Low Carb Counter > Mega Fuel For Growth And Energy, Part 2
Bulletin No. 38, Mega Fuel For Growth And Energy, Part 2
Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404
Last month I explained why the latest diet craze the high fat diet doesn’t make any sense. It can contribute to heart disease and cancer. It deprives your muscles of carbs which they require for high intensity exercise like 
weight lifting. And if you are eating extra calories to gain lean body mass, excess fat calories have a very high tendency to be stored as body fat. Remember, fat cannot be converted to muscle and it cannot be stored as glycogen. The only thing your body can do with excess calories from conventional fat is to store them as body fat.
The theory behind the high fat diet is to use dietary fat as fuel in place of carbohydrates. This results in lower insulin levels. Since insulin stimulates fat storage and blocks fat breakdown, this sounds like a good idea. If we could get around the problems with the high fat diet, it would be great. And we can with CapTri®! The Parrillo diet is very low in conventional fat but instead relies on a special fat called CapTri® which has been specifically formulated for bodybuilders and anyone trying to minimize body fat stores. The Parrillo diet is a more balanced approach, and I think you’ll agree makes a lot more sense. The first consideration is to meet your protein requirement. A good rule of thumb is one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Divide this equally among six meals spread throughout the day. Next comes CapTri®. Start out with ? tablespoon per meal, mixed with food, until your system gets used to it. Work your way up to one or two tablespoons per meal, depending on your size and level of caloric intake (some people eat as much as five tablespoons per meal). A good rule of thumb here is to try to derive 30% of your calories from CapTri® while limiting conventional fat to 5% of calories. You should see and feel a dramatic effect at this level. Then make up the rest of your calories from unrefined, complex carbohydrates. Avoid simple sugars, fruit, dairy products, bread, pasta, and other refined carbohydrates. These carbohydrate sources will make you fat. I classify carbs into three groups: simple sugars and refined carbohydrates (one group), starchy carbs, and fibrous carbs. Good starchy carbs are potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, beans, peas, corn, and oatmeal. Good fibrous carbs are vegetables like lettuce, spinach, cabbage, green beans, and so on. The Parrillo Performance Nutrition Manual contains an extensive list of good foods to eat along with their nutritional content.
How does this compare with the high fat diet? There are two big differences. First, the Parrillo diet uses CapTri® instead of conventional fat. Whereas regular fat found in conventional food has a very high tendency to store as body fat, CapTri® does not. CapTri® is a fat with a specially engineered molecular structure that causes it to be metabolized differently than regular fat (1-7). CapTri® has almost no tendency to store as body fat (1-7). Instead, excess calories from CapTri® are simply released as body heat in a process called thermogenesis (1-7). This is really a bodybuilder’s dream since it allows us to substitute fat calories for carbs in order to decrease insulin levels, while avoiding the pitfalls of regular fats. The second big difference is that on the Parrillo diet you never go real low on carbs. The way the diet is structured, you don’t have to. The high fat diet calls for limiting 
carbs to 5-10% of calories so that you can enter a fat-burning state called ketosis. With the Parrillo diet you can maintain insulin at low levels and shift your metabolism into a fat burning mode, all while still consuming 40-60% of your calories from carbohydrates. This works because combining protein and fat (CapTri®) and fiber at each meal slows the release of carbs into the bloodstream, resulting in a much lower insulin level.
This approach is far superior to the high fat diet because it supplies the carbs your body needs for top performance. If you’ve ever tried going low on carbs, you know what I mean. You just don’t have the energy without carbs. As I explained last month, weight lifting is a form of anaerobic (without oxygen) exercise. This means that your muscles are working so hard and so fast that the energy requirement cannot be met by the aerobic (with oxygen) energy pathway. The preferred fuel for your muscles to use during anaerobic exercise is carbohydrate. So does it make sense for bodybuilders to go really low on carbohydrates? I don’t think so.
