: On today's episode, Keto, Carbs and Running Reality with Professor Louise Burke. Welcome to the only podcast delivering and deciphering the latest running research to help you run smarter. My name is Brodie. I'm an online physiotherapist treating runners all over the world, but I'm also an advert runner who just like you have been through vicious injury cycles and when searching for answers struggled to decipher between common running myths and real evidence-based guidance. But this podcast is changing that. So join me as a run smarter scholar and raise your running IQ so we can break through the injury cycles and achieve running feats you never thought possible. Welcome back, brand Smarter Scholars. This episode is my attempt at balancing the scales after my interview with Ian Seales, who was originally on to discuss the role of nutrition when it comes to pain and pain sensitivity. But since the release of that episode, I've received a lot of feedback or criticism detailing the potentially harmful narratives around a low carb diet, in particular with the athletic population in mind. I wanna say thanks to... Christopher for his feedback on the episode and his suggestion to interview someone like Professor Louise Burke, who is on today and has published many papers, some of them including low carbohydrate, high fat diets, exercise metabolism, ketogenic diets and ketone supplements. And so in this episode, we attempt to do just that, explore what the role for carbs are in the athletic population or recreational running space. What are the trade-offs with low carb versus carb diets and how you can effectively implement your own nutritional plan that works for you. I hope you enjoy this one. Let's take it away. thank you very much for joining me on the podcast. Pleased to be here. Let's start off with your academic career. Could you give the audience or run them up to speed in terms of what your academic career and professional careers look like to date? So my academic and professional careers are separate really. I started out as a practitioner and I worked or have worked in elite sport for 45 years now. First in private practice and various AFL football teams, etc. And then 30 years at the Australian Institute of Sport. And I was finding during that period that the more interesting activities that I was doing were the research. activities. And for me, the research was with elite athletes, but it was trying to find ways to embed questions that they're interested in tackling into some of their training and competition opportunities. And I had a really great opportunity through Australian Catholic University to get funding to do that. And that was really the start of our supernova studies a decade ago. And Then when the AIS model changed and got really out of the working with athlete business, it suddenly occurred to me that I could probably do better work from within academia. So in 2020, I shipped it over to ACU full time. And now the work I do with elite athletes is from a research standpoint. I still work with a couple of athletes, but most of what I do now is try and set up our studies and collaborations with other people so that we can get to the bottom of some of the things that athletes find interesting. what's been quite funny for me is that, you know, over my life, and I always think about this when I go overseas and when you come back into Australia and you fill out your card of who you are, and I've always written sports dietician. And recently, I wrote researcher as my occupation. I've obviously had a change of perception about what I do recently. I only ever thought myself as a practitioner who used research as the basis of making decisions about what would be good to practice. And then I realized that another thing that research did was that it was a really great way to have relationships with athletes. You some of our best research, the Supernova and other research camps that we've done. being embedded with the athletes and co-designing research creates a completely different relationship and you suddenly realize that athletes are researchers too. They're trying to work out what works best for them. And so when you do things together from that angle and I really appreciate their insights, like I've learnt more from coaches and athletes than they've ever learnt from me. So that's sort of changed my perspective on both working with athletes, but also what research is. And it's almost coincidental to me that then from an academic point of view, some of the outputs that I've had with the other aspects of my life have actually been welcomed in academia. you know, now when I go to conferences and people sort of introduce you and they tell you what your H score is or how many publications you've had, and it's not, you know, it's reasonably decent for an academic, but it's not something that I did with academia in mind. So for listeners out there, there's more than one way to get to be a researcher. sometimes taking the pressure off yourself, like I now work in an environment where I'm so old that it doesn't matter what I do with the rest of my career is gonna be just fun rather than having to keep climbing up ladders. But you some of my younger colleagues, they're so pressured into what's the best journal to publish in to get the best citations and what's the best impact factor and how do I get my H score up? And I've never thought about any of that. And I still don't know how to play that game. And I'm sort of actually happy that I don't, I'm happier just being that practitioner research and the rest can take care of itself. Yeah, glad that's worked out that way. One of the main