Diets, Sugar, Calories, & Natural Sports Nutrition

Food and nutrition have become a kind of an obsession to me in the last few months. Being the control freak that I am, I couldn't accept putting things in my body that I didn't know or, worse, didn't want. Wanting my family to have the best and most suitable nutrition, as well as my training sessions becoming longer and more intense, I spent a lot of time researching and experimenting with everything to do with food and drink. In this post I share with you how I have changed from buying all kinds of powders, gels and drinks to making everything I need for my sports in my own kitchen, and how not all calories are created equal, and not all sugars are created equal either!

I realise that if I start to go technical, I might lose half of you, so I’ll just keep it very simple.

As someone who is very keen on everything to do with the kitchen, cooking, and long boring Excel sheets, it was just a matter of time before I took this to the next level. My approach to the sports nutrition issue has been a very simple one, with very few steps:

1. Understand what my body needs exactly, both in and out of training.

2. Calculate how much of each nutrient I am getting through my normal meals.

3. Analyse the sports nutrition that I have been using for many years to see exactly what nutrients they had and how they worked.

4. Find a way to recreate (and improve) the sports nutrition at home with natural and organic ingredients.

5. Improve my overall approach to nutrition by matching the food intake to my actual needs.

I mentioned in my last post the blood tests I've had to see what I could do to improve my general health. Through the amazing service and advice from Curoseven and Dr Tamsin Lewis (aka SportieDoc), as well as some extensive research that I have done, I have learned a lot about what my body needed exactly in terms of nutrients. This did lead lead me to start looking at the usual food I eat every day and try to see how much of everything I was getting out of my meals. Luckily, since my normal food habits are what we’d usually call “healthy” (i.e. a lot of protein and vegetables, no sugar, no fizzy drinks, minimal bread, minimal desserts, carbs through less harmful sources such as bulgar and quinoa, and never any junk food), my usual diet didn't need a lot of modifications, and, if I was a person who did a normal volume of exercise, this should have been more than sufficient to keep me going.

To complete points 1 and 2, I had to dig a bit deeper into what nutrients exactly the body needs before, during and after exercise, and not just during the normal day. With very specific amounts of carbs, protein, fat, salts, vitamins, amino acids, etc, I had an extensive list of items that had to be fulfilled, not just through my normal food and drink, but also through some additional sources.

Before deciding on the additional sources of these nutrients, I went on to analyse the sports nutrition that I have been using for a while. Over the years, I have changed brands, quantities, and combinations of gels, drinks and powders to try and achieve what I thought was the optimum in sports fuel. The approach was less than scientific, starting with choosing what tasted nice as a first from very few criteria, but also comparing basic information such as which one had the higher content of carbs, for example. To be honest, I didn't like ANY of these, but I tolerated some more than others. I saw it as a necessary evil, since they really were essential in keeping me going. But, the ingredients have always fallen short of healthy, from artificial colours that would actually stain my bottles and never come off, to using artificial sweeteners that have been related to all kinds of horrible diseases, to some nasty additives that I wasn't sure why any human would even consider consuming.

I then spent a lot of time on my computer and in stores selling natural foods looking for equivalent natural ingredients that would match the nutrition values in these products, as well as, more importantly, match my personal fuelling requirements. What worried me the most was how simple this whole thing was! I told myself that “surely it can’t be that simple!” I started to have major doubts about the validity of my newly found simple ingredients that would make much better fuel for my sport than all these expensive and fancy tubes and tubs. The only way to see if it worked was to test, retest, and retest again.

I experimented with different ingredients to reach the flavours that I actually liked, the texture of bars that would suit being put in my jersey for long rides and neither fall apart nor break my teeth, adjusted the amounts of nutrients to the most accurate to match my personal needs and preferences, and went ahead with trying them over some time now, for training sessions that couldn't normally be completed without the proper nutrition. It didn't just work. It worked much better than anything I've tried before!

