Torwen:
Hello and welcome back to the Ideal Nutrition podcast. My name is Torwen Eerkins and I’m joined by my co-host, Aidan Muir. And today we’re going have a chat about processed versus unprocessed pre-workout carbs. We’re going to talk about what the goal of pre-workout carbs actually is. How the digestibility of these carbs matters. Whether we need to consider things like fibre and micronutrients. And we’ll finish with some practical examples.
Aidan:
So, starting with the goal of pre-workout carbs, I kind of split up into two categories. Where I would say the first one is physically. And that would be to top up glucose and potentially help spare muscle glycogen a bit. One of the reasons why I say spare muscle glycogen is that although the conversion from eating food to turning into glycogen can start within an hour. It typically is like a four to six-hour process to like get stored in the muscle. So, therefore pre-workout carbs aren’t really to top up glycogen, they’re more to top up glucose.
We know that this can help improve performance. Particularly the longer a session is and the harder a session is. There’s plenty of research on if it’s above 45 minutes and it’s pretty intense. And it’s using the same muscle groups and stuff like that, like that’s pretty positive. Below that’s a little bit less positive.
But also if you’re not training hard, like how are you going to measure performance? Like food for thought, but anyway. The next bit is we also have research going as low as just mouth rinsing with carbohydrates showing potential improvements. Where I see that as something where I’ve viewed as about 70 % of the research on that topic has been positive. That’s my own number. That’s my own interpretation of the research.
But I also think the benefit that you would typically see from a mouth rinse is so small that if studies didn’t find benefit, it could just be due to that kind of sample size. But I use the mouth rinse example of you could use the simple explanation of having the mouth rinse kind of tricks your body to thinking that carbs are coming in. So it’s willing to burn through glycogen more quickly. And if we’re getting benefits from mouth rinses you think that we’d get benefits from consuming the actual carbohydrates.
So that’s like the physical benefit. The other benefit that I think is really important is feeling good during training. There are sessions that you go into where you haven’t, quote unquote, fuelled properly, and you just might feel terrible and you can’t get the same work done. And there are other sessions you going to and you feel great. And you can work harder than normal and potentially get a better like stimulus for adaptation stuff like that. So those two benefits physical and also how you feel.
Torwen:
Absolutely and the reason we want to touch on this is because there are so many benefits of including pre-workout carbs. There are some barriers for people. People seem to believe that the recommended pre-workout carbs which are typically potentially more processed don’t fit into their goals or their diet. The diet that they’d like to follow.
So what want to explore then is the difference between that processed versus unprocessed. And if we start with digestibility. The biggest difference here is that simple pre-workout carbs are lower fiber content and are typically simple, fastly digested carbs. On the other hand, things like unprocessed carbs are normally fruits, dried fruits, that sort of thing, which are absorbed a lot slower, sit heavier in the stomach. And are also digested a lot more slowly.
Aidan:
I got some numbers here. So, in terms of how long it takes glucose to peak in the blood, obviously there’s individual variation, there’s just averages. Some process options like lollies and sports drinks are very fast. Like it can peak after about 15 to 30 minutes. We’ve got things like white bread or refined cereals that are still quick, just a little bit less quick. When we go towards natural round honey is very quick as well.
But then when we go to like dates and bananas, they fall into the quick-ish category of like often peaking within 30 to 60 minutes. If we go to white rice and potatoes, it goes to about one to two hours, depending on the amount, obviously. And then once you go like oats, whole grain products, and other fruits and stuff like that, it obviously gets even slower than that.
And the other thing that I would add onto that is I’ve just talked about like peaking in the blood, but we also have that digestibility in terms of the how you feel. Like if you had something that was like tricky to digest and in too large of an amount, you wouldn’t feel great.
Torwen:
Kind of takes away the point of a pre-workout carb. Your session is going to be awful if you’ve got something sitting in your stomach that doesn’t feel good. So I think that takeaway from there then is that timing really matters. So generally when we say pre-workout carb, we’re talking about either 15 to 30 minutes before, or even that 30 to 60 minute window beforehand.
So the more processed carbs like you mentioned, lollies, sports drink, fantastic options. If you wanted to go down the unprocessed route, this is where things like honey, banana, dates, maybe raisins, dried mango, that sort of thing are positive rather than going for super heavy whole grains like you mentioned, rolled oats, potatoes, that sort of thing.