Let’s take a look at some of the other benefits of carbohydrates. Everyone knows by now that diets based on severe caloric restriction fail (8,9). They fail because the body reduces its level of energy expenditure to compensate for the loss of incoming energy (calories). During very low calorie diets about half the weight which is lost is muscle. And since muscle is the metabolic engine where a lot of calories are burned, if you lose muscle you burn less calories. The number of calories your body burns per hour while you are at rest is called your basal (baseline) metabolic rate (BMR). It has been shown that BMR increases following excess feeding of a mixed diet (i.e., a normal diet that contains carbohydrates) but not if only excess conventional fat (LCT) is fed (8). This means that carbohydrates increase your metabolic rate more than conventional fats do (but not more than CapTri®). How does this happen? It turns out that carbohydrate is converted to ATP (energy in the molecular form which is usable by cells) with an overall efficiency of 75% (8). The other 25% of the calories in the carbs gets released as body heat in the process. Fat is converted to ATP with an efficiency of 90% (8). This means that if you feed your body carbohydrates instead of fat a higher percentage of the calories you eat will be converted to heat, which translates into a higher metabolic rate. The more calories you eat which are lost as body heat, the less left to store as fat. In simple terms, this is just saying that eating a high carb diet instead of a high fat diet results in a higher metabolic rate, meaning that your body burns more calories all the time, even when you’re at rest. These calories which are being burned simply appear as body heat.
Now keep in mind that this does not apply to CapTri®, which is a specially designed MCT. CapTri® is a fat, but follows a different metabolic pathway from regular fats. It’s a whole other animal. CapTri® increases metabolic rate even more than carbohydrate. It’s jet fuel for muscles.
For you biochemists out there who want to know how carbohydrate feeding stimulates metabolic rate: The thermic effect of food (TEF) is defined as the postprandial increment in energy expenditure above the resting rate and is expressed as a fraction of the energy content of the food consumed (8). A substantial part of the TEF (50-75%) is simply the energy used to digest, transport, and store food (8). This is termed the obligatory component of TEF. Carbohydrate feeding is known to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, and the ensuing catecholamine-mediated increase in metabolic rate is known as the facultative component of TEF (8). This effect can be blocked by propanolol (a beta-adrenergic antagonist).
From this we can see that body weight, and body composition, depend not only on energy balance (calories in versus calories out) but also on what foods you eat. A person eating a high carb diet will naturally burn more calories than someone eating a high fat diet, because he has a higher metabolic rate. This will make it easier for the person on the high carb diet to stay lean. I think it was explained very well in Bjorntorp and Brodoff’s classic text “Obesity” (8) when they pointed out that the human body very narrowly regulates carbohydrate stores but not fat stores. The body has a limited ability to store carbohydrate (glycogen). The adjustment of carbohydrate oxidation to carbohydrate intake is carefully controlled to result in stable glycogen reserves under a wide range of dietary carbohydrate intakes. This means that if you eat more carbs you burn more carbs, and if you eat less carbs you burn less carbs. This is because it is so important to maintain blood glucose levels to allow proper brain function. On the other hand, body fat stores are not regulated in this way and your body has an almost limitless potential to store fat. You can only store 400-600 grams of carbs no matter how much carbs you eat, but you can store 100 pounds of fat (or more) if you eat enough. Thus, carbohydrate feeding promotes carbohydrate oxidation (burning) but fat feeding does not promote fat oxidation (8). On days when excess carbs are consumed carbohydrate oxidation is increased, but if excess fat is consumed it is simply stored in adipose depots (8). Since 25% of excess calories from carbohydrate are wasted as heat, and since glycogen stores are generally far from full, an excess carbohydrate load of 500g can be accommodated without an increase in body fat (8). This means if you over-eat on the high carb diet the excess carbs get stored as glycogen, but if you over-eat on the high fat diet the excess fat gets stored as body fat. Excess fat calories are not released as body heat, and they cannot be converted to glycogen or muscle. Bummer.
These arguments show that a meal with a high carbohydrate to fat ratio is more thermogenic than a meal with a low ratio. While carbohydrate and protein balance are closely regulated, fat balance is related by the amount of fat in the diet (8). During over-feeding, weight gain is closely related to fat intake (8). The body’s inability to regulate fat stores explains why the incidence of obesity rises as the fat content of the diet increases (8). Is this starting to make the high fat diet sound a little less attractive?
Now don’t go crazy on this information and get the idea you can indiscriminately eat all the carbs you want and never get fat. It just isn’t so. After glycogen stores are full, any more excess carbs get converted to fat and stored as fat. Your body is very good at converting excess carbs into body fat. The point is that body fat accumulation is less likely with the high carb diet than the high fat diet, but it is possible with any diet if you consistently consume too many calories. I’ll reiterate the most important guidelines are to avoid simple sugars and refined carbohydrates. These generate a greater insulin response and therefore are a more potent stimulus for fat storage. Simple sugars are present in sweets and desserts (obviously) and are also found in significant quantities in fruit and dairy products. Pasta and bread are made from refined carbohydrates (sorry, but this includes bagels). Also, but sure to mix your carbs with protein at each meal, and include a fibrous carb with each starch. These things slow the entry of glucose into the blood.