reasons I wanted to get you on was the discussion around a low carb high fat diet that has drawn a fair amount of attention. I guess we could start off by, I guess, what theory has caught so much attention. One of the things that I've come across and heard about is the phenomenon of, okay, if you have a low carb high fat diet, you are training your body to burn fat as a fuel. more so becoming more efficient at burning fat as a fuel. And therefore when translating that to low intensity endurance sports, you're then a bit more of an efficient athlete from a fueling point of view. Does that hold up? Is that theory, does that exist in the research that you found? Yes and no. So let's choose our words really carefully. So there's no doubt that being on a carbohydrate restricted high fat diet trains your body to be able to burn fat as a substrate for exercise. It does it, it can double it. Even in athletes who are well trained and they've got good capacity to burn fat already, when you VAT adapt or keto adapt athletes, we can double their ability to oxidize fat during exercise. And so it's quite phenomenal and it's quite a robust protocol or quite a robust change that happens. We've done some studies earlier on, not the most recent ones with the keto diet, but there was a decade of my life from sort of 1995 to 2005 when we were looking at lower carb, higher fat diets and found that even within sort of four days of being in that restricted carb zone, there were... profound changes in the muscle and they were robust. weren't just, I'm just switching over for this moment. Things happen to upregulate the molecules and the hormones that are part of being able to transport fat into the muscle and then take it up into the muscle, take it up into the mitochondria and then oxidise it. And at the same time as those changes are happening, there's similar... changes that are happening to down-regulate carbohydrate oxidation and some of the enzymes involved in breaking down glycogen and in putting the carbohydrate into the TCA cycle, the Krebs cycle, so the pyruvate dehydrogenase enzyme that allows pyruvate to enter into the TCA cycle, that's down-regulated too. So it's a sort of a an activity that happens in two equal and opposite parts if you like and what your body's obviously wanting to do is to conserve the carbohydrate that it does have and increase its use of the fat which is in a more plentiful supply. So there's no doubt that that happens but the word that you used before is efficient and so I would say it's effective in that it can do it but why don't like the word efficient is because when we talk in sport about economy or efficiency, what we're often talking about is your ability to take a substrate and to turn it into ATP, which is the energy system that we're using to create the power, the speed, the whatever. And we're, in most situations in sport, wanting to do this using those oxidative pathways I talked about before, the TCA cycle and the electron transport chain. What you need to think about in terms of efficiency or economy is not just how much substrate you've got, but how much oxygen have you got to be able to create those pathways aerobically? And what's the yield of ATP that you get at the other end? And even though fats got more calories per gram, it takes more oxygen to be able to then go through all those pathways and produce the ATP. So there's about a 5 % difference if you're thinking about I've got substrate, but how much oxygen can I use to convert that substrate and produce the ATP, then the carbohydrate is actually more efficient or more economical as a fuel. And where that becomes important is In sports at higher intensities where oxygen starts becoming the limiting factor, you've got plenty of substrate, but if you're doing something at 60 % of VO2 max and you're wanting to then switch from carbs to fat and then you say to yourself, oh, I've got to have now 5 % more oxygen to create the same ATP, going from 60 % to 65 % of your VO2 max, that's not hard. We can do that. And it's just a slight increase in perception of effort, if you like. And you might say, well, that's fine. I can cope with that. But if you're a two-hour marathon runner, you're not doing it at 60 % of VO2 max. You're doing it somewhere between 85 % and 95 % of VO2 max. you're running as close to your critical power as possible. That's the incredible thing that those marathon runners are doing. And so you don't have... capacity to say, now I need to use more oxygen to produce less or to produce the same amount of ATP. So what you're basically going to get is a less power, less speed produced from the same amount of oxygen that your muscles have, the mitochondria have access to. And so that's where we feel the problem with the keto diet for high performance endurance athletes is that if being able to work at those critical powers is a key part of performance in your sport, well then that's sacrifice and you've got to then work out is it, is the trade-off worth having the ability to toot along for longer on the high fat during the lower intensity parts of it. So there's lots of events in the Olympic program where that wouldn't be a good trade-off. I mean, even though, even in the Giro or the Tour de France, on average, you might be moving at about 60 to 65 % of VO2 max in the peloton. To win the race and to win the stage, you have to be able to break away. You have to be able to go up that hill. And the power outputs that are being sustained there are those really critical, very high intensity ones. So that doesn't seem a good trade off. where it might be useful as in events that are truly moderate to low