LEVEL 2 - MACRONUTRIENTS & FIBER (Part 6) Application Flashcards
Who are these recommendations suited for, and not suited for, why?
80% of people who are not overweight, lifting weights regularly, and who have not yet started the nal third of their life span (arbitrary number here, but let’s say 60 years old). So, if you are in the first ~2/3rds of your lifespan, not overweight, and regularly lifting weights, the recommended ranges will more than likely “work” well for you.
Most older people who struggle with higher carbohydrate diets do so because they have lost muscle mass and gained fat mass as time has passed, resulting in insulin resistance. However, even for the folks who have picked up tness later in life or who are still committed to their resistance training, some independent effects of aging do negatively impact the body’s ability to handle carbohydrates. Also, protein doesn’t continue to give the same anabolic response that it used to as you age. So although your fat and protein might need to increase over the years, just remember that this occurs alongside an overall reduction in energy expenditure. This means you won’t have as many calories to play with overall, which is why you don’t want to go so low on carbohydrates that you’re actually getting ketogenic unless you nd that actually works well for you.
What is a high fat percentage?
Percentages of fat that are higher than 35%
What is a low carb intake?
An intake that may approach as low as 0.5-1.5 g/lb (~1-3 g/kg) of bodyweight. Daily average carbohydrate intake somewhere around 80- 120 grams or lower per day.
Why are high fat diets useful, who are they for, what is misunderstood about them?
There is pretty convincing evidence that a higher-fat, higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate diet can be very effective for producing fat loss for those with insulin resistance
The likelihood that you will do better with more dietary fat due to insulin resistance is typically increased with age, a family history of diabetes, the presence of a condition in women called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), or oligomenorrhea, which is represented by a menstrual cycle that occurs less frequently, speci cally taking longer than 35 days to recur.
Sometimes high fat low carbs are taken to an extreme (fine for a small population) ketogenic diet, which is extremely low in carbs, sometimes defined as 50g or lower These diets necessitate extremely high fat intakes to maintain calorie balance, often up to or above 60% of total calories. These “keto” diets have become quite trendy and popular as of late along with the idea that eating more dietary fat helps you to burn more fat as fuel, but that’s not exactly how it works. Sure, you shift your body’s fuel usage more towards burning fat, but since you are also consuming more fat, it doesn’t necessarily result in greater fat loss.
What is Insulin?
Insulin is a hormone made by the pancreas that allows your body to use sugar (glucose) from carbohydrates in the food that you eat for energy or to store glucose for future use. Insulin helps keeps your blood sugar level from getting too high (hyperglycemia) or too low (hypoglycemia).
What is Insulin for?
The cells in your body need sugar for energy. However, sugar cannot go into most of your cells directly. After you eat food and your blood sugar level rises, cells in your pancreas (known as beta cells) are signaled to release insulin into your bloodstream. Insulin then attaches to and signals cells to absorb sugar from the bloodstream. Insulin is often described as a “key,” which unlocks the cell to allow sugar to enter the cell and be used for energy.
If you have more sugar in your body than it needs, insulin helps store the sugar in your liver and releases it when your blood sugar level is low or if you need more sugar, such as in between meals or during physical activity. Therefore, insulin helps balance out blood sugar levels and keeps them in a normal range. As blood sugar levels rise, the pancreas secretes more insulin.
What is the glycemic index?
The glycemic index is a value assigned to foods based on how slowly or how quickly those foods cause increases in blood glucose levels.
What is Insulin Resistance? What are it’s dangers?
In insulin resistance, muscle, fat, and liver cells do not respond properly to insulin and thus cannot easily absorb glucose from the bloodstream. As a result, the body needs higher levels of insulin to help glucose enter cells.
The beta cells in the pancreas try to keep up with this increased demand for insulin by producing more. As long as the beta cells are able to produce enough insulin to overcome the insulin resistance, blood glucose levels stay in the healthy range.
Over time, insulin resistance can lead to type 2 diabetes and prediabetes because the beta cells fail to keep up with the body’s increased need for insulin. Without enough insulin, excess glucose builds up in the bloodstream, leading to diabetes, prediabetes, and other serious health disorders.
How does blood sugar affect you? How do low GI and high GI foods help and hurt different populations?
Also known as “blood sugar,” blood glucose levels above normal are toxic and can cause blindness, kidney failure, or increase cardiovascular risk. Foods low on the glycemic index (GI) scale tend to release glucose slowly and steadily. Foods high on the glycemic index release glucose rapidly. Low GI foods tend to foster weight loss, while foods high on the GI scale help with energy recovery after exercise, or to offset hypo- (or insufficient) glycemia. Long-distance runners would tend to favor foods high on the glycemic index, while people with pre- or full-blown diabetes would need to concentrate on low GI foods. Why? People with type 1 diabetes and even some with type 2 can’t produce sufficient quantities of insulin—which helps process blood sugar—which means they are likely to have an excess of blood glucose. The slow and steady release of glucose in low-glycemic foods is helpful in keeping blood glucose under control.
What is the Glycemic Load? What is it for?
To understand a food’s complete effect on blood sugar, you need to know both how quickly the food makes glucose enter the bloodstream, and how much glucose it will deliver. A separate value called glycemic load does that. It gives a more accurate picture of a food’s real-life impact on blood sugar. The glycemic load is determined by multiplying the grams of a carbohydrate in a serving by the glycemic index, then dividing by 100. A glycemic load of 10 or below is considered low; 20 or above is considered high. Watermelon, for example, has a high glycemic index (80).
How can you test for insulin sensitivity?
- Go get some blood tests done to determine your insulin sensitivity
- Run some off-season testing and data collection on yourself. I would recommend taking about a month to consume a 40% fatdiet, with the same protein and calories that you have normally been consuming. This would simply be changing the carb to fat ratio and nothing more.Throughout this month, write down and record a 1 to 10 rating on mood, energy, and training quality each day. Mood and energy are pretty straight forward to de ne, but I’d like to clarify that gym quality is different than gym performance. We are not looking at your program, volume, or poundage of weights lifted (you can track this as well, but only if you keep your training approach the same). This is more of how you perceived your overall e ort and mental state during the day’s training. After about 4 weeks of tracking mood, energy, and gym quality, take an average score of those ratings.When that month is complete, take another month consuming a 20% fat diet while keeping calories and protein the same. Once again you will track the same data: food and bodyweight (as always), and also your 1 to 10 ratings for mood, energy and workout quality (and again, also a good idea to track gym performance, but you would need to keep the overall training structure the same). I would recommend running these trials at least twice each, making this a 4-month commitment. At the conclusion, you’ll be able to see if your ratings were higher for one diet or the other, and you’ll have your answer.
