Aidan:
Hello and welcome back to episode 12 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. Today we’re going to try a Q &A episode. I’ve got no idea if it’s going to be good content or not. I’m, it’s a funny belief, but I’m a belief in almost like the Steve Jobs philosophy of people don’t know what they want until you give it to them. And sometimes I feel like Q &A, like I feel like that with Saturday Q &A, like I get a lot of questions. I’m like, people don’t really want to hear about this, but then I try and answer ones. And like I’ve tried to pick a few that might be interesting here and hopefully it works out alright. If you don’t like it, please let me know. If you do like it, also let me know. So the first question we’ve got is from Tab Liftsing. So these are obviously all through Instagram, so that’s a handle, shout out Tabatha. And that is on what is the impact of alcohol on body composition and strength?
Leah:
So I feel like we can definitely approach this question from a few different prongs. So the first one would be, obviously there’s the calorie intake when it comes to alcohol. So if you’re consuming a lot of alcohol, it’s adding to your calorie intake and you end up in a calorie surplus over time then the effects on body composition are probably not gonna be that great. You probably are going to gain body fat from excessive alcohol consumption. And then there’s also the food that is often consumed alongside alcohol. So kind of your salty, high fat snacks that are a good combo with like your beer. That’s gonna have not usually a great impact on body composition either.
And then there’s also if it’s taking calories away from protein. So say you are having alcohol but you are remaining within your calorie, I suppose, like calorie amount and it’s you’re not in a surplus so that’s fine you’re not gaining body fat but you know those calories are going to alcohol now instead of protein therefore you’re not meeting your total daily protein requirements then it can definitely have an impact on your ability to grow muscle mass or retain muscle mass. The other kind of side of that coin is that it might actually impair your ability to recover or even impair things like muscle protein synthesis. So I like to look at it as, we know at least that alcohol definitely does impact our sleep. We know how important sleep is to recovery. So if we’re drinking alcohol, we’re not sleeping that well, and then we’re not recovering, our training’s worse, and then we end up in this cycle of we’re not training the best we can. So from a body composition perspective, a strength perspective where we’re not doing everything we can to optimise that. And then I’ll actually let you talk about this study that we’ve both kind of gone over and found, but how alcohol affects muscle protein synthesis.
Aidan:
Yeah, so before the study. In university, one of the best lies, it was an unintentional lie, but the best lies I ever got told from a lecturer is that muscle protein synthesis is completely switched off while alcohol is in your system. And the logic that this lecturer utilises is that alcohol is a toxin, your body’s prioritising getting rid of it, get it out of the system basically, and it down regulates every process. That’s part of why it actually does down regulate it. And I viewed it as a bit of a switch. Like I viewed it as if it switched it off. I always question it a little bit because I was like, well, how do people who are alcoholics not end up with no muscle at all.
Like if you’ve got alcohol in your system 24 hours a day, every day, how do you end up not having no muscle? So was like, maybe there’s a scale to this thing. Like maybe if have it a lot, it kind of works out in the end to a certain degree to just down regulate it instead of switching it off. But then I became aware of research like this. And the study we’re going to reference is called, it’s a 2014 study called Alcohol Ingestion Impairs Maximal Post-Exercise Rates of Myofibular Protein Sympathies Following a Single Bout of Training.
And it is a crazy study. Like what they basically did was they got people to do a training session and one group had whey protein directly post workout, the other group had whey protein and alcohol and then they also had a control group that didn’t have anything but obviously we don’t need to talk about that. We’re going to compare protein versus protein and alcohol.
The protein and alcohol group, I’m still not 100% sure we’re reading the study correctly, but over the course of four hours, it was either 12 standard drinks or 24 standard drinks. We think it’s 24.
Leah:
I think it is 24. I read it a few times. It just seems like so much alcohol to give people.
Aidan:
Yeah, how good it’s getting that got through ethics approval, putting people in a room to have 24 standard drinks. And also they put in a carb-based meal two hours after the exercise training as well, just keep it a little bit more standard as well to what people normally kind of do. But what’s really fascinating about that is if it doesn’t really matter if it’s 12 or 24 for the sake of this, but the muscle protein synthesis levels that were observed were 24% lower in the alcohol and protein group compared to the protein group. So it was only a 24% reduction in muscle protein synthesis.
