose pool um there's there seems to be no additional performance you know uh you know benefit and again it doesn't take that much carbohydrate ingestion to stabilize your your blood glucose level yeah and actually yeah how does this shift in in terms of our in terms of recommendations I guess that's the big question the overarching question that that um anyone listening to this will be like well what does this mean that I should be having a for grams of carbohydrate in hour like like can we glean that from from what we already might know like what what are your thoughts there fill up yeah so our our review right uh is is saying right that rather the emphasis of the focus should be on the small glucose pool and like like we already discussed right it it doesn't take that much carbohydrate

1:06:01uh to help stabilize or normalize your your small glucose pool and so the traditional approach right or the the old model right was all geared towards the large glucose pool okay then you're consuming a lot of carbohydrates before and also during exercise for obviously different purposes as previously discussed but if we're saying if we're saying exercise and use hyperglycemia if that's the primary uh that's the primary factor in inducing fatigue especially during endurance exercise then then hang on then um then all of a sudden what I'm doing before doesn't become like that necessarily that important as we previously discussed low on high carbohydrate diets since that's impacting large glucose pool but then it's more so but what am I doing during exercise to helping to helping to maintain uh glycemia right normal blood glucose levels during exercise I'm trying to prevent right uh significant reductions in in blood glucose uh levels and I

1:07:06can do that with relatively small amounts yeah and yeah and that's the that's the whole point I can do that with relatively small amounts as I was discussing previously in a and one of the studies we did it was just 10 grams I mean 10 grams of carbohydrate per hour in that study it was so we did uh it's about 3.4 grams every 20 minutes because that's that's the interval in which we administrative the carbohydrate which comes out to be about 10 grams per hour such such a small amount was sufficient clearly to help maintain blood glucose levels during exercise to prevent exercise induce hyperglycemia and extend uh exercise performance yeah and um and you know that's not overly different from the carp rinsing studies that they did back in the I want to say that the early 2000 I can't remember when there was a sort of spate of them with yeah yeah cyclists would put sports drinking their mouth rinse it around and then sort of spit it out had a similar effect was that preventing potentially that exercise induced hypoglycemia as well

1:08:09yeah I think that's I think that's different because there's no real ingestion of the carbohydrate but it's still kind of both are still working through the centrally mediated mechanisms right because what we're saying with with this with EIH right so once your blood glucose level starts to drop significantly during exercise and it doesn't have to be just at the clinical level right because clinical hyperglycemia is around 70 milligrams per deciliter right so once you get to that point or obviously lower now it's clinical hyperglycemia if you if you go read the paper right it's also just about that relative drop from baseline yeah so what is that relative say I started off at at a hundred or hopefully not above a hundred because then you're pre-diabetic but whatever you had that baseline was and then you drop below that uh 20 25 30 units um so even just seeing that large relative reduction um in blood glucose right that's enough to trigger to trigger

1:09:12those uh cerebral or central systems right because then your your brain recognizes that your blood glucose level is obviously going down and that's where the whole central governor theory right comes in comes into play and your your your your your your your experiencing more of those fatiguing symptoms uh you have a less motor unit recruitment and activations ultimately obviously when once that happens you're gonna want to slow down or ultimately stop as a result yeah so so if someone's listening to this and they're like small glucose just to finish up small glucose pools so if I make sure that my liver glycogen is topped up and they say they're exercising in the morning about to do something sort of higher and and and not even thinking about what their habitual diet might be but if the liver glycogen is topped up then they've got enough on board and that's like if if your liver carries say a hundred grams of glycogen did you say we reduce by 50 percent out of a glycogen overnight or something today do I hear well yeah I mean if you're if you're

1:10:14going to do an overnight fast I know there's previous studies that have shown like uh like a 15 hour fast uh it's going to significantly reduce your liver glycogen yes yes so if you have anything in the morning it's really just to top up your liver glycogen before you go out for a higher and for whatever exercise session you're doing that is likely you but you don't have to put in like 100 or 150 grams of carbohydrate before you head on out the door type thing not that anyone really does that anyway although sports nutrition guy sports nutrition guy don't even have you have wonderful grams per kg body weight but very seldom do we do that check a banana and then go out the door yeah I mean so we're we're I mean just to make it very simple and practical just just think about how can I help how can I maintain my blood glucose levels during exercise I don't want to see a significant drop right and this is obviously now much more likely to happen

