Can We End The Debate On Depletion, LCHF and High Carb Diet Once And For All?

El CabaIIo

My prediction is no:D

But a new enough study has been released and is the most comprehensive to date. Louise Burke of the Australian Institute of Sport who are responsible for elite performance athletes in Oz came out with this study.

The subjects of the study were Australia's elite racewalkers whose diet was controlled and monitored along with training. The most interesting part of this study is that it also covered periodised depletion like empty many do for long runs on empty and the depletion procees before loading going into a marathon. No one has covered all three before in a study.

Another interesting thing is that the study backed up Volek and Phinney's famous and oft qouted LCHF study that depletion and ketosis do in fact increase Vo2max and fat oxidation. But she went further than that and tried to correlate the diets to actual performance which Volek and co didn't cover.

The findings were that sub-max performance got worse with LCHF diet approach by 3% despite increase in fat oxidation and Vo2max

Performance increased 2% in periodised diet

Performance increased 3% in a high Carb diet.

Performance didn't just decrease in 10k efforts but at all sub max efforts.

Here it is, it's a long one but should interest a lot of people

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5407976/

Testosterscone

I remember reading when this came out. Despite the low numbers of participants the fact that they were able to continually monitor and facilitate the controls within the training camp adds a hell of alot of weight to this study.

Might also be of relevance to the discussion here is a good case study of a triathlete whose diet was actually supervised by Volek;

https://journals.humankinetics.com/doi/full/10.1123/ijsnem.2018-0124

Perfomance was actually directly comparable between pre/intra and post LCHF intervention

El CabaIIo

Testosterscone wrote: »

I remember reading when this came out. Despite the low numbers of participants the fact that they were able to continually monitor and facilitate the controls within the training camp adds a hell of alot of weight to this study.

Might also be of relevance to the discussion here is a good case study of a triathlete whose diet was actually supervised by Volek;

https://journals.humankinetics.com/doi/full/10.1123/ijsnem.2018-0124

Perfomance was actually directly comparable between pre/intra and post LCHF intervention

She is actually very well respected in keto circles as well I see so bias or conflicting interests can't be labeled on her.

I think a really important thing to take away from these thing is just because you note an improvement in a physiological marker in something you believe is important doesn't mean it translates to performance as it can be taking away from something much more important. Like here where something like the ability to burn fat for fuel more efficiently or having a higher aerobic capacity from a diet might make sense in improving performance but if it has a negative on walking/running economy, you'll never see improvements in getting that extra power down which is what really matters.

Enduro

Thanks for the links. Some good reading ahead for christmas . Obviously the answer to the thread title is "No!", but its always good to get interesting new quality studies

Pherekydes

Will they replicate the study with actual athletes? :pac::p