I now have control over how many bars, how many bottles, and how many gels to take with me, which is also a major difference from the limited choice I had in the past, where I had to sometimes take a ridiculous number of gels on the bike, as well as some extremely sweet drinks that after a couple of hours of drinking it, I just want to never drink that thing ever again.

My sports nutrition cupboard now contains ingredients such as gluten free oats, dates, dried apricots, maple syrup, almonds, sesame seeds, soy protein, table salt, and limes. It is a very different list of ingredients from what I can see on, say, the isotonic gel tube that I still have in there, which reads as follows:

water, maltodextrin (produced from partial hydrolyses of a special variety of maize), natural flavouring, gelling agents (xanthan gum, gellan gum), acidity regulators (citric acid, sodium citrate), preservatives (sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate), sweetener (acesulfame K), sodium chloride, antioxidant (ascorbic acid), colour (beta-carotene).

Considering that this was the best option I could find that didn't contain as many dodgy ingredients as some others I've used in the past, and I would have had to take about 3 or 4 of these every time I went on a long ride, or one on a long run, I wasn't happy about this at all. At least now I know exactly what goes into whatever it is I'm taking with me during these sessions. The drinks were the worst, though, in terms of dodgy ingredients, especially the powder ones... And, by the way, to reach the exact same amount of carbs in that gel tube I can just take 25 grams of honey or 30 grams of maple syrup. Nothing too complicated.

I am currently doing my best to put all the findings and recipes into a more easily accessible product that anyone can have. In the mean time, you can just get in touch with me by email if you’d like to try, discuss, help, or comment on the issue.

While looking into the ingredients, and as carbohydrates form a rather important aspect of any endurance athlete’s fuel, I came across some research into the different types of sugars and how the body deals with them. To cut a long story short, avoid fructose (except when it’s in fruit, when you have it in moderation). Fructose can be found in almost all sweet drinks, including fruit juices, and you can even find it in things like bread that you buy in the supermarket. Normal sugar, which is sucrose, is made up of glucose and fructose. Glucose is used by the body for energy, but fructose is dealt with in the body in the same way alcohol is dealt with (apart from the drunk feeling), ending up being converted to fat (about 30% of it is stored as fat) and not sending a signal to the brain that the body is satiated, so you would still feel hungry.

The whole journey made me change my mindset towards food completely. The way I look at any dish now is worked out in my head as a break-down of the nutrients, and whether I actually need them for the day or not. For example, I’d have a hearty carb-loaded breakfast for a day during which I have some long and/or intense training sessions, I’d end the day with some decent portions of protein to help my muscles recover, and on recovery days, I’d limit my intake of carbs and stick to protein (and fat).

As for supplements, such as vitamins, these should be approached with a bit more care. According to SportieDoc, she doesn't “believe in multi-vitamins per se as [she] thinks [that] if taken consistently they reduce our ability to absorb nutrients from our gut.” So, what should we take and how should we take the supplements? Again, there is no one answer to fit all. Every person is made up differently, we all follow different diets, habits, etc.

For example, someone like myself, with darker skin, I tend to get very low on vitamin D easily, especially living somewhere with less sunshine than I grew up in. The way I have been training in the last few months (during my foundation period) where I was building up endurance, exercising at lower intensities for longer times, have contributed, for example, to levels of haemoglobin and testosterone that are lower than ideal, which affect performance, energy levels and recovery. Yet, things such as my cholesterol levels were in the “green” zone, as well as some other things that might be related to a healthy diet and doing sports.

So, the short answer to the question of what supplements should one take is: it depends. It is all a very personal issue, and it needs to be discovered individually.

I hope the above didn't make the whole issue of nutrition sound more complicated than it should. It should be easy, and you have one of two ways to tackle it: 1. If you’re interested in all the details, as is the case with myself, you should find the whole exercise rather useful and enlightening or 2. Just ask someone who knows to give you the short answers.

I am more than happy to share the more technical and boring parts of it with anyone who is interested. Just send me an e-mail and we can take it from there.

As always, your feedback is always welcome!