1:11:15for exercise that's longer than an hour in in in nature any of those endurance based activities then you go well I'm gonna consume carbohydrate during exercise since obviously that is helping to maintain the small glucose pool you're at your blood glucose levels but I don't have to do 60 or 90 or 120 or even more I can get away with much smaller amounts right because remember then that conversation which is quite significant and obviously result in a big paradigm shift the way we think about sports nutrition in general but that conversation is also important from just an overall metabolic health standpoint so that this these these topics and conversations is not just purely performance driven which we have been discussing over the last hour or so but it's also very much centered towards metabolic health since it's not just you know general population who have seen significant deteriorations in overall metabolic health right chronic disease

1:12:19etc but we've also seen a larger uptick in you know metabolic ailments and you know different conditions and diseases also in athletes in your athletic populations as well and we've we've published on this and I think in one of the podcasts right we we talked about that where in one study we found you know 30% incidence of prediabetes again that's in that's in athletes and we're not we're not the only ones to have have found that so yes it's the other thing is what I have personally seen in the lab so the last 10 plus years because all of these studies are on usually endurance-based athletes so runners most of these guys are you know doing marathons or ultra-marathons on a regular basis triathletes I mean these are individuals are obviously clear doing a lot of activity on a regular basis so over the years as these guys are coming into the lab

1:13:24for most of these studies we're measuring blood glucose kind of almost one of the first measurements that we get is kind of just a baseline blood glucose so for in addition to the fact that for most of these studies they're coming in in some kind of facet state right it's like a new overnight facet state so you obviously ideally you would suspect because their athletes are insulin-sensitive right blood glucose is below 100 milligrams per deciliter you know 80s 90s or something like that I've seen a significant uptake of all these athletes in their 30s and 40s sometimes also in their 20s who are coming in with blood glucose values above 100 milligrams per deciliter so meaning there are pre-diabetic so yes we've published on it but just anecdotally just spending a lot of time in the lab over the last 10 years this has become I think it's a serious issue yeah yeah so even even in these highly active individuals we're seeing a metabolic you know

1:14:28abnormalities and and so we have to stop and think you know how is it possible that these highly active individuals are seeing these metabolic disturbances is that has something to do with the amount of carbohydrate that they're ingesting before exercise during exercise why have they been doing that because all the focus has been on the large glucose pool but here we come out now with a complete paradigm shift and say hang on if the small if the focus is on the small glucose pool then you don't necessarily have to consume all that large amounts of carbohydrates for training or before and then carbohydrate loading and all that stuff and you don't have to consume a very large amount of carbohydrates also during training or racing as well so that completely changes the playing field and I think we result in ultimately significant improvements for a lot of individuals who are physically active recreationally active etc I agree and and and I and I think but I'm I don't think what you're saying is everyone should go keto like and I think this is this is

1:15:31that's what no not at all it's just eat an appropriate diet and you don't have to stuff your face full of carbohydrates for the the your average age group athlete will still you know doesn't won't really yeah need to have the average age grouper doesn't have to consume her raw amounts of carbohydrate I think that's what I'm hearing which actually will save us quite a bit of money won't it so I mean there's another great thing like like you know you don't have to be like yeah or even or even dollars yeah or even going from right if if if if you are doing um you know 400 or 500 grams right if you just reduce it from that amount to 200 or 150 or 100 well you know that's already a significant improvement or if or again if you were doing these very large amounts because you spend some time on social media and some other guy said

