Carbohydrate loading is a strategy employed by athletes that involves reducing training volume whilst simultaneously increasing the amounts of carbohydrates consumed in the days leading up to a game or event. The aim is to up regulate an enzyme called glycogen synthase (an enzyme that creates muscle fuel called glycogen) and cause the muscles to … Read more
Carbohydrate loading is a concept that both athletes and the general pubic know of. This is largely due to the marketing of carbohydrate based products such as whole grains, sugary snack foods and sports drinks being the champion or elite sports performance, and in some part to information passed on via successful ex-elite athletes extolling … Read more
Check out Steve discussing why we should avoid processed food @ http://www.youtube.com/user/peakxvfitness
Fruit juice is portrayed as a healthy food and conventional medicine and dieticians will tell you that fruit can be one of your “5 a day”. However, I’m going to show you some research that blows this out of the water.
Now, we all know that we are supposed to get 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, and I would bet that most people either don’t manage to eat this or just eat several portions of fruit a day to make up for the shortfall in vegetables. We are led to believe that fruit … Read more
So, this week we’ve talked about how saturated fat may not be the evil fat that is portrayed by the media and conventional medicine, but how trans fat are; and we have also talked about how margarine (that often times contains trans fats) is not heart healthy as it is portrayed and that using butter … Read more
Another food that gets touted as heart healthy is margarine. It’s claimed that margarine is a healthy alternative to butter – as butter is full of the heart damaging saturated fat that raises cholesterol (however remember my blog post earlier this week that dispels the myth that saturated fat contributes to heart disease) and margarine … Read more
This week I’m going to discuss some common misconceptions concerning healthy eating – I’m going to talk about saturated fat, red meat consumption, margarine, fruit consumption and fruit juice. Current dietary wisdom would have us believe that saturated fat and red meat are bad for us and things like margarine, fruit and fruit juice are good … Read more
So you can see from the tables and classifications of carbohydrates it is sensible to eat low GL foods for the majority of the time, the book – The Low GL Diet, by Patrick Holford explains all you need to know. But I want to finish this piece with a little bit of contention. The … Read more
The next step in the evolution of these carbohydrate ranking systems is the Insulin Load (IL). The IL is a measure used to quantify the amount of insulin the pancreas releases in response to various foods – remarkably not just carbohydrates. The IL is similar to the GI and GL but instead of measuring how … Read more
To solve the problems of the GI, researchers came up the Glycemic load (GL) ranking system. This is based on how quickly the carbohydrate in a food releases its carbohydrate into the blood stream (The GI) and the amount of carbohydrate in a portion of that particular food. So the GL takes in to account … Read more
The Glycemic index (GI) is a measure of how quickly 50g of carbohydrate from a given food raises blood sugar levels compared to 50g of glucose.