The Effect of a Repetitive Feeding Challenge With Carbohydrate Versus Fat on Markers of Gastrointestinal Integrity and Systemic Outcomes in Response to Endurance Exercise
Study Details
This new study examined whether 7-days of repeatedly consuming a higher-fat food during exercise, compared with carbohydrate, worsened gastrointestinal integrity or systemic inflammation during endurance running in 36 endurance athletes 🔍
Participants completed a 2-hour run at 60% VO₂max followed by a 1-hour self-paced distance test 🏃
During the gut-challenge trials, athletes consumed carbohydrate every 20 minutes at a high intake of 87 g/hour 🎯
Gut training consisted of either…
🥜 20 g nut butter
⚡️ Carb gel (47 g carbs)
…during 1 hour of easy exercise each day for 7-days.
Here are the key findings ⬇️
Key Findings
🧬 Intestinal fatty acid-binding protein, a marker of intestinal epithelial damage, increased with exercise but was not worsened by the fat-feeding intervention
🦠 Soluble CD14, a marker associated with bacterial components crossing the intestinal barrier, was also similar between fat and carbohydrate conditions
🔥 C-reactive protein responses were mild overall and did not indicate greater systemic inflammation following the fat intervention
📉 CRP was lower after the carbohydrate intervention, but this difference was not observed with fat
Importantly, 7-days of higher-fat feeding did not further compromise gastrointestinal integrity compared with carbohydrate gut training ✅
GI symptom severity was not associated with intestinal damage, bacterial translocation or inflammatory markers 🤢
Conclusion
These findings suggest that how an athlete’s gut feels does not necessarily reflect what is happening to the intestinal lining☝️
Higher-fat foods could therefore be incorporated into gut-training strategies for athletes who want to tolerate more nutritionally dense foods during prolonged exercise 🥜
The key finding is that repeatedly consuming fat during exercise did not create the compounded gut-damage response that might theoretically be expected when combined with strenuous endurance exercise 🧐
Importantly, this study does not show that fat-based gut training is superior to carbohydrate gut training, only that it did not appear to worsen the measured markers of gastrointestinal integrity or inflammation ✅
Reference
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