That’s really relevant because it’s kind like, well, how much better for me who had heard that it was completely switched off to go from that to only a 24% reduction, I was like, that’s not so bad. That’s all right. But it still obviously does impact your training results. Like if you had 24 standard drinks and say that takes 24 hours to clear out of your system, like that’s very rough math, but say it does that, that’s an entire 24 hour kind of timeframe where it’s reduced by 24% at minimum really, because it’s going to affect sleep, it’s going to affect all these other things as well.
Leah:
Yeah, binge drinking in general is probably going to be not super great for body composition or health and I’d put 12 to 24 drinks in that binge drinking category. But I’d actually be super interested to see, know, for those people that occasionally have a beer after a training session, like how much that actually impacts things because some people are on the fence or on the side of like, it’s the worst thing you could possibly do after training, but if you could have 12 standard drinks and it reduces it by your muscle protein synthesis by 24%, say if you have one standard drink.
Aidan:
It probably doesn’t matter.
Leah:
Although it’s not something I’d advocate that people do, if it’s an occasional thing, it’s probably not going to matter so much.
Aidan:
Exactly, and that really updated my thinking. I was in that camp of like, well, if it’s 0% muscle protein synthesis, then it’s like, that’s an hour where you’re not building muscle or recovering or whatever when it should be peaked. Yeah, so like I’ve definitely changed my opinion on that recently or not recently, like years ago now, but like I’ve changed my opinion.
Leah:
Question two. I’m sorry if I mispronounce any of these names. I’m terrible with that. But Miss Rivera, 15. So that person’s asking, thoughts on mixing creatine with protein shakes.
Aidan:
This is a pretty quick one for me. I see no downside of it directly. It doesn’t prevent creatine absorption or anything like heck if you actually put some carbohydrate into the shake like if you had milk or something like that it might even increase how much of the creatine you absorb. Like I’m not, I don’t really think that matters that much But it is something to be aware of. But the big thing that I think is relevant is I just see people if they only put it in their protein shakes That therefore means they need to have their protein shake every single day to make sure they have their creatine It’s a consistency issue.
Most people probably don’t want to have a protein shake every single day. Week after week after week after week after week, but you probably do want to be having creatine every single day as well. And if you link those two together, it might affect things. Also, some people only have their protein shakes on the days that they work out, and that would also contribute to this problem, because you want to have creatine every day. Whatever way you can get to that outcome is what you want to do. So there’s no real downside in this, but that is something that I do question about whether that would happen in practice.
Leah:
Yeah, I agree with that completely. In terms of creatine supplementation, I always tell my clients, look, whatever you can do daily consistently is going to be the most important. Sure, you can get some slight benefit from combining with carbohydrates, although you have to actually do have a lot of carbohydrates to have that effect. And there’s probably some, you know, argument to having it post training, obviously not training every day. The biggest thing is consistency. So whatever you can do every day is the way to go for sure.
Aidan:
Cool. So the next question comes in from Jordan Barker zero. Shout out to the sports dietitian. So Jordan Barker has asked this multiple times in Q &A and I saw the sports dietitian answer that, like he asked me and Taylor Ryan as well. So it’s already been answered for him, but I’m going to do it again here. Do we recommend multivitamins to fill the gaps?
Overall, I’m not a huge advocate for supplementation that is unnecessary. And for the most part, if you can optimise your nutrient intake through your diet, food first approach, that’s always going to be my first approach. So I don’t tend to use or recommend multivitamins. I feel like it could be useful in circumstances where you are struggling to optimise your diet. So allergies, intolerance, so many reasons why someone might not be able to get certain nutrients.
And if there’s general, just a general lack in their diet, they might fit in well there. But my thoughts on nutrient supplementation is it should probably be specific to what you actually need. So if you’re struggling to get iron in your diet, rather than taking a multivitamin, you should probably be taking an iron supplement. So less of that approach of, let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, and actually look at your diet, see what’s missing, try to fill it with food, and then if you can’t do that, supplement with individual nutrients rather than a whole bunch of stuff.
Aidan:
Yeah I completely agree with that so like if I was going to be playing devil’s advocate and trying to reach for for a reason why we could recommend that to fill the gaps. Two scenarios come into mind. One is like, what if your diet is so terrible that you have so many gaps? Well then maybe, yes, it makes sense to do the multivitamin approach. Yes, that does make sense. There’s like phytochemicals and stuff like that, like these little nutrients. One that comes to mind is beta gluconanotes. You’re not gonna find that in a multivitamin. Like little tiny nutrients, you’re not gonna find in a multivitamin.
