Fighting Blog Health & Nutrition

Carbohydrates: A Deep Dive

Carbohydrates, or carbs, are your body’s primary source of energy. Without carbs, we often feel fatigued, lack focus, or otherwise don’t feel like ourselves. With too many carbs, we can run into health problems like diabetes or obesity. Knowing the different types of carbs, and how to balance them, is an essential part of your daily health. Let’s look at this deeper…

In This Article…

What Are Carbohydrates?

I like to think of carbohydrates (carbs) as your short-term fuel source. Contrary to popular belief, for most people, carbs are not the enemy. They are an energy source for your muscles and brain, and a necessary part of your overall diet. When dieting, many people are told to avoid carbs because foods rich in carbohydrates tend to be high in calories as well. Anything involving bread (pasta, pastries, pizza, etc.) is an obvious culprit.

Carbs are primarily composed of sugars, starches, and fibers that are typically broken down into ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ varieties. When our body breaks down carbs, we primarily convert them into glucose. Glucose is then used as energy or, if you don’t use it fast enough, converted to glycogen and stored for later.

One gram (1g) of carbs equals four calories of energy, according to the Atwater System.

Simple Carbohydrates

A carbohydrate composed of only one (monosaccharide) or two (disaccharide) sugars is classified as a ‘simple’ carbohydrate. Simple carbs are easy for us to digest and provide a quick burst of energy. It’s important to note, when I say ‘quick burst of energy’ I don’t mean the kind of energy you get from drinking a Monster or bumping a line of cocaine, I mean energy to not feel fatigued while performing tasks.

Monosaccharides

The three monosaccharides we care about are fructose (sugar from fruit), galactose (sugar from digested milk), and glucose (blood sugar). They are all single molecules of sugar. Glucose is the most common, and arguably most important, because our brain relies on it for energy, and it is a building block for disaccharides, starch, and glycogen.

Fructose – A simple sugar found naturally in many fruits, vegetables, flowers, maple syrup, and honey. This is often what gives foods their sweetness. Food companies like to pump their products full of fructose in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, for taste.

Galactose – Bonds with glucose to form lactose.

Glucose – Acts as an energy source for most living things, ranging from humans to bacteria. When exercising, our bodies use oxygen to convert glucose into energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and heat, with water and carbon dioxide as a waste product.

What’s cool is that if we’re lacking oxygen (out of breath) our bodies can still make this conversion for energy without it. The problem is we produce lactic acid as a waste product. Lactic acid buildup creates that burning feeling in your muscles and makes you unable to perform.

Disaccharides

Disaccharides are chemicals made up of multiple sugar molecules. The most common example is sucrose (table sugar), which is composed of fructose and glucose (two monosaccharides from above). The other two important disaccharides are lactose and maltose, though there are many combinations of molecules that classify as disaccharides.

Lactose – Created from one molecule of galactose and one molecule of glucose. Found in milk.

Maltose – Created from two glucose molecules bonded together. A key component of starch.

Sucrose – Created from one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. This is your regular old table sugar, derived from sugar cane or sugar beets.

Complex Carbohydrates

Complex carbohydrates are also broken into two groups: oligosaccharides and polysaccharides. Like disaccharides, complex carbohydrates are amalgamations of sugars. The fundamental difference between the oligosaccharides and polysaccharides is the number of sugars bonded together.

Oligosaccharides are between three and ten sugars, while polysaccharides are usually ten or more. There are a bajillion and a half different versions, but the ones we care about are starch, glycogen, and fiber.

Starch – Found in foods like bananas, corn, potatoes, rice, and wheat. We break down starch into glucose.

Glycogen – Stored glucose, preserved in the liver and muscles for about a day. If unused, turns to fat.

Fiber – Found in foods like beans, beets, corn, fruits, potatoes, and whole grains. We can’t actually digest fiber, which is why we use it to clean out our digestive system. Instead of breaking it down into energy, fiber helps move things along our digestive tract and keeps us ‘regular’.

The Difference Between Simple & Complex Carbs

Now that we have all this information in our brain hole, what does it all mean? Well, as our body digests carbs and converts them to glucose, a few other things are happening. First, as you process carbs in your stomach, your body secretes insulin to aid in the digestion of starches and sugars.

When we eat simple carbohydrates, insulin secretion is more dramatic than if we eat complex carbohydrates. Insulin is kind of like a limo driver for glucose, chauffeuring it to your brain and muscles as needed or dropping it off at our liver in the form of glycogen if you don’t need the energy.

Thanks to insulin, our bodies are pretty good at balancing the glucose in our blood and delivering it where it needs to go. Unless you’re diabetic, you can probably rest assured that this entire process happens under the hood and without incident. As our blood sugar drops, our pancreas will naturally stop producing insulin and signal the liver (via glucagon) to turn that stored glycogen back into glucose for immediate use.