intensity and particularly where the cost of continuing to take in carbohydrate is the penalty. And one of the problems that we have in this whole world at the moment is that people want to see it in black and white. You have to join an army. You're either team carbs or team keto. And because most my... life and work in elite sport, has been in these more traditional Olympic or professional sports where the critical factor for performance includes being able to sustain these really high power outputs for either the duration of the race or critical periods, then keto hasn't turned out to be a great opportunity. And so when our studies are showing that, people then think, oh, well then she's obviously team carbs and She's never going to think that keto is a good idea, but I'm actually working on a case history at the moment of working with an athlete who I worked with to do the keto thing because for her event it was perfect. And this was an ultra endurance swimmer who came to me wanting to be able to swim between Albania and Italy, which was over, it was about a 30 hour event. And it wasn't just the duration of the event and the intensity that was going to be quite moderate. It's just a one person event. She's not having to race against someone else neck to neck and have to find an extra speed at some point. She's doing her own pace. And even though there's going to be parts where there's a swell or a current, whatever, that she might have to fight against more difficultly, she's going to be able to work at an even moderate intensity for most of it. But for her, the big problem was when she tried to do it previously was it's not the same. In running and cycling, you can fuel during the event quite easily because there's aid stations and you can just grab something on the way past and you can take it down without having to stop. But in swimming, you have to actually sort of stop and get the thing on the stick that the boat is who's following you has got. And if this is swell and waves and things, it can be quite difficult to do that. You have to really stop to consume it. It's hard to when you're to be feeding yourself. But the thing I hadn't known before is that in the seawater after four to six hours, your tongue and your mouth become so swollen with the saltwater that it's really difficult to chew and swallow things. And it tastes terrible. when you're thinking of here's an event at moderate intensity where it's going to be difficult to keep fueling if you want to go the carb route, well then it makes sense to go in the opposite direction and go the keto route. And that's basically what we did. And she's one of the people that responds well to that. And she was able to achieve her race goals. So just like to point out that, you know, there are horses for courses and you can teach old dogs new tricks and it's possible to see sports nutrition as a really complex and nuanced sort of industry and that we don't have to belong to armies or teams or religions or whatever it is and hate each other. Yeah. I'm glad that you find the balance there. I know everyone's going to be a bit different, but for a standard recreational runner who is most of the people listening to this, they'll spend hopefully 80 % of their weekly mileage at a low intensity, and then they might have one really high intensity workout, one long run in the week, and then they might run and train for one to two marathons per year. How would they like, what's your advice with how they should plan out their fueling strategy? Like should they be prioritizing carbs for their low intensity, easy runs? Should they be staging or? timing when they consume more carbs for their long runs or their intense efforts? Like what's your advice around that? Yeah. So every, every session of exercise you do will have a different goal and it's, it'll be something about the session itself and what's the best way to support it. But it'll be how it fits into the big picture of what you're trying to do. Um, and my, I guess my natural tendency is to even with the slower runners, mean even doing a four-hour marathon, I still probably think that the ability to continue to take in carbs is sustainable during that sort of a run and that is probably that would be the way that I would attack it first. Even with lower intensity, not everybody is a good candidate for keto. All the studies, when you look at them, will show that even in a study where the average output says that the keto diet didn't impair performance or improve performance as a whole, there's still individual athletes that have a completely different experience to each other. so there is something about the individual responsiveness to it. even if we just said, right, we've decided that we're going to still be sort of a carb-supported runner to do a four-hour marathon, many of the sessions that you do in a week with low intensity don't need carbohydrate support. whether it's a deliberate thing that the athlete says, I'm going to do this overnight fasted, or I'm even going to have not replaced glycogen since the last training session I did. So it's a low glycogen training session. Whether it's accidental design like that, then it's probably a reasonable thing to do some of those sessions with low carbohydrate availability. Again, not everybody finds that easy. Some athletes can do it easy and some adapt to doing it. Other athletes just find that when they go out and they try and do things with the overnight fast or low glycogen, it just feels terrible and they don't perform very well. And so in those situations, it might be just easy to say, well, I'm going to have it after, I'm going to have