The Influence of the Subject’s Training State on the Glycemic Index.
For readers who aren’t familiar with the concept, the glycemic index (GI) is a measure of how a given food affects blood glucose levels. It was introduced over 25 years ago as a more accurate measure of foods (as opposed to earlier schemes that simply used simple versus complex carbs) for diabetics and has been researched extensively since that time.
Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies: Part 2
As noted, the usual argument goes that high-fat diets cause high-cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, obesity and the rest, as evidenced by the high incidence of those disease in modern diets (which are typically high in fat). But that’s a questionable conclusion to draw.
Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies: Part 1
In this article, I want to look at carbohydrate and fat intake in terms of the various arguments and debates that tend to surround them.
The main controversy here revolves around what amounts of carbohydrates and/or fat are ideal, healthy, recommended, etc. and that’s what I’ll focus on. I’m not going to deal with body composition explicitly in this article, I’ll save that for another day.
Protein Requirements for Strength and Power Athletes
Possibly one of the longest standing debates in sports nutrition (not that people don’t argue about stuff constantly) is over protein requirements for athletes. Traditionally, there have been two primary and opposing views to this topic.
Protein Controversies
Before looking at whole proteins and protein powders, I’d like to address some of the most common controversies that tend to surround the high protein intakes typically seen in and recommended to athletes. The major ones are kidney function, bone health, and heart disease and colon cancer. Related to the issue of bone health, I’m also going to address the topic of metabolic acidosis and the impact that dietary protein intake has upon it.
Contest Dieting Part 1
Of all athletes in the world, bodybuilders (and other physique oriented folks such as fitness and figure girls) tend to be the most anal compulsive and neurotic about their food intake. Nowhere is this seen more than during contest dieting where folks that are already on the far edge of what most would consider sane turn batshit crazy about their food intake.
How Dieters Fail Diets
Perhaps the single biggest reason I have found for dieters failing in their diet effects is that many dieters try to be far too absolute in their approach to the diet something I alluded to in the foreword. When these people are on their diet they are ON THE DIET(!!!). Which is altogether fine as long as they stay on the diet. The problem is that any slip, no matter how small, is taken as complete and utter failure. The diet is abandoned and the post-diet food binge begins. As I’ve said repatedly, this tends to puts the fat (and frequently a little extra) back on faster than before.
Does Cumulating Endurance Training at the Weekends Impair Training Effectiveness?
As the introduction to the abstract mentions, some people, due to their scheduling find that training during the week is nearly impossible. And while the standard dogma in terms of endurance training is that you have to train at least 3X/week (generally for a minimum of 20 minutes), preferably on non-consecutive days, this study brings that into question.
Different Glycemic Indexes of Breakfast Cereals Are Not Due to Glucose Entry into Blood but to Glucose Removal by Tissue.
This is another older paper that I wanted to talk about since it ties in somewhat with the feedback on milk below. In way of introduction, I should probably define glycemic index (GI) for readers who aren’t familiar with it.
The GI is used to rate carbohydrates by examining the blood glucose response to 50 grams of digestible carbohydrates. After fasting, subjects are first given some reference food; this used to be glucose but researchers now use white bread. The blood glucose response to white bread is defined as 100. Then, the test food is given and the blood glucose response is measured and compared to that of the test food. A food that shows 60% of the blood glucose response to white bread is given a GI of 60.
Comparing the Diets: Part 4
And finally we come to the low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet, the diet with perhaps the greatest amount of controversy and argument surrounding it. Now, at the risk of beating a dead horse, and since I find many of my critics to be a little slow on the uptake, I’m going to go off on one last rant about this topic.
