Diet and Athletic Performance—An Olympic Tale
2012 Olympic medals
By Dr. Bill Wilson
If you have spent some time on this web site then you already know how the combination of excessive fructose mainly from sugar and HFCS and high glycemic carbohydrates mainly from grains can adversely affect your health and brain function. These dietary elements can lead to the condition Sugar-Brain and the more serious disease CARB syndrome.
I suspect that many of you have spent a lot of time over the past few days like my family—glued to the TV watching the Olympics. The question comes to mind whether diet can adversely affect athletic performance.
What really troubles me is that many young people—especially athletes who still appear to be healthy, are much less likely to pay attention to the message about the connection between diet and health than those whose health has already fallen off a cliff. We want to get the message to these apparently healthy young people before too much damage has already been done—a major challenge. My Greek in-laws and my wife’s niece are visiting from Greece and we have been watching a lot of Olympics. We are especially interested in following gymnist Aly Raisman because she is from our home state of Massachusetts.
In one segment they interviewed her and asked about her diet. She mentioned drinking milk and eating yogurt and then mentioned that she had a big bowl of Special K every morning (one of the sponsors of the Olympics). Chobani Greek yogurt is also one of the sponsors of the Olympics. Neither my in-laws or I will eat Chobani yogurt because it has added sugar. They don’t add sugar to yogurt in Greece–they don’t need to because true Greek yogurt has a naturally sweet taste. The reason they add sugar to yogurt in this country is because so many people have what I call Sugar-Brain or CARB syndrome and the premier symptom of these conditions is craving sweet and starchy food. In other words when food producers add sugar to their food or beverages they sell more product–it’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Athletes like Aly can consume these products for years without obvious adverse health consequences even as their health is subtly affected. It takes years to get to the point where a person develops obvious Sugar-Brain or CARB syndrome.
The sponsors of the Olympics are a list of the worst food producers on the face of the earth–Kellogg’s, Coke, McDonald’s and others. Perhaps some of these outstanding young athletes feel obligated to consume products made by Olympic sponsors. After all, what could be more American than a Coke and a Big Mac?
Does diet affect athletic performance in healthy appearing young people? I believe that it does. These athletes burn so many calories they can eat whatever they want without obvious weight gain. Swimmer Ryan Lochte is a good example. He came into the Olympics as the favored swimmer in multiple events because of his track record and extreme training schedule. Below is a description of his eating habits:
Now here’s a shocker: To prepare for the London Games, Lochte stopped eating McDonald’s “pretty much every day”—something a small study published in the journal Gut found increases the fat content in your liver, and puts you at risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He ditched the drive-thru and swapped candy and soda for heart-healthier alternatives.
Olympic Village has World’s largest McDonald’s
I suspect that Lochte didn’t go from pure junk to a completely healthy diet. I can tell by looking at people whether they are consuming sugar and high glycemic carbohydrates and he still has that look. He won his first race and then tanked in his last two. When you have any degree of Sugar-Brain or CARB syndrome you don’t handle stress well, you have some degree of emotional lability, you have increased anxiety, you don’t sleep as well and athletic performance is subtly affected. I also saw him walking around with Gatorade–another brain-frying concoction. Before his last two races he had that “deer in the head-lights” look, not the place you want to be when you are competing at this level.
An outstanding athlete with a lot of inborn talent can still perform fairly well even when they are frying their brain with bad food and beverages—up to a point. At this level of competition a few hundredths of a second can make the difference between the podium and the trash heap. Ryan Lochte is now the poster boy for this scenario. Perhaps the Olympics should start looking for different sponsors!
If you want to stay healthy and be able to perform mentally and physically at the highest level, stay away from sugar, HFCS and grain-based high glycemic carbohydrates. Who knows, some day you may find yourself with a gold metal around your neck.
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