Low-Carbing for Endurance: the Oxygen Problem


There are a proliferation of low-carb high-fat diets out there these days. They appear to be helpful for some people wanting to lose weight. However, efforts to use LC-HF diets for athletes doing intensive workouts are less promising. A recent study “When exercising at near-maximal intensities, the demand for ATP production increases significantly, which in turn pushes our energy producing systems (namely glycolysis for carbohydrates and Beta-oxidation/Krebs cycle for fatty acids) to their maximum capacity. Importantly, because fats have a pathway to generating ATP that requires oxygen, it becomes apparent that a shift in fuel utilization from carbohydrate to fat for high-output energy production may not be as great of an idea as it would appear to be on the surface.”
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