But the other one that comes to my mind as well is like a big calorie deficit. Like, this is something I’m just taking people’s word for because like I obviously can’t go through and do nutrient analysis and figure this out for everybody but like it seems to take about 80% of your maintenance calories to reach roughly what would be the recommended daily intake for each individual assuming you’re not a massive outlier or something like that.
What if you’re in a large deficit? If you have a 40% calorie deficit, like you take 40% of your calories away, by definition you’re only consuming 60% of the calories that would be maintenance, you would have this discrepancy there that unless you’re consuming really nutrient rich foods that are low in calories, you’re going to fall short regardless. Once again, I’d prefer to take the approach of supplementing individual gaps, but what if you don’t know what your individual gaps are and stuff like that? Maybe multivitamin makes sense in those circumstances. I’m not opposed to it. The last thing to throw a real curve ball in there, because I think it’s an interesting fact. On average, people who take multivitamins have shorter lifespans than those who don’t. I don’t know you’ve ever seen that research.
Leah:
I’ve never seen that research.
Aidan:
It blew my mind when I heard that because it’s kind of like, well, when I saw that research and like, I wouldn’t overthink that. Like that’s not me being like, don’t take multivitamins, you’re gonna shorten your lifespan. Like that’s not what I am saying because it’s the whole like correlation doesn’t equal causation and stuff like that. Like who’s to say that like people who take multivitamins do very different things than those who don’t like that? Clearly they do. And that’s probably the bigger explainer for it.
It’s also enough for me to be like, I’m not going to take a multivitamin every single day for the rest of my life if my nutrition is already good. Like I’m not going to add that on top, just in case like that’s another thought process that I have as well related to that that I factor in personally for myself when it comes to this topic.
Leah:
Totally. And it makes me think like, what does that tell us about people that take multivitamins as a whole? Like are they typically the people that take a multivitamin and then completely don’t worry about what they’re doing from a dietary perspective? Maybe.
Aidan:
Yeah. Yeah, I think about that especially if it fits your macro style approach like theoretically you could get most of your protein coming from protein shakes. You could have fibre supplements for your fibre and you could have multivitamin for your micronutrients and then just eat whatever you want for the rest. Like there’s a very slippery slope when you take that approach.
Leah:
Yeah, it doesn’t really work that way. No. So question number four comes from Curtis Thurgood, dietitian. A dietitian giving us a question here. So if you train multiple times per day, what’s the fastest way to replenish glycogen stores?
So this could be a really easy question to answer, but I think there’s also a complicated answer to it as well. Like the easy one is just emphasise high GI carbohydrates directly post workout. That’s easy. There’s a concept called glycogen super compensation, which is basically like, this has been played around with two extremes actually, where pretty much like if you have sugar directly post workout, it’s almost impossible for it to get stored as fat. It’s crazy.
Obviously if that was a true phenomenon that carried over, to longer term outcomes, if it fits your macros that we just talked about, would not have any remote chance of working, because people could abuse this system. I’ve mentioned to him before, but Charles Poliquin, when we talked about the, like early on, the whole concept of him having people who are above 10% body fat, no carbs ever, and then like people who wanted to gain size, he’d give them 200 grams of carbs, all coming from sugar, directly post-workout. He was somebody who was trying to abuse this theoretical loophole that we can find in terms of like, if you track that sugar, it does not get stored as fat if you have a direct post-workout, it mostly gets stored as glycogen.
So that does exist. Obviously I think that causes a cascade of effects that leads to fat storage later on most likely, which is how it balances out obviously. But from the glycogen replication standpoint, that’s a really interesting loophole. If we want to maximise glycogen replenishment. It makes sense to have a ton of high GI carbs directly post workout. So if you’re training or competing or whatever multiple times per day, like the example that comes to my mind is like school gala days where they do like multiple events in a day. High GI carbs make sense. That’s the easy answer. The complex answer is like, what if you really want to maximise this? And the highest glycogen synthesis rates have been reported about one to 1.85 grams per kilogram per hour.
To simplify that, for somebody who’s 80 kilos, that’s like 80 to 150 grams of carbs per hour. So a can of Coke, for example, is like 40 grams of carbohydrate. So you’d be looking at two to three, maybe even four cans of Coke, is what we’re looking at, if we’re using Coke as an example. So it’s a lot, it’s not just a small amount, you can actually get a lot done. But that’s for somebody trying to maximise things. An 80 kilo athlete who’s 10% body fat would have 72 kilos of lean body mass. And we can store about 10 grams per kilogram of lean body mass. So that athlete, if they were fully glycogen depleted could store 720 grams of carbohydrate as glycogen.