The down side of carbs, as proponents of the high fat diet are quick to point out, is that they induce a big insulin response. This is why I’ve gone to such pains to structure my diet the way I have, using only slow-release complex carbohydrates. If you eat as outlined in the Parrillo Nutrition Manual, you’ll be able to eat a high carb diet while minimizing insulin response. This is also why my carbohydrate supplement, Pro-Carb, is formulated the way it is. It is based on maltodextrin, a slow release glucose polymer with a glycemic index of 22-26. This is just about as low a glycemic index a carb can have. Plus I’ve added 4 grams of complete protein to every serving to further slow glucose release. It is sweetened with glycine, a naturally sweet amino acid, instead of sugar or corn syrup. For good glucose and insulin control, it’s probably one of the best carbohydrates available. It was designed specifically for bodybuilders and athletes, with these considerations in mind.
The truth is I can see the logic of the high fat diet and I’ve had great success with it in bodybuilders, the main difference being I use CapTri® instead of conventional fat. The reasons for this have to do with how CapTri® is metabolized and that it has almost no tendency to be stored as body fat (1-7). CapTri® is profoundly thermogenic, meaning that it increases metabolic rate and excess calories from CapTri® are simply lost as body heat instead of being stored as body fat (1-7). This is in stark contrast to conventional fat found in regular foods, which has very little thermogenic potential and has a high tendency to store as body fat. The other main difference is that I never recommend going as low in carbs as the hard-core high fat people do. The high fat diet calls for restricting carbs to 5-20% of daily calories, depending on who you read. Once carbs get below about 100 grams a day, your body starts to break down muscle tissue and uses the amino acids to make glucose in the liver. Intentionally constructing a diet that results in muscle break-down to maintain blood glucose never made much sense to me. Losing a pound of fat doesn’t really get you anywhere as a bodybuilder if you have to lose a pound of muscle at the same time. The other thing is your muscles require carbs to fuel the anaerobic activity of lifting weights. If your muscles need carbs, feed ‘em some carbs. It’s not that complicated.
My experience with top bodybuilders over the last twenty years has taught me that the best diet is one which provides one to one-and-a-half grams of protein per pound of body weight per day, about 30% of calories as CapTri®, and the rest as complex carbs. (And believe me, I’ve taken them from the basement to the Olympia, literally.) This usually works out to be around 30% protein, 30% CapTri®, and 40% carbs, but the percentages vary among individuals depending on their protein and calorie requirements. The ratios also change depending on whether you’re trying to gain muscular weight in the off season or lose fat before a contest. The exact protocols are given in the Nutrition Manual.
My opinion is you’re better off with a high carb diet, with or without CapTri®, than with the high fat diet. I think it works better and an overwhelming body of scientific literature backs me up. Plus, it’s healthier, you feel better, and you have more energy to train.
Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404
References
1. Baba N, Bracco EF, and Hashim SA. Enhanced thermogenesis and diminished deposition of fat in response to overfeeding with diet containing medium chain triglyceride. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 35: 678-682, 1982.
2. Geliebter A, Torbay N, Bracco EF, Hashim SA, and Van Itallie TB. Overfeeding with medium chain triglyceride diet results in diminished deposition of fat. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 37: 1-4, 1983.
3. Hill JO, Peters JC, Yang D, Sharp T, Kaler M, Abumrad N, and Greene HL. Thermogenesis in humans during overfeeding with medium chain triglycerides. Metab. 38: 641-648, 1989.
4. Lavau MM and Hashim SA. Effect of medium chain triglyceride on lipogenesis and body fat in the rat. J. Nutr. 108: 613-620, 1978.
5. Seaton TB, Welle SL, Warenko MK, and Campbell RG. Thermic effect of medium-chain and long-chain triglycerides in man. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 44: 630-634, 1986.
6. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Medium chain triglycerides: an update. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 36: 950-962, 1982.
7. Hill JO, Peters JC, Swift LL, Yang D, Sharp T, Abumrad N, and Greene HL. Changes in blood lipids during six days of overfeeding with medium or long chain triglycerides. J. Lipid Res. 31: 407-416, 1990.
8. Bjorntorp P, and Brodoff BN. Obesity. J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1992.
9. Remington DW, Fisher AG, and Parent EA. How to Lower your Fat Thermostat. Vitality House International, Provo, 1983.
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