my run after breakfast or I'm going to make sure I've had some carbs the night before. So even if I'm overnight fasted, I've still got glycogen. It's only the sessions where you're probably going higher intensity that you might make a more deliberate decision to try and have that to be a carb-supported session, whether that means you've had breakfast before you went out on that morning run or you took some carbs during it, you know, took out some sports drink or some gel and you did one or both, then that will probably lead to a better quality session. And if some of those sessions are also trying to practice what you're going to do in the marathon, then it does make sense to learn to be able to tolerate the carbs. And sometimes that's just a gut thing that you need to feel comfortable with being able to consume it and swallow it then have it absorbed from the gut. Some of it's that sort of physiological adaptation at the gut level, but also some of it's behavioral. I remember the first triathlon I did and I made myself a sports drink because was the days before you couldn't buy them easily and I was ready to go but and I'd done all my training by myself and I hadn't worked out that when I was riding in a group that my ability to take my hands off the handlebars and take the big out of the big cage and drink it was seriously threatened. I just didn't have the behavioral sort of confidence to be able to do it and so doing things in practice and making sure that you can do it and so that, you know, it might be that you try and learn to be able to grab something on the run and be able to swallow it down without losing it while you're running. I mean, if you can't do that, and you're doing a four hour mouth, so it might be that you actually stop and get it down properly. But learning all the techniques and the behavior that makes it something that you can do in the race under pressure. is a smart thing to do. So some of the sessions of exercise that you or the training sessions that you do leading in the marathon should mimic that behaviour. And it could be as focused as saying, what are the, what's the marathon going to provide at aid stations? How often are the aid stations apart and what's going to be there? And I'm going to start practising that. Or it might be saying, I like to be self-contained and that's something I do as a runner. When I do my marathons, I do drink from the aid stations that are along the way, but I carry my own carbohydrate supply. I'm a frequent feeder. I like to have something every kilometer, so I carry a little bag of lollies with me and then I'm in complete control of what I need and then I just get extra fluid along the way. So whatever it is that you're going to do, work it out in training. practice it and be really confident that it's going to happen. um, that's, you know, that's all part of the process and the enjoyment of doing the training that you're learning all these skills and you're adding up a whole lot of things that are going to help you on the day. what, what signs are we looking out for that what we're doing is working because like you say, people have different responses to different fueling strategies, both at like low intensity and high intensity. So if someone says, Oh, you know what, let me just see how I fasting for low intensity sessions or vice versa. Someone's been says, you know what, I always run on an empty stomach. Let me try consuming a few more carbs on my low intensity sessions. What are we actually looking out for to see if it is beneficial? Yep. So training diaries are a really good idea for people and writing down, you know, the time and the speed if you've got a garment or some other. metric that you can follow to see what's happening in terms of your physiological responses, if you're at heart rates and you might also look at the speed, how you feel tummy wise and just how you feel in terms of the effort. Like sometimes you can do your 10k session and you can do the same time, but it just felt like it took more out of you. Like it was, in other days it feels really easy. So the more that you can document what happens, including you know, even with long runs, things that you might notice like towards the end, just really got sick of the flavor of that same sports drink, or I felt like I was waterlogged, I would have liked to have had some carbs more concentrated rather than having to drink it all. All those sort of learnings from a session are really important. And then when you add them up over time, you can start to see patterns. You sometimes what happens on one run mightn't be the the rule, you sometimes you might've just not had enough sleep or you've been really stressed at work and so that run was affected by other things. But if you can see those patterns over again, that, you know, when I do this, this is how I feel and this is good or this is not what I want it to be, then you can start being able to work out what's great for you and then either tweaking it or deliberately trying to push yourself a little bit more that maybe the first time you went out and you had had the gels, um, they felt terrible in your tummy and they were sticky all over your teeth and you just didn't enjoy it. But two or three times after that, you've learned how they feel and that it's a smart idea to have some water there so that you can switch the stickiness out of you, your mouth afterwards and eventually work out. Right. That's, that's now a tool for my toolbox that I'm happy that I've got the best out of. So keeping a clear diary and not just. think not just taking it like session by session, try to look at like a longer term trend to