All about carbs: for maximum muscle gains, here's what you need to know about this tricky bodybuilding nutrient

Flex, July, 2008 by Jordana Brown

Simply cut carbs to lose weight?

If you're a bodybuilder, it's not so simple. In the 1970s, the American Medical Association blasted low-carb diets as potentially dangerous "fads," and by the 1980s, scientists and doctors were blaming dietary fat for causing people to gain obscene amounts of weight.

High-carb, low-fat diets were considered the healthy way to eat. But in the past 30 years, rates of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases like atherosclerosis and diabetes have sky-rocketed, and Americans (and those who habitually eat a Western diet) are now arguably less healthy than at any other point in history. It seems rational to assume that the pro-carb stance has been a huge medical mistake, but the debate rages on.

For the record, our stance has always been somewhere in the middle. We know that low-carb diets are far from dangerous, and we believe--and have scientific research, our own anecdotal experience and our articles to support us--that carbohydrate is not an essential nutrient. That said, however, with careful manipulation, carbs can be an important tool, one that will bring you closer to your goals.

CARB TYPES Carbohydrates can be divided into two different categories: simple sugars and complex carbs. The simple sugars (examples include glucose, fructose and galactose) are so called because their molecular makeup is as simple as it can be--they can't be broken down any more. Meanwhile, complex carbs (starch and fiber) are made up of longer, branched chains of sugar molecules. Since the process of digestion is essentially breaking foods down into their smallest components, it used to be assumed that the simple sugars were all extremely fast digesting and the more complicated complex carbohydrates were slower digesting.

We now know that this is not entirely true. Certainly, pure glucose (also called dextrose) is quickly digested because it shoots through the stomach, into the small intestine and from there can be taken into the bloodstream and directly to muscles to be used as fuel. Since it's already as broken down as it can be, the digestive tract doesn't have to work on breaking it down.

But fruit, which contains a lot of the simple sugar fructose, is slow to digest. How can this be? Fructose, it turns out, does not follow the same path as glucose. Or rather, it does, but because muscles can't use fructose as fuel, it goes through the small intestine and then gets diverted to the liver, which converts it to glucose and then stores it as glycogen, to be used by the muscles after they exhaust any glucose circulating in the bloodstream and have used up their own glycogen stores.

Similarly, the digestibility of com-plex carbohydrates depends a great deal on their molecular makeup. Foods-like potatoes, which contain a large amount of starch, can be quickly digested precisely because the type of starch they contain is highly branched, allowing a lot of areas where digestive I enzymes can break them down. UNDER CONTROL All this talk about how fast carbohydrates get digested is important because of what hap pens when sugars hit the bloodstream. Simple little sugar catalyzes a cascade of reaction, all of which are intended to take advantage of the sudden appearance of fuel. The most important part of this cascade is that the presence of glucose triggers the pancreas to release the extremely powerful hormone insulin, which is solely responsible for keeping blood-sugar levels under control. It does this by ushering glucose into muscle cells, where it is either burned or stored.

But there's a sinister third option. If your muscles don't need fuel and their stores are full, the glucose goes to the liver, where it's stored as glycogen or shepherded elsewhere to be stored as fat. Furthermore, insulin release also inhibit fat burning because your body will preferentially burn carbs, in which case it doesn't make sense to tap stores-it can burn what's-it can burn what's readily available for use.

This is not to say that you should never eat carbs. On the contrary, they're an important tool in the bodybuilding diet, and manipulating how much, when and what kind you eat can have a big influence on how good you look. Generally speaking, most bodybuilders who are trying to get lean should limit total daily carb intake to about one gram per pound of bodyweight per day, if not slightly less. Bodybuilders trying to add mass should be shooting I for about 2 g of carbs per pound of ' bodyweight per day, or slightly more.

Most mainstream nutritionists i advocate eating only slow-digesting ! complex carbs (whole-wheat bread, brown rice, oatmeal), and with good reason. Slow-digesting carbs keep I insulin levels steady (which allows fat burning to continue unabated), provide lasting energy and help to reduce hunger pangs. They also have health benefits, working to keep the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems functioning optimally. That advice is good for the average American couch potato, but it's not quite the same for bodybuilders. We do advise that most ' of your carbs come from slow-digesting sources, particularly at lunch, dinner, ner, between meals and before I workouts (20-40 g each meal). How ever, there are two meals that require faster-digesting carbs: breakfast and post workout.