Aidan:
Let’s go and talk about some benefits of going the unprocessed So there’s a few things here. One I won’t touch on heaps, but just as a population, not so much amongst athletes, but as a population. We have a large percentage of calories coming from like hyper-processed foods or ultra-processed foods. I was listening to a podcast this morning. I won’t name them. I don’t want to give a free shout out. But they were talking about statistically in Australia, about 40% of calories are coming from ultra-processed foods. That’s quite high. They claimed that in the UK it’s as high as 60%.
And I’m like, well, damn, I am all for reducing like reducing those numbers down. I wear both on the same page of thinking that probably 80 plus percentage of intake should come from minimally processed food. We’re gonna go deeper on that, but let’s just stick to the pre-workout window now. So we’re gonna talk about micronutrients and fibre. So processed foods are often, but not always lacking in these areas. Like if we’re using lollies as an example, obviously it won’t have micronutrients or fibre.
There could also potentially be other ingredients in processed foods that you might specifically want to avoid. For example, it could be artificial colors, could be emulsifiers, it could be other things. I’m not saying whether you should or shouldn’t avoid those. I’m just saying whether you would like to avoid those. And then we’ve got the fact that natural options will offer more micronutrients and fiber. This still contributes to your overall daily intake. And if it can be done in a way that has no downside, that’s even better.
We have the risk of downside. For example, the high fiber stuff, what if that slows digestion, what if that causes issues? And also a lot of the natural pre-workout options are also particularly high FODMAP. Which could be a potential IBS-type symptom trigger. Honey, high FODMAP. Bananas, if they’re ripe, are high FODMAP. They actually go into this category as well, these can all be potential triggers. And a take that Torwin and I were speaking of off air is that…
Pre-workout nutrition really should be like a tiny portion of your intake. It is only a small portion and I think that if the majority of your intake is aimed to be at minimally processed, if a portion did come from this, like does it really matter that much?
Torwen:
And I don’t really have much else to add there. Most of the people that we’re talking to now as well who do have the training requirements where they’re adding pre-workout nutrition in have a high like calorie requirements. Have high intake requirements. This even further then becomes such a small part of their daily intake that I think it matters even less. So if you’re aiming for mostly whole-food, throughout the day, 80%, and this is making up that 20 % extra. I think that’s completely okay.
Aidan:
Yeah, we had another section in our notes called Practical Takeaways and Food Examples. We’ve kind of gone through a bunch of the food examples, so I don’t know if we want to go too deep on that. Do you have any thoughts or anything that you want to go on with that?
Torwen:
I don’t think so. I think if you’re thinking processed, there are so many options. It doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s something as small as lollies and sports drink. It still can be white bread with jam, crumpets, rice cakes, cereals, like those sorts of things. Likely still digested quick enough to fall into this processed benefit category as well.
Aidan:
Yeah, and another thing that I’m going to add on this is, because I actually am pretty neutral on this topic, I’m like, if you want to go down the route of unprocessed.
And you can do it in a way that works for you. I am all for that. I’ve made posts on this on Instagram and it is way harder than you think to get variety. That’s the one thing I wanted to touch on here. So shout out to Bella on our team because I’ve done collabs with her on this. And in those collabs, sometimes she has included some like semi-processed foods. And I’ve kind of looked at being like, the goal of this was to do like natural, like unprocessed.
And then I’m like, can’t think of anymore. Like she would have already included like honey, banana, dates, if you had a dried fruit or whatever. But it does get to a pretty small pool. And if we’re looking at other things that I really value, do like value diversity of plant-based intake. But there’s not heaps of options that can be done in a way that are aligning with being low fiber and easy to digest.
But that’s not a problem. There are people out there who are stoked to just like do the whole thing where you get like honey and you put some salt on it and you just do that. And like that works right. So like, I don’t know, heaps of options here as well.
Torwen:
Heaps of options. And like we say, it’s better to have something. So if you’re stuck in the mindset at the moment where you’d like you’d prefer to stick to those less processed options, that’s okay. You’ve got options. Start with those. There’s always the option to expand after that.
Aidan:
Perfect. Well, we’ll wrap it up there. So this has been episode 234 of the Ideal Nutrition podcast. As always, if you have not already, if you leave a rating review, we would massively appreciate it.