“Sure, thanks Kyle, but what does all this mean?“

The little voice in your head

Basically, when we’re in the middle of strenuous activity (like sparring) we need quick energy. Ingesting simple carbohydrates 30-60 minutes before is the most convenient way to accomplish this. If you’ve read my article on electrolytes, you already know I recommend a 50/50 mix of Gatorade and water.

The reason is twofold: first, the salt and potassium in Gatorade helps replenish your electrolytes, thus helping your nervous system react to the stress of training. Second, the sugar gives us quick and easy energy to keep our physical output at high levels of performance.

If you’ve ever been to a jiu-jitsu competition, you’ve probably seen people eating bananas, apples, or trail mix with M&M’s before or after a match. All these foods have simple carbohydrates, which our body processes in about fifteen to thirty minutes.

Complex carbohydrates, on the other hand, take several hours to convert into energy and fully digest. Therefore, it’s no good consuming complex carbs right before a match because your body won’t have time to process it before you fight. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. Many people take advantage of the slow energy release of complex carbs by eating them for breakfast and allowing their body time to store up the carbs before their match. Some people even do something called carbo-loading.

What Is Carbo-Loading?

The idea behind carbohydrate loading is that you use the science we’ve discussed above to increase your muscle’s glycogen stores for increased energy output on the day you need to perform. It works like this:

A day or two before the event, we’re going to slow down our training and increase our carb consumption. Not only does this help us recover before the big match, but it prevents us from spending the energy we’re consuming and forces our body to store it as glycogen (which is then later converted to glucose on the day we need it).

How much do we increase our carb intake? Well, the Mayo Clinic suggests about 8 to 12 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight. This means I, a 180lbs man, would increase my carb intake by 640g – 960g a day or two before the fight. Yes, this also means calories will increase significantly.

Obviously, that’s too many carbs for our body to process in one sitting, but that’s the point. The excess carbs convert to glycogen and get stored in the liver just long enough that by the time we’re on the mat the following morning, our body converts the glycogen back into glucose and uses it for fuel. In theory, this gives us more energy than we would otherwise have on the day.

Carbo-loading isn’t bullet proof though. If you have diabetes, for example, this could seriously harm you (or kill you). For the rest of us, it could cause severe gas, cramping, bloating, or projectile sharts. Talk to a doctor before you try this and get their opinion.

Also, this method is mostly recommended for long-distance endurance athletes like triathletes.

If you want to try this before a jiu-jitsu competition, I’d suggest doing a few test runs before you a specific event. Pick a day you plan to go hard, a shark tank style open mat or something, and see what kind of result you get. Without running your own tests before a competition, your results could be less than ideal.

Why Does Everyone Say Carbs Make You Fat?

Sections of the diet community have vendettas against carbs, with entire lifestyles like the Atkins diet built around avoiding them. If they are our primary source of energy, why would we have such a witch hunt for them? As I mentioned early on, carbohydrate-rich foods tend to be high in calories because of excess sugar and added fat. Also, carbs are the easiest and most common macronutrient we can find.

One Snicker’s bar has 28g of carbs, roughly 1/6th of what most people should eat in a day, and is over 200 calories. Chicken Alfredo at Olive Garden has 96g of carbs and 1570 calories. Most of the snacks at a convenience store or vending machine are loaded with carbs and provide little else, nutritionally speaking, so we get hungry again in no time flat. We then eat more carbs, get hungry again, and the cycle continues until we’ve ingested more calories and carbs that we’ve realized.

If we mix that with a sedentary lifestyle, a chain reaction of unhealthy things happen. As we learned above, carbs (specifically glucose) we don’t use get stored for later as glycogen. Glycogen sits in our liver and muscles, waiting for about a day to be used. If we don’t spend enough energy to convert the glycogen back into glucose, it gets converted to fat for long-term storage.

Thus, consuming excess carbs makes you fat because you’re eating too many calories and not using the energy they provide. How do we best monitor our overall carbohydrate consumption? By counting our macros, maybe even with the help of an app like MyFitness Pal.

Dr. Mike agrees with me.

Carbohydrates: The Takeaway

So what carbs should I eat? Generally speaking, you want most of your carbs to come from complex carbohydrate sources like whole grains, beans, starchy vegetables, and high fiber fruits and vegetables. Things to avoid are sugary beverages, sweets, and processed foods like chips. Enjoy them in moderation, with moderation being the key word.

You can always enjoy the occasional pancake breakfast or pint of Ben & Jerry’s at your leisure (I’m partial to Chunky Monkey), but making carbohydrate bombs a staple of your diet could create problems for you down the road. That said, don’t fear them! Like many things in life, it’s a balancing act. Make conscious decisions and monitor your progress, then adjust as needed.

As always, this article comes with my health & safety disclaimer.

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Written by Kyle Winter
Writer, fighter, and amateur scientist.