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Time To Stir The Pot- A Refutation Of The Science Behind Carb Backloading
Alas, down to the meat and potatoes- I hear you and Kiefer have heat. How'd this happen?
Man, truthfully speaking the guy probably has no idea who I am- I don’t have heat with him in particular, just with bullshit science and those who make a buck off it. All these diet and health gurus are interchangeable, whether they be dangerously hardcore or bulletproof executives- they learn just enough about a topic to sound authoritative, then put down half-baked theories that would get torn apart by a first year biochem major, back it with a whole bunch of references that they either haven’t read or don’t really understand, then say shit like “This works, and you can’t disagree because I know science and I’m over 200 pounds.” My real beef with this is that nobody seems to question this stuff- they just fall into the pack and go “wow, this works”. Of course it works- eat next to nothing all day except some eggs and protein powder, pound coffee until you’re tweaked to shit, then only stuff yourself with sugar after your evening workout? I know a whole bunch of sorority girls who went all through college like this. Controlling cravings through fasting then binge eating at night makes it hard to take in enough calories for most folks, so they lose weight. Miraculous.
Look, I have nothing against the guy personally- I don’t know him. Could be the nicest guy on earth, and he’s certainly earnest about the field. What I don’t like is bad bullshit science being repackaged and sold. I’ve picked apart a lot of his stuff, but… hey, it’s the internet, what are the odds he’s seen any of it and felt the need to respond? Pretty low. It’s not about debunking anyhow- most of what I write isn’t an attack on people trying to come up with new ideas, it’s just stating the facts. People can draw their own conclusions from there. If that makes some popular diet or amazing new underground renegade magic bullet systemic manipulation whatever the crap sound like bullshit, then, hey, maybe it is bullshit.
Goddamn, you're going strong to the hoop. So you're saying the idea of carb backloading is, in essence, bullshit?
The concept might have some merit when it comes to helping people restrict calories, control cravings and take in an overall solid nutrient profile, but there’s no magic to it. The concept of clinically significant modulated tissue response using your body’s natural hormones is bullshit. Which, yes, basically undercuts the entire premise. If the tagline was “CBL- it’ll make you less hungry during the day and you’ll lose weight”, I’d say GREAT. But no, it’s pages and pages of hyperbole and in-text citations to 20 year old studies on diabetics.
Christ almighty, I'm sure half of my audience has already rage-quit this article and has some half-formed, incoherent, all-caps diatribe against you and your family forming on their fingertips. Half of Supertraining now wants you dead. As such, it might behoove you to tell us with what, specifically, you disagree?
Oh man, I’d be doing you (and myself) a disservice if I tried to condense this into anything shorter than a novella. We’re talking basic, basic stuff, things like the clinical insignificance of morning growth hormone pulses (i.e., the pulses are far too low to really affect muscle gain or fat loss in any meaningful way), a seeming lack of comprehension regarding digestion times and insulin peaks (particularly digestion of large meals- CBL as designed will have most people waking up with carbohydrates still digesting in their small intestine), flaws in understanding receptor kinetics and response to hormones (i.e. the entire concept of Modulated Tissue Response…and I’m not dignifying that with the trademark symbol, assumes you can cause selective expression of certain receptors in muscle as opposed to fat via resistance training and insulin regulation, but fails to understand that this selective expression is upended the moment you ingest ANY glucose.. unless you’re diabetic…. Which is why most of that cited research on diabetics here is not really relevant.). This last part is the biggest problem, for me. Any entire system based on a shaky foundation is, to me, completely suspect… and the foundation simply doesn’t hold water. Sort of like chiropractors. Sure, you can seem to know what you’re talking about and can be right about a lot of things, but your entire field is based on quackery bullshit… so I’m not trusting you over a more reputable source.
You're the only other person of whom I know who knows that the founder of chiropractic/osteopathy was a med school dropout and out-and-out quack. Mention that in some circles and people get very stabby in a hurry. That motherfucker thought he could cure cancer by cracking the joints in peoples' skulls... nevermind the fact that they fuse when you're a child. That science shit is SCARY.