So when we look at it from that perspective, it’s like, well, you could really have a lot of carbohydrate if you’re doing multiple times in a day, and that’s why you’d be looking at a ton of sugar to maximise performance on that day. That’s obviously not great for body composition overall, but for that day, it makes sense. What I’d consider as a simpler rule is if you’re somebody who wants to take advantage of this principle, but you’re not looking to absolutely maximise things with a ton of carbohydrates, I’d probably just have 50 grams or more carbohydrate directly workout, maybe do that for the first two hours. That way you’ve got at least 100 plus grams of carbohydrate stored as glycogen, most likely. Obviously it’s a little bit more complex than that, but it probably does cover that.
To be even more complex, it doesn’t all get stored as glycogen and protein could also be converted to glycogen as well. So even though I’m saying all the carbs will get stored as glycogen, it’s more complicated than that. But like 50 grams per hour for at least the first two hours should maximise things. Going higher than that 150 grams of carbs in the first hour won’t increase any absorption any further. That’s the maximum that you could probably take on that 80 to 150 gram. So more is not necessarily better. It’d be better to spread it out over multiple hours.
Leah:
Yeah, so if you’re someone that regularly does, I suppose, AM and PM sessions, we definitely wouldn’t be recommending, you know, you have four cans of Coke after your AM session in preparation for your PM session. That’s obviously more when you’re doing multiple events on a single day and you’re performance really matters, but no, I think that was really thorough.
Aidan:
For sure. So then the next one we’d be looking at is, I think it’s from Nick Adeline is how I’d say it. Apologies if that’s incorrect. And the question is, is a inositol beneficial for PCOS?
Leah:
The research that we have currently says yes, and it’s really pretty positive, specifically in regards to using myo inositol in around the dosage of two to four grams daily. there has been research to show that that kind of supplementation can improve insulin sensitivity with people with PCOS, reduce testosterone, and even aid in general fertility. So there could be other benefits at play there, but those are the ones that are quite well documented currently and it is something I recommend to all of my clients that do have PCOS.
Aidan:
For sure, huge one, completely agreed and yeah I look into that as well for pretty much all my clients PCOS as well. The next question is carbs hold water, it’s from Anna. Is it only grains or does it include fruit plus sugar? It covers all carbohydrates. So basically the number that I often go with, and I do make it little bit misleading to make maths easier, but I often say for every gram of glycogen you store, keeping in mind that carbs break down into glucose in the blood which can then get stored as glycogen, so it is a storage form of carbohydrate. Every gram of glycogen you store, you can store about three to four mil of water is the number that I often go with. And I like the four number because it makes the math simple. If you store 100 grams of glycogen, that’s half a kilo of body weight that you’ve stored. That’s easy because you’re storing 400 ml of water.
There is one study that gets quoted heaps that is like 2.7 mL of water is stored every gram of glycogen you store. So it’s like that’s overly specific. Obviously it’s not that specific every single time, but that’s like a good average to go. So round it up to three. But it’s clear that that makes a difference. You could have all of any form of carbohydrate. Like a lot of people think of grains in terms of like, I’m assuming Anna might be coming from the perspective of being like maybe grains make you bloated, but say sugar doesn’t or whatever. But the reason why it stores water, is related to the glycogen.
Any form of carbohydrate is going to lead to that. So that’s why I look at it. It’s always gonna do that. And this is also very worth being aware of when it comes to low-carb diets and stuff like that. And just short term thinking, if you weigh yourself very regularly, but your carb intake fluctuates, say one day you have a low food intake and you have low-carbs, of course your weight’s gonna be lower over the next few days. If you have a massive, like, high-carb day, of course it’s gonna spike the next few days. Doesn’t mean it’s all body fat, doesn’t mean like it’s an actual change in body composition. It can be big changes in water weight due to carbohydrate intake.
Leah:
So question number seven is thoughts on carb cycling. And that comes from Jess with AG. that makes so much sense because I was trying to figure out how to say that. It definitely explains it. So thoughts on carb cycling. So there’s two trains of thought that I tend to have on this. Majority of my clients I do not carb cycle with. We’re talking about my athletic clients or someone that performs in some kind of sport people because I don’t think it’s overly necessary.
