Why Keto, high fat and mainstream fat loss diets fall short for older cyclists. Part 2

28 Mar

Written By Velo Performance Cycling Club

In the last blog I set the scene to start changing the conversation on nutrition for older cyclists and get you to think more about what, how and why you need to eat differently from the main stream diet paradigms such as fasting, keto, high fat or just thinking about your diet as a fat loss diet.

I talked about calories and why you shouldn’t drive a hard calorie deficit, why fasting may not be the best idea and why we need to sit protein at the top table.

This time I’m going to talk about the performance and health benefits of fats and carbohydrates.

At the bottom of this blog I’ll put some links to studies and evidence based articles so you know I’m not just plucking this from thin air and have researched this.

So, let’s get into it.

Righty then, let’s talk about fats.

Fat helps protect your immune function, helps you produce recovery hormones, Is a pre cursor for sex steroid hormones, has been show to improve mitochondrial health and protect against anabolic resistance. The point is It’s an important macro for health, muscle health and quality.

I’d suggest that you aim for a diet rich in Monounsaturated fats and Polly unsaturated fats with a focus on Omega 3. Aim for foods such as salmon, mackerel, olive oil, avocado’s, nuts and seeds.

The minimum RDA for fat is about 15% of total calories. For training cyclists I’d recommend aiming for a more moderate intake between 22% to 32% of total calories. For omega 3’s, EPA and DHA aim for 500ml daily.

Considering fat is essential for health and its important you don’t go below these numbers.

Now hears the probably controversial part that some may not like but frankly need to hear.

When it comes to performance it’s been shown that high fat diets are not superior to high carbohydrate. Yes, high fat diets can help you upregulate blood lipid oxidisation but it can also down regulate carbohydrate oxidisation.

When it comes to performance and health eating a broad range of whole foods, fueling adequately for the training demands and for recovery means you have the best of both worlds and have a good relationships with all foods.

Let’s talk about carbohydrates.

Now there are a lot of people out there that will advocate that we don’t need carbs in our diet for performance and they’d be wrong.

Maybe they have that confused with you don’t need carbohydrate’s to survive. On that matter they’d be right, you don’t, however, if you want to train, perform and look your best you might want to keep reading.

To grow your ability to ride fast and climb fast as you get older your training has to include quality sessions such as Vo2 and threshold training. Carbohydrates are essential for this kind of training. Exclusively high fat diets just don’t deliver for these kind of sessions.

Carbohydrates are also muscle sparing. What that means if you eat adequate carbohydrate in your diet and you’ll retain more muscle.

Very low carbohydrate diets have been shown to increase exercise-Induced Immunodepression and raise the catabolic stress hormone cortisol.

High fat low carbohydrate diets have been shown that you lose a fraction more weight but higher carbohydrate’s diets help you retain more lean muscle and have a positive change to body composition. AKA you have less body fat and more lean muscle mass.

Complex whole food carbohydrates such as beans, wholegrains, vegetables and oats also have health benefits. For instance they help us maintain digestive health as they have good fiber and pre and probiotic fiber profiles which can improve gut health, stool movement and there is good evidence they have a favourable effect on blood lipid profiles.

Again you can see why older cyclists should think about their diet differently. Not follow the main steam trends and eat in a way in a way that helps fight age related decline, supports their training, recovery and promotes health.

So what are the recommendations for carbohydrates in training?

Low volume to moderate intensity between 3-5g per kg of bw

Moderate volume to moderate/high intensity between 5 - 7g per KG of bw

High volume and high intensity between 8 -12g per KG of bw

And crucially a minimum 1.2g per kg of bw in training with the minimum of 1g per KG of bw for health

To wrap up

When it comes to diet. There are some main stream strange trends that we need to be aware of that really don’t work for us as we age.

I think we need to have a focus on sitting protein at the top table. Make sure we eat enough mono and polyunsaturated fats. Eat enough carbohydrates to drive training quality, support lean muscle mass and health.

And, don’t do crazy low calorie, stupid diets that polarise you toward high fat, fasting or excessive high carb diets for that matter.

Righty that’s it for today, if you want to learn even more check out the links below.

Thanks for reading

Simon

Performance & Nutrition Director
2 X Winner of Gym Based PT, and founder of VPCC

Carbohydrate for training and competing

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2011.585473

Protein necessary for immune health

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22150425/

Exercising in a carbohydrate depleted state may result in higher levels of stress hormones that impair immune function

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00217-016-2772-3

Recovery of the immune system after exercise