Will Run For Food

By Danny Mackey M.S.

  

I hope everyone enjoyed the downtime from training, racing and had fun with their friends and family over the Holidays.  Now that we are getting back into the routine of work and school, most of us look at 2009 and set performance goals.  If you are anything like me, the Holidays put a little damper on starting 2009 “fit”.  Personally, after a very frustrating 2 years, I began to come around slightly in November and December so I wanted to carry this through to January (as most of us want to).  But, the endless amount of food and drink caused me to put on most of the weight I fought so hard to loss in the fall.  The runner mentality is to starve yourself and just lose the pounds as quickly as you put it on, but that’s not ideal.

 So that’s what we will look at in this article; nutrition.  Specifically, I will talk about nutrition after we exercise.

 First, I want to make sure we all start on the same page with *Nutrition 101* information.  You might hear the term macronutrients to describe proteins, carbohydrates and fats (water is pseudo in this category also, but it does not give us calories).  Macronutrients are needed in large amounts (hence “macro”) and on top of providing us energy; they allow us to repair, recover and do many other forms of metabolism and body functions.  If you look on the back of food label you will notice it focuses on these macronutrients, these equate to our total caloric value.

You can figure out the total calories without the label telling you because each gram of: protein is 4 kcal, carbohydrate is 4 kcal and fat is 9 kcal (so try the math and it will add up here). 

 What about beer?  Well a gram of alcohol (ethanol) is 7 kcal, but as much as some people might feel otherwise, we do not need alcohol for survival so that beer missed the macronutrient cut-off, sorry! 

 We hear the term calorie everyday, but exactly what is it?  A calorie is literally the amount of food energy, (remember energy here is heat) that will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water 1 degree.  An interesting point, well to me at least, is physicists DO actually burn the food using a bomb calorimeter.  To do this, all the water is removed from the food and it is ground up into a powder.  The powder is then placed into a metal container surrounded by water, and you guessed it, they light this food powder like gun powder…….and Looney Tune style there is an explosion.  The explosion gives off heat to raise the water temperature around the metal container and how much of it raises, decides the calories.

 Ok, now that we have some of the fundamentals down, I want to focus on nutrition after the run.  The reason why……nutrition is a major stimulator of protein formation after exercise. If you are anything like me, the last thing you want to do is eat after a session of nasty mile repeats or a tough long run, but that is when we need it most (and we get the most bang for our calorie buck).  One reason why we need it most then is because distance running changes our skeletal muscle’s homeostatis.  I specifically bring up the macronutrient protein for a number of reasons.  First, unlike carbohydrates and fats, we do not store proteins yet they catalyze almost all reactions in living cells (think about why this can be an issue for a second).  Second, out of the 20 amino acids that form specific proteins, we only make 11, thus we need to ingest the other 9 (these 9 are called essential amino acids).  Third, the translation process (1^st part of protein synthesis) is specific and if we fail to make even 1 of the 9 amino acids the polypeptide (chain sequence of amino acids to make a protein) is not correct and the protein is not made.  The failure to make a protein may result in degradation (breakdown).  The negative implication on us athletes is tissue atrophy (loss of protein from cells, specifically muscle tissue).

 A close friend of mine whom is finishing his PhD in nutrition sent me an interesting research paper;  Morrison et al. Adding Protein to a arbohydrate supplement provided after endurance exercise ehances 4E-BP1 and RPS6 signaling in skeletal muscle. J Appl Physiol 104:120-1036, 2008.  The study had rats do an exhaustive endurance exercise followed by ingesting a liquid with carbohydrate, protein, or a mixture of carbs and protein. 

 The study had results that athletes need to keep in mind after a workout.  Any food eaten immediately after exercise is better than nothing because this will lead to a transient (short and quick) increase in signaling proteins.  This will be the one time when eating a candy bar that is still under the seat from Halloween on a drive home from a run is OK, enjoy it.  Not to rain on the junk food parade, but another performance influenced finding from this study is that supplementing a mixture of carbohydrates and protein immediately after exercise should promote the best activation of protein synthesis.

 What to look for, instead of that snickers of course, are foods with complete proteins (these foods have those 9 essential amino acids).  All animal proteins are complete proteins, but it is not easy to put down a steak, or practical to have one sitting in your car or track bag.  Luckily some plant proteins are complete like brewer's yeast, certain nuts, soybeans, cottonseed, and the germ of grains.  Some energy bars, like Cliff Bar Builders Bar, Power Bar Protein Plus etc. should work, but combining foods is good too…..think whole wheat bread and peanut butter.  Either way, just check out the label and the bar should note if it contains complete proteins.

 Keep this little nutrition tip in mind even If you are dieting to get back down to your healthy racing weight from the Holiday binge.  Timing and composition of foods are important post workout and can help you recover quicker for the next session.