Oh man. The founder claimed you could heal people with magnets. There are some good chiropractors out there who are really trying hard to become more scientific and restrict their practice to conditions that they might actually be able to treat, but… if they really wanted to be legit, they’d go into orthopedics. I think about it a little like Scientologists- you might seem like a rational, reasonable person who might occasionally have some good insights on life, but underneath it all your beliefs are batshit crazy. The only things I’d have a chiropractor treat outside of lower back pain are fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme disease [ed. aka Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever / Valley Fever for those of you outside of the NE United States. I've no clue what they call it overseas, but I don't even know if they have ticks overseas]. Because nonexistent illnesses respond well to useless treatments... (I’m going to catch some heat for this one).
Ok, so now just about half of the women in the United States want you dead, too. You're making a lot of friends here. So, in your opinion, is there any fact behind Kiefer's work, or do you just consider Carb Backloading to be a work of fiction?
There’s fact behind it somewhere. Look, the guy did some homework. Problem is, he did what most first year bio grad students do before they figure out how to really examine research- he looked at a few mechanisms in isolation, then figured these would translate to the real world. Problem is, this ignores the reality of the human body. I spent enough time in pharma to know that out of every 10,000 “can’t fail” perfect mechanisms discovered by some very very smart people (driven by money, so they got incentive), only 1 of them turns out to be applicable in the real world. Most of these ideas sound great in theory, but when the systems involved are examined in more detail and all the body’s various homeostatic safeguards kick in, the ideas fall apart. When you read this stuff (CBL), it’s really a lot of selective interpretation of data (Hell, his own references contract his statements and conclusions), hand-waving about MTR, and other “Trust me, I’m a scientist and I’ve read 40,000 studies”. Bullshit.
A) Your PhD is in an entirely unrelated field, probably about as diametrically opposed to biochemistry as you can get.
B) Really READING a study, understanding it, analyzing it, reading its references, examining the mechanisms in question, cross referencing its conclusions, and otherwise being able to draw YOUR OWN conclusions from it takes HOURS and HOURS- there’s a reason that post docs have journal clubs to help them understand new research. You do the math here. If the 40,000 figure is true, then this most likely equates to about two or three minutes spent scanning each abstract and looking at pretty graphs.
B) Really READING a study, understanding it, analyzing it, reading its references, examining the mechanisms in question, cross referencing its conclusions, and otherwise being able to draw YOUR OWN conclusions from it takes HOURS and HOURS- there’s a reason that post docs have journal clubs to help them understand new research. You do the math here. If the 40,000 figure is true, then this most likely equates to about two or three minutes spent scanning each abstract and looking at pretty graphs.
AAAAANNNNNNND now physicists want you dead as well, which is not all that awesome because they've apparently been building death rays with which to kill Obama. Soon, the Japanese will send giant robots after you and you'll have to hide in the Nazi base on the dark side of the Moon. Before you depart this Earth in a fiery blast of physicist-fueled rage, could you expand a bit on the insulin peaks? I've been arguing this point with people since I first saw a powerlifting face those cookie sandwiches with the frosting in between the cookies postworkout. To me, that shit seems like a recipe for the beetus.