It can be harder like logistically just to do this carb cycling. So if there’s days where you know you’re having you know a certain amount of carbs then the next day you’re having 100 grams less like logistically how do you do that? How do you work that out? So it can be easier just to have the same calorie and carb intake day in and day out. A lot of my say powerlifting or strength athletes won’t be carb cycling but on the other side of that is going to be my endurance athletes. So they tend to have greater discrepancies in their energy expenditure day to day. So their training can really differ. some days they might be expending 4,000 calories and then because they’ve got huge ride and then a brick in the afternoon or something like that. And then on a rest day, maybe they’re expending about 2,200 calories.
So there can be these huge discrepancies in energy expenditure where it might make sense that you do a bit of carb cycle and you’re fuelling for the work that you’re doing day to day, so having less on rest days and more on heavier training days. So I think carb cycling definitely has its place and can be beneficial. It’s just, know, if you don’t need that carb cycling, it’s perhaps just adding in a complexity that you just don’t need and it makes things a little bit harder. I’d also see it from the perspective of just generally calorie cycling or budgeting calories.
So when you’re dieting or in a calorie, deficit, some people will find it easier if they have some higher calorie days versus lower calorie days. Some people like to have more calories and carbs on the weekend. Some people like to have more calories and carbs on their training days for performance. So it definitely has its place there. So it’s not that I’m like anti or pro carb cycling. It really depends on the circumstances and the situation.
Aidan:
Yeah, I don’t see any real benefit for body composition. Like I’ve had a theory like in the back of my mind for a while being like maybe it makes sense like let’s use that huge discrepancy that you kind of talked about. Let’s pretend there’s optimal numbers like let’s pretend somebody in a 500 calorie deficit is optimal for maintaining muscle mass and losing fat or whatever. It doesn’t really matter like pretend there’s an optimal number. If you’re working with somebody with massive discrepancies.
Like if they had the same intake every single day, then suddenly they’d have a massive calorie deficit on their big training days and a massive surplus on their rest days. Like we’ve got no research suggesting that actually makes any difference for body composition, but I’ve always had that back in my mind being like, they gaining more body fat on their rest days? Are they not optimising their recovery and stuff like that on their training days? Like I’ve had that in the back of my mind, but it doesn’t seem overly relevant for many people. And like, seems to like, we can sort that out pretty easily by giving more food on those days to offset that a little bit.
For my powerlifters, definitely that is not an issue. That has been studied to a certain degree and there’s no body composition differences have been found there, which is part of why it’s in the back of my mind. It’s not something I’m really concerned with. I often will give a pre-workout snack or something like that that is not on their rest days and that’s an easy way to sort it out. So that way at least they feel good during their training session because they’ve just had a good snack that they know makes them feel good for when they train and it partly balances out. Like maybe they burn like 500 calories in their training session and maybe the snack’s 200, 300 calories. It’s not intended to cover the gap entirely. It’s not tried to, and I’m not trying to mathematically figure it out to make it match up, but it is a little bit extra food on their training days.
And then the budgeting one can be useful, but it’s very much personal preference. Me personally, I like simplicity. I think it’s easier to do consistent things day after day after day. Some people, what if you’re somebody who likes more calories on the weekend? For some people it makes sense to budget for that. Like I’ve done the maths on it. If you take away 50 calories per day six days of the week, that gives you 300 calories extra on the weekend. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you think about it, because protein needs don’t change or anything like that, you should keep your protein the same throughout the entire time.
That therefore means you might get like an extra 30 or 40 grams of carbs in the weekend and some extra fat as well. And that could be a dessert or something like that that you don’t normally have. You could take away 100 calories per day. Once again, that’s still not a lot. Now you have 600 calories to play with. Like you look at an extra meal or something like that or like a large meal out, replacing another meal or something like that. That sounds very, very appealing. I think the concept falls apart when you go larger than that and sometimes it also creates the issue of setting yourself up for that to happen where it’s like you then want to go wild on the weekend because you’ve been so strict during the week. So there’s a few thoughts of that. Calorie cycling is fine in my opinion. think it’s just very much a personal preference thing.
Leah:
Yeah. I just want to mention one thing with the calorie budgeting that I do see happen a lot and people fall into the pitfall of, not super to do with carb cycling, but I think worth mentioning just as part of this discussion is spending their carbs or calories beforehand. So like not budgeting and saying, I’m going to put a hundred calories, you know, take that off Monday to Friday and use that on the weekend, but blowing out and going, I’ll just make it up later because that never works. promise you that never works. So I just wanted to mention that.
Aidan:
For sure. Well those are all the questions for today so we’ll wrap up there. Hopefully you guys all enjoyed this format and we might try it again at some stage in the future. Apart from that, thank you for listening.