Endurance athletes who 'go against the grain' become incredible fat-burners

sciencedaily.com

4 points·bumbledraven··5 comments

A very small population in the study, but they did at least control for VO2Max in addition to the other factors.

I'm not a medical person, nor a nutritionist. So, maybe I'm being completely obtuse here and missing something. But isn't this already common knowledge?

When your body needs energy, it consumes [in order of preference]:

1: Its store of Carbohydrates

2: Its fat reserves

3: Muscle tissue [by this stage we're talking starvation levels]

So, by minimising carbohydrate intake and participating in long-lasting endurance sports, you're obviously going to force your body to move to 'number 2' on the menu sooner, as there won't be enough carbs to meet its needs.

The interesting observation from the study is that the rate of fat utilization achieved by the low carb athletes was higher than expected. The high carb athletes utilized fat energy at a rate that the researcher believed was on the high side for humans, and the low carb athletes utilized it at a much higher rate than that.

I'm not a medical person either, so this is probably the best place to say, that by definition almost nobody is an elite athlete and drawing general conclusions from studies involving such people is rather speculative.

It's more complicated than that, given that fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibers preferentially use different fuels.

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