Yeah, absolutely. I think selective citation of clinical studies have done people in this community a tremendous disservice. When people think insulin peaks, they think insulin spike, post workout anabolic windows, thirty minute periods of high levels that can be taken advantage of to shuttle nutrients into the body, etc. The major problem- this is NOT how the body works the majority of the time. Insulin spikes, followed by a return to baseline, are the norm in studies that test insulin response to foods because these are conducted on FASTED SUBJECTS. These are people who have ZERO food in their guts who then take in small quantities of carbohydrates, which allows researchers to study the dynamics of glucose and insulin response. For MOST of us, our insulin levels look like a sine wave that’s always above zero- they’re constantly rising and falling throughout the day in response to a semi-constant release of nutrients in the gut (insulin oscillation). And it is a semi-constant release- very few of us are EVER in a truly fasted state, since food digestion is measured in multiple hours, not minutes. Look at it this way- say I take in 500 grams of PURE sugar, as would be an ideal post workout carb meal as per CBL. What ACTUALLY happens? First of all, most of that will sit in the gut for hours- transporting sugar across the intestinal lining requires both ample amounts of water and ample amounts of sodium- too little of each and it just sits in the stomach (ever seen a distance runner puke up pure Gatorade even when totally dehydrated? This is why- that sugar’s just sitting in the stomach sloshing around for hours, holding water there to maintain osmotic balance). What then happens is a relatively slow absorption of sugar for the next 8-10 HOURS. Yes, you get a huge insulin spike that then REMAINS elevated all night. Fact is, post-training is one of the WORST times to take in huge amounts of sugar, since not only are you probably slightly dehydrated, but your gut is also operating on low power mode (since your muscles are receiving most of the blood), further delaying gut emptying time. Hence, you get a fat insulin spike that lasts for hours and hours. You want a recipe for insulin resistance? There you go.
I am not a fan of the post-workout carb-up either, but I imagine the hordes of people screaming for your blood are calling bullshit for lack of citations while stuffing their faces with Twinkies. While you're pissing everyone off, though, would you mind expanding on Modulated Tissue Response as well?
Sure. So the general idea here is that you can, and I quote, “give each tissue of the body a specific instruction, either through diet, activity or both.” Generally speaking, this is a natural part of how the body works- each system operates under a set of rules and feedback mechanisms, and depending on the conditions it can operate in different ways.
Now there are two primary mechanisms that CBL discusses:
- The overnight increase in insulin sensitivity, and
- non-insulin mediated glucose transport into muscle cells.
First, just to recap, insulin has MANY purposes in the human body, but the most significant one here is its ability to cause glucose uptake by the cell. Basically, when insulin encounters any nutrient storing cell (muscle, liver, fat, etc.), it binds to the insulin receptor, which then (simplify simplify) causes a glucose transporter receptor to come to the surface. It’s essentially telling these cells to “open their gates” to glucose.
As for number 2, there’s an even bigger problem with this. When you’re exercising, your body is burning glycogen (even at low intensities, some is being used). At high intensities (as when weight training), your muscles are using glycogen as its primary fuel source. In response, your body releases small amounts from your liver as glucose and dumps it into the bloodstream, with the goal of getting this sugar to the working muscles. This is a small amount of sugar- not enough to cause an insulin response. Now, as an adaptation, your muscles themselves, when stimulated by high intensity activity, signal their OWN cells to “open their gates” to glucose WITHOUT needing insulin to tell them to- this is precisely to facilitate uptake of this liver-sourced glucose by the muscles that need it most. The CBL argument is then, post exercise, you can take advantage of this selective response by flooding the system with sugar, and the muscles will take up a huge amount of it before insulin is released… thus avoiding an insulin spike and minimizing fat storage. Bzzt. False. The reason this is so studied for diabetics is because they do NOT release insulin naturally (or, in the case of type 2 diabetics, do not respond to it), so ANY non-insulin related expression of glucose receptors is beneficial- it’s one of the few ways the body can clear sugar from the system (which is toxic in high amounts). For NON-diabetics, this isn’t a concern. And, in fact, within SECONDS after taking in simple sugars, whether post workout or otherwise, your body releases JUST AS MUCH insulin as any other time of day. Insulin expression is not governed by the amount of receptors open on muscle cells, it is released a) by high levels of glucose in the blood, and b) on its own in pulses throughout the day. The few seconds that a handful of muscles have their glucose transporters open before the floodgates open are in no way clinically significant… you’d be talking maybe a few extra grams shunted into muscles as opposed to fat cells. The reason is simple- there’s only so much glycogen storage capacity in your muscle cells, and even prolonged high intensity weight training won’t do much to drain these stores. All they really need is a few grams to fill them up again, and any extra glucose simply floats on by, right to the fat cells it was destined for all along.
These are basic, BASIC fallacies. It makes the book hard to read.
bron: ChAoS & PAIN: Time To Stir The Pot- A Refutation Of The Science Behind Carb Backloading
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