Podcast Episode #14: Foot and Ankle Health, More Nutrition Questions

Ben Greenfield (0:02)

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield fitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting-edge fitness, diet, and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist, an exercise, diet, and wellness guru. And each week, I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this week's podcast from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Hey, podcast listeners, we've got a jam-packed Q&A on carbohydrate depletion, with some questions on last week's interview on chiropractic, as well as a inspection into nighttime eating patterns, some of the things that you can do to maximize the health of your nighttime eating. We're also going to have an interview about foot and ankle health, how that affects the rest of the body, common injuries, when to change your shoes, all that and more from Dr. Darron Woolley. But before we get to that content, just real quick, a couple of special announcements.

On Wednesday, September 24th, in Spokane, Washington, at Champion Sports Medicine, and I'll put all the information for this on the website, I will be teaching a nutrition clinic. And this nutrition clinic is going to focus on optimizing your nutrition for holistic wellness.

It's going to cover supplementation, meal timing, carbohydrate, fat, protein percentages, et cetera. The program is slightly geared towards athletes who are in their off season, but anyone would benefit from attending this seminar. And you can simply show up. There'll be a lot of free handouts, free nutritional samples, free supplement handouts, things of that nature. So make sure to add that to your calendar. Wednesday, September 24th, at 6:30 p.m. in Spokane, Washington.

And also, I wanted to draw your attention to just a little bit of publicity for bengreenfieldfitness.com. We recently featured on a local television news station, and a KXLY reporter came in for a lot of testing here in my lab. And you can actually read more about that by visiting bengreenfieldfitness.com, clicking on the show notes for this podcast. And I put a link there to the blog. It's some interesting information that you may want to look at. Very informational. So, let's go ahead and move on to this week's jam-packed listener Q&A from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Listener Q&A. Remember, if you have a question that you want featured on the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast, just leave a comment on one of the blog postings, or you can also email me. Ben at bengreenfieldfitness.com. Now, today's first question comes from listener Steve, who asks, I heard that eating a meal too close to the start of a long distance race or training session can deplete your glycogen stores faster than not eating prior to, or at least three to four hours prior. He says, is this true? And if so, what causes it? Well, basically, if you're eating too close to your workout session, there's basically kind of a three-step effect that occurs on your body. First of all, when you consume your pre-workout meal, your blood sugar levels are gonna elevate. And we've talked about this on this podcast before, one of the natural products of blood sugar level elevation is a release of insulin by your pancreas. And rapidly elevated blood sugar actually causes enough of an insulin release to where the blood sugar actually drops too quickly. And that leads to a condition called hypoglycemia, which is basically a very, very low level of glucose in the blood.

And that's something that can actually happen to you if you're consuming your pre-workout meal, either A, just a little bit too close to your workout, or B, consuming it comprised primarily of the high glycemic index, very sugary carbohydrates. The only way that you can avoid that is to literally eat that high glycemic index meal just like five or 10 minutes before you start your workout. And by doing that, you actually don't give the insulin enough time to send your blood sugar levels plummeting, and what you wanna do is just make sure that you eat a good meal three hours beforehand and then have that high carbohydrate meal literally five to 10 minutes before and make it fairly small. We're talking about the equivalent of a gel, half a piece of fruit, half a bottle of sport drink, something of that nature.

So, leading on to Steve's question about glycogen depletion, basically another effect of high insulin levels is that they inhibit the amount of fat that you can use during aerobic exercise. Basically, one of the effects of the hormone insulin is it inhibits what's called lipid mobilization, which means your body's ability to take lipids, or fat, and mobilize them for energy. So, essentially, by elevating your insulin levels too close to your workout, what you do is inhibit your ability to burn fat as a fuel, and so your body will turn more to the other fuel that it could use, which would be carbohydrate. And so, yes, when that occurs, you would be looking at a faster rate of carbohydrate depletion and less time that you would be able to work out at a high intensity if that occurs, if those high insulin levels are allowed to circulate in the bloodstream too close to the workout. And then the last thing that would happen if you have high, high insulin levels is it actually brings blood sugar into muscle cells, and insulin is supposed to do that, but any time you start to increase the amount of blood sugar that goes into the muscle cells, you increase the amount of blood sugar that the cells are burning, or you increase basically what would be called carbohydrate metabolism.