see how you're feeling effort wise, um, speed and just general feel. look, this is the great thing about life these days that all this technology is so available to everybody. It used to be that you'd have to be the, you know, the most elite athlete in the world that had access to the best coaches and the all the gadgets that told you what was going on. These days, so much of it is available to all of us, even just with the Apple watch or some, you know, thing that you're not paying extra money for. And so learning, you've got to get the right balance though. Sometimes you get too much information, the right balance of what's enough to learn from. I don't go out every session that I do with all that information at me. Sometimes I just want to go and have a run and just enjoy myself. And I don't want to look at the speed because this was for fun and I don't want to come home and then be grisly at myself the whole day that it was two minutes slower than the last time I did it. You know, there's, there's times to want to know stuff and there's times when you just want to enjoy and you don't need all the other baggage on it. Yeah. And I have seen in a few of my runs, particularly females, they might say, you know what, most of my morning runs, I just, I don't eat and I go out and run and it's just all they've ever known, but. they do experiment with having some consuming some sort of food or some sort of carbs before the run, actually start feeling better, like their energy, their recovery afterwards, and might be worth testing for some people who are just thinking about it. If someone wants to take the extreme and be on like a ketogenic diet and wanting to run marathons, as you mentioned before, there might be a sacrifice in performance. But is there any like risks or like dangers of adopting such an extreme approach and then also trying to squeeze everything out in terms of performance? I worry about any dietary approach that is very restrictive in terms of food choices. And I think we're sort of over the hump a little bit with the keto diet in terms of its popularity, but when it first started and got a ground swell, I see a lot of people doing it. and they were getting quite rigid about it and being absolutely restrictive with the amount of different foods that they had in their diets. And I'm not sure that's a great thing from the point of view of just nutritional adequacy when you cut so many foods out of your range. But the other thing in terms of the psychology of it, we know in terms of eating disorders that one of the big risk factors is going on a diet. and people who go on diets might do it primarily because they're wanting to lose weight. But the thing that sort of then in many people triggers the problem is just this idea of control and restriction. And so whether your motive was to lose weight or whether it was to go keto, there's still an element of this idea of restriction. And for some people, that's not a great experience. It'll be interesting to see in time when we look back over the period, you were there changes in some of the behaviour that led some people to have disordered eating problems. The other thing that sometimes happens is people get really sort of fixated with the top line aspect of a diet. And it's not just keto. It's almost every diet I can think of. When I started my career, it was just the beginning of the high carb movement. And so the message was, you know, people should restrict fat or reduce fat and eat more carbs. Now, when we said that we meant whole grain breads and fruits and vegetables and, you know, dairy. We didn't expect the food industry to respond with muffins the size of your head and jumbo packs of low fat ice cream. But what happens is that suddenly foods become more available. that aren't nutritious, but they fit the profile at the top line. And so if you think now of paleo diets and vegan diets and gluten-free diets and keto diets, you can see that the food industry has changed to be able to tailor a lot of what's available and whether it's in ultra-processed food form in the supermarkets or whether it's at restaurants, et cetera. Now you can find something that fits your diet. but it's not particularly healthy. It just fits the macros or it just fits the top line. And I get sad when I see, you know, vegan diets and all they're eating is impossible burgers and ultra processed versions of something that's meat free. And I mean, I call it the ice cream index. I know your diets hit problems when you can go to the supermarket and in the ice cream fridges. there's choice of which ice cream you can have. There's this keto ice cream and that keto ice cream. Because then a lot of people then think, I'm keto, I can have that ice cream. And so suddenly they start filling up their diet with some of these less nutrient dense foods, but they still got the halo of, I'm keto. It's just I'm eating fat bombs rather than avocado. And I'm eating keto ice cream instead of meat. so I think sometimes that this over focus on the top line aspect of the diet is stopping people from understanding that food range and nutrient density are the two most important things about your diet. And the third one is enjoyment. So I don't care what you follow, if you can preserve those three things, then you're doing better than someone who's saying, I'm totally rigid. Or as long as the label says it's my diet, I'll gobble it down. Do you prescribe a type of, I don't want to call it diet, but like, you know, lifestyle choice when it comes to eating choices that people make? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you always, when you're working with someone, you're starting with the human being who's already eating. So they've already got some things that work with their lifestyle, things that they're happy that are in their food environment and whether that's, you know, where they like to shop or whether it's their cooking skillset or whether it's their budget. We already start from somewhere. And so what I normally would do is to say, let's look at what you've got now and let's look at how we could improve it. And if there are barriers to improve it, what are the things that we need to do? Do we need to learn some more cooking skills or do we need to learn better budgeting so that there's more food and money available? Or do we need to think about time-saving ideas that means that you've got more options to eat when you're time poor from more nutrient dense foods. I'm someone that usually doesn't start with a clean slate and say, right, you know nothing about nutrition and let's start from a blank sheet and completely fill it up with things you've never tried before. mean, that to me is a rare experience because I think most people have got some attachment to what they're doing now. And they've also got, I've never met it. an athlete who's had such terrible diet that I've said, there's nothing in there that's worth keeping. Usually it's show us what you got and then let's see what we can do to alter things so that it better achieves what your nutrition goals are. But the things I want to preserve are the social aspects of your eating and the practical aspects of your eating and enjoyment aspects of your eating. Yeah. So considering all of those things when trying to make just small changes here and there to then hopefully sop it out to be like maybe adding more nutrients into diets and variety and that sort of stuff. Yeah. You often have to try and help people to increase their food range. Um, and often it is to be able to find ways of adding back some nutrient dense foods, you know, putting some more fruit and vegetables into meals. Um, a lot of the The protein choices, know, people often have meals that are a bit unbalanced where they might just grab stuff that, you know, they just grab a bagel on the way to work. And if you can teach them how we can add some protein into that and some fruit or vegetables to make it a more rounded meal. mean, it's not that every meal that you eat has to be totally perfect, but the more often that you can try and get the meal better, then it's all easier to add up to the big picture. I think I've read maybe about five general health books this year, they're not necessarily talking about performance, but just talking about lifestyle in general and longevity, I guess you could say. And a lot of them talk about like lower carb diets. talk about Mediterranean diets, or I think one of them is called like, or suggests like a mild keto diet. I think someone called it like a Mediterranean diet. I think they just made that up, but it seems to be the. what I've read, a general consensus with lifestyle and longevity. And I have seen, I guess they're sort of talking about, okay, we want to remove a high carb diet because of disruption to certain hormones or brain function or your response to insulin sensitivity and those, I guess, benefits if you move away from that. And I have seen endurance athletes some endurance athletes, um, be pre-diabetic because of their high carb consumption. And so I, I just want, I know you mentioned before we hit record that you're not too versed in or like, um, qualified to dive too deep into this subject, but when it comes to high, carb diets, is there anything we should be looking out for to make sure that maybe we're overdoing things or maybe we're heading too much in the other direction? Yeah, look, I think. It's very hard to have a very high carb diet without having large amounts of sugar and often from food forms where there's no other nutritional value. And so one of the messages that rings true about some of the things like the Mediterranean diet is trying to get people more connected to having nutrient dense foods to meet their fuel requirements. And that's both sort of the energy requirements in general in terms of weight control, but also the amount of muscle and brain energy that carbohydrate needs to provide. mean, there's no benefits to just eating large amounts of carbohydrate if you're not needing to use them for those main metabolic organs. so partly that you don't need it, but partly if you're eating it in high amounts, it's probably coming from foods that aren't nutritionally dense. Like it is really difficult. to eat large amounts of whole grains and large amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables to add up to very high amounts of carbohydrate compared to just going and getting a sugary beverage from the fridge and then just plugging it down. It's just so easy to eat carbs in that form. And that's really where we want to target the messages around carbohydrate. Get rid of the stuff that's just too easy to eat unless you needing it during exercise for that very specific purpose we talked about before. And even then, you know, think about the different ways that you can consume it. And so it doesn't have to be an anti-carb message so much as balance everything up with what you need. And I'd feel the same way about any other nutrient if it was to go crazy. mean, to me, the carnivore diet, which is mostly protein, is too much of that. and not enough of the other stuff. And you know, the keto diet can be very low in the nutrient range as well, if you're trying to keep carbs so low. I'm leaning towards trying to get the most nutrients per calorie, if you