1:16:32hey I'm doing so great at 120 or whatever and then you drop it down to you know 60 or 50 or even like we study just just 10 even just just simple recommendations like that so yes we're we're you know um not saying you have to go completely not to the the opposite to the uh to the other extreme and you have to do low carb you have to do you know keto ketogenic diets or complete totally in a or train or in a in a fastest state or anything like this we're just kind of more more geared towards just think about it more geared towards the I guess if anything you get from this conversation is that you have to glucose pools in in the body and they're regulated differently and uh from a human health or performance standpoint maybe the infants that should should rather be on the small glucose pool yeah no I love it for like I mean I definitely have a bias towards a lower carb approach as well and I think you know the more that we can sort of talk athletes off

1:17:36the cliff of that sort of 90 to 120 and like hey you know what 60 is going to be fine for you like the less GI issues people are going to have they're still going to be able to recover the more protected the metabolic health is in the long run so they'll be able to do what they love doing for longer so yeah and I would I would I would just say I would say stay stay tuned for there's other study I was talking about earlier because again we need these proper carbohydrate dosing studies right we need we need to that's obviously not industry funded the way we can clearly see you know is is more moderate doses clearly superior to lower doses and our our higher doses more superior to moderate doses because often that's what most people are going to be interested in just wait if I if I scale it up uh do I see that significant enhancement and performance yeah like I care about that but I also care a lot about just the metabolic effects you know as well but I understand obviously most people are just going to want to know hey if I do

1:18:40more does that necessarily equate or almost certainly to improvements in performance into what to what extent you know what is the meaningfulness right off that improvement is is it like a 1% is it a 5% and I think people will be very very surprised when they see these findings come out of course it might not be as you might suspect because a lot of a lot of the guys even coming in I mean very much every single triathlete because that study is on triathlete who comes in that's already the the belief I agree they're ready doing obviously these very high amounts now obviously in what we're blinding them right they don't know what they're they're interesting and it's funny because sometimes it's like they think oh I just did 90 grams when they were like on a placebo yeah they're taking 60 grams when it's 10 grams so they that's how you have to do those studies right they you have to completely blind them to all these different conditions

1:19:41and then just and then see how they how they perform and when I when we show these athletes that results I can tell you right now they're they're confused and surprised at the same time Philip do you play poker at all now unfortunately not yeah no I'm probably that's probably not a bad thing because I'm not sure about your poker face I think you probably told us about telling us well what we mean but hey we will wait yeah we will but please so obviously I'll put a link to the paper where people can read it in the show notes and where else might people find out more information about this in the the sort of research that you you guys are doing yeah I would again I would definitely urge everybody to go just read the paper or again it's kind of long so maybe you put it into some AI system and just get ears ears that kind of short the the brief just of it but obviously or you can just listen to to this podcast since I kind of we kind of

1:20:44discussed one of the least the the main the main findings from again it is really the most authoritative review on that topic I mean there's no other you know paper that comes you know close to that I mean like I said earlier I mean just a massive amount of studies that were reviewed and again the key statistic was that almost 90% of the studies right where copper hydrate improves performance shows falling butt glucose in the placebo group or in the control group so that's that's right there yeah but yeah you can dip so read read the paper or yeah you can go to research gate I guess and find some of our other work or on social media again I'm not that active but I yeah I'm on X or especially you know Tim Tim is very active Tim nooks on on X and Andrew's also Andrew Kutnik is very active on yes on on X as well where you can again find some great other you know information as well amazing Philip as always

1:21:46thank you so much for your time I really enjoyed this conversation and I look forward to the next one where we dive into this new research amazing cheers Philip thank you all right I hope for you enjoyed that it certainly is food for thought right and really interested to see these next studies come out from this group and also just engage in this conversation what I will say is it's not like zero carbs is the answer it's not like carbohydrate during sport is an important it's just understanding the mechanism for how these work for performance and I think that's a really interesting question for those science-minded amongst us so questions comments queries anything of the above hit me up I'm on Instagram threads and X at Mickey Willidon Facebook at Mickey Willidon Nutrition or head to my website MickeyWillidon.com

1:22:50scroll right down to the bottom pop your name in the little box and jump on my weekly email where I share insights research studies thoughts and opinions that don't appear anywhere else in my weekly email all right guys you have the best week see you later you