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Winning without wheat

  • 11-03-2010 12:37PM
    #1
    El_Dangeroso
    Users Awaiting Email Confirmation Posts: 5,620 ✭✭✭


    Cool article in Mens Journal:

    http://www.mensjournal.com/winning-without-wheat
    How a gluten-free diet powers one of the best cycling teams in the world — and how it can help you perform better and recover faster.

    For endurance athletes, carbo-loading on pasta and bread is as much a part of their sports as spandex and heart-rate monitors. So when Dr. Allen Lim, former exercise physiologist for the Garmin-Transitions pro cycling team (he’s now with Lance Armstrong’s RadioShack team), and Jonathan Vaughters, Garmin’s founder and CEO, suggested the squad switch to a wheat-free diet, the riders thought they were crazy. “Their first reaction was, ‘What? No! We can’t race the Tour de France without pasta,’ ” recalls Vaughters. But the two men were banking on the idea that gluten, a composite of proteins in wheat, is responsible for bloating, stiffness, and gastrointestinal distress — huge performance-hindering problems — and the theory that their riders would recover better from grueling stages by avoiding wheat. Moreover, they knew that the team could get all the carbs they needed by eating other foods.

    “I was pleasantly surprised,” says Christian Vande Velde, Garmin-Transitions’s team leader, who was the first member of the team to experiment with going wheat-free during the racing season. “I just had all-around better digestion, and digestion is the biggest thing in utilizing the energy I consume.” Teammate Tom Danielson had a similar experience when he started following the diet during the Tour of Missouri in 2008. “My performance really improved a lot — there was definitely a correlation,” says Danielson. “I think that my digestion is better, and because of that my sleep is better and my recovery is better.”

    Good to see that gluten free is catching on in high-performance athletes. If they ditched the cornmeal and agave syrup they'd probably feel even better.


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