like, from the biggest range of foods. But and that can include, you know, being really smart about the carbs that you're eating and not overdoing them. Yeah, I think that's a good message, it seems like, be conscious of the types of foods that you're eating and making sure that if it is packaged or processed or ultra processed, that's probably going to have a lot of carbs, very low nutrients. Um, and if you start, if the bulk of your diet is around nutrient dense foods, that's going to be very hard to overconsume certain macros and that sort of stuff. I think that's one of the big problems with these ultra-processed foods is that it just make every nutrient easy to eat. And the first ones they targeted with the carbs. But it's quite interesting at the moment to see what's happening in the, say the vegan space with all the new protein forms that we're getting that are not just, they're really available and you can eat them in much larger amounts than you would have before if you'd been eating a vegan diet. So. Let's, let's see what happens in that space as well. I think we'll, you know, we'll generally find that there's good reason to stay in the middle with everything and that you can tip the balance on any of those macros just by making them more available, ultra processed and easy to eat. someone is wanting to experiment with consuming more carbs and they feel like they have quite a sensitive stomach, do you have any recommendations as like where they can start before a run? What they can consume and then how they can build upon, I guess, training their gut to tolerate more and more nutrient dense stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, there's pretty good evidence now that it takes two to three weeks of dedicated training during exercise. And that might be, you know, three times at least a week to be able to run with the carbohydrate of your choice and whether you stay, say, I'm going to work backwards and look at what's going to be in the race I'm doing. then because it's going to be more convenient for me to just to take from the aid stations, I'm going to practice with that to be able to tolerate it. Or whether you say, I'm going to look after myself in this race. So I'm going to choose the one that I think is going to work best for me. And I'm going to have that. And then I'm going to train with it, tolerate it. And then I'm going to work out a way that it comes with me during the race. So that there's the two different approaches of where you start. If you're having less than 60 grams of carbs per minute, it probably doesn't matter that it's, it could be just a straight glucose. 60 grams per minute. sorry, grams. Sorry, sorry, 60 grams per hour. If you're going to go higher than that, it does make sense to have the mix of carbohydrate type so that you've got glucose and fructose from the food sources. Now that comes to you in sports foods. because it's been manufactured that way, but you can find other foods in real life, whether it's some fruits and other carbohydrate-rich sources that can provide you with a range of the carbohydrate types if you want to go with natural foods. But less than 60 grams per hour, you can probably choose any carb source that you like because you're not going to hit what we think are the normal barriers. mean, of course, we aren't manufactured by Mother Nature so that everybody's gut tolerate 60 grams per hour and that we come out of the factory, you know, all the same. So there may be some people for whom 40 grams is as much as they ever learn to tolerate. But I would start with the carbohydrate choice of what's available, what feels nice. And look, people got their own preferences. I mean, as I said, I like having the lollies during. Marathon because I like having sort of something that I can have frequently and I like the I like eating lollies compared to drinking sports drink And I also like to have all different flavors and I eat them in order of niceness, but that works for me other people just love to have the same sports drink because they've they you know, they they tolerate it and they know it's gonna be there and that works for them there's more than one way of doing things and Finding the one that works for you is all part of the fun of the training process. Very good. Thanks for sharing that. Uh, is there any other, I guess, diet, nutrient, performance focused misconceptions that you may see in the recreational running space that we may not have discussed yet? Oh, there's probably millions. There's a, problem about having a, um, a professional like mine is that Everyone's an expert because everyone eats and everyone's got social media and everyone's, you know, reading a whole lot of other influencer stuff. And I sometimes wonder whether it would have been easier to be a nuclear physicist because not too many other people would have tried to feel that they had expertise that they needed to force on you. But look, almost every day I pick up something that's got some influencer telling me something about nutrition that just makes my head hurt and makes me glad that I'm sort of towards the end of my career than at the beginning of it. I admire people who are on social media all the time and can, you know, get in there and reply back and provide more balanced view to counter some of the nonsense. Let me think of some of the things that I've seen recently. One of the things that is getting a lot of airplay at the moment is, and it's great to see female athletes getting some recognition for being underrepresented in most of the research that we've done, including mine. But now it's almost tipping in the opposite direction that everything has to be female specific and that females can never do things the same way as males and that all females are going to be the same as each other and that all females are going to have a menstrual cycle and that it different stages of the menstrual cycle, they have to do things so differently and so there's almost an industry now just sort of thinking up crazy ways to make females feel special instead of, you know, giving them information that remembers that they're first an individual before they're a female. And so I get a little bit cross with a lot of this industry that's making money out of having all these special things that differ from day to day and just assuming that everybody's menstrual cycle is the same and forgetting half the female population is generally on hormonal contraceptives and don't have menstrual cycles and I'm not sure if we've catered well for them with some of these ideas. But you know there's a problem sometimes when you under represent or underserve a community that when you cotton on that they are now a special community that you just go over the top with too many stuff that just haven't got the evidence base. And it's sometimes as dangerous to give people too much terrible information than no information. So getting that balance right and saying, yes, look, females, there are some things about you that are different. And some of you do have symptoms around the menstrual cycle that make it easier or harder to eat food. and feel comfortable on certain days and that you may need to alter things just to be able to manage those symptoms. But we can't assume that everybody's going to be the same and then force people into this, you know, today's day four of your menstrual cycle. So today's the day you eat blueberries and today's the day you won't be able to parallel park the car because your hormones are interfering with your concentration. mean, some of this stuff just just laughable. So It'd be good if we didn't have to laugh about it so much and sort of started to be a bit more science-based with this information. what would your recommendation be for females given that advice would just be to experiment with different stuff and see what works for them. Yeah, absolutely experiment. again, document because, know, one of the good things now about technology is there's lots of ways in which you can keep not just your training diary, but you can keep some information on what's happening with your menstrual cycle, where you are in it and whether you've got any symptoms about it. One of the, not sadnesses, but one I think of the things that I'd like to see improved, and I've got some colleagues that are working on this and I really applaud them, is that rather than being negative about the menstrual cycle all the time, I think it'd be good if we started keeping, not in symptoms, but information that talks about when we feel good. Like at the moment, lot of the menstrual apps say things like, you how bad do you feel today? How tired do you feel today? How much is your stomach causing problems today? Instead of saying, how strong do you feel today? You know, how great do you feel? How much energy have you got? And I think sometimes if you ask people questions in a more positive way, then people would feel more positive about what you're asking them about. So if people can learn and they may find that there are predictable times of the menstrual cycle, they are feeling really great. And that's the time when they might schedule some of the harder sessions or the sessions that they want to tackle with some not as much interruption. And then there's days when they could expect some symptoms and that's where they need to be kind to themselves and just make sure that they manage some of their food, the timing and amount of it to make sure that it's not exacerbating any symptoms when they're exercising. Louise, if people want to learn more about your work, your studies, is there any way that can go any social media links or anything that I can leave in the show notes for people to learn more? Oh, look, I am on Twitter within a love hate relationship. In fact, I just attended a session just moments ago on LinkedIn, and I'm going to make myself do better there with putting more information up. Otherwise, you know, PubMed is a great way to find out the articles that the research articles that we write and there's I'm actually working on an update of a book at the moment. lots of ways to hear, not just from me, but look, I think if you've got any doubts, go and see a sports dietician. That's the best investment you'll ever make. We're so quick to buy a tin of some powder or a new gadget. And yet we sometimes balk at the idea of paying money to get professional advice from somebody that can work with you to make better use of some of those other things. So it doesn't have to be me. great sports dietitians out there that can do what I do and better. And having a relationship with one yourself was probably one of the best investments that you'll make. agree and goes in line with what you've mentioned earlier with everyone having an individual response to different fueling strategies and different foods and different cycles and that sort of stuff. thanks for that reminder. And yeah, that's, that's great advice to finish off with. So Louise, thank you for coming on to the podcast. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and thanks for all the great work you do in the research. Run Smarter book and ways you can access my ever-growing treasure trove of running research papers. Thanks once again for joining me and well done on prioritising your running wisdom.