Category: Nutrition + Health

GI Problems, Nutrition + Health, Running, Sports Nutrition

Aspects of Training the Gut for Athletic Activity: Part I

by Rebecca1 Comment on Aspects of Training the Gut for Athletic Activity: Part I
runner running
Photo by Clique Images on Unsplash
Today, let’s address training the gut and fueling during your run. This is a digestive health topic that’s pertinent to endurance athletes, particularly runners. While many athletes are wrapping up their fall season right about now, taking a little seasonal workout slow down, and/or making race plans for the new year, it’s a good time to also start thinking about nutrition and how it impacts performance for the months going forward.
Underfueling during exercise and throughout the day

Generally speaking, the general trend among runners, as compared to cyclists and triathletes, is that runners tend to under fuel during activity, despite ample science making a case for adding an energy source during long runs. It’s also very common for endurance athletes across many sports to be under fueling throughout the day(s) in their entire eating pattern, for just how much they are moving their bodies. 

There are a few reasons why runners in particular might be under fueling during activity specifically: 

  1. Blood flow changes during exercise, leading to more blood flow to the skeletal muscle and extremities and less blood flow to the GI tract, along with a shift in the GI nervous system control. These two combined can lead to more exercise-associated GI symptoms, which many hope to avoid. 
  2. Additionally, exercise load including intensity, type of exercise, and duration, can lead to more GI symptoms. Runners especially tend to suffer more because running is an impact sport and there is a lot of jostling of the GI organs while running. The longer and harder the effort, the worse and more frequent GI discomfort will be (2). 
  3. Heat and humidity also tend to increase GI symptoms (2). 
  4. Another reason may be due to confusion and/or not understanding how fueling can help. A recent conversation with a runner revealed that he had initially believed that not fueling during any training runs when he was marathon training would be beneficial because he theorized that if he then added fuel only on marathon race day, the fuel would work better. This is certainly not the only belief that an individual can have. 

Training the Gut

It’s quite common for athletes to say they don’t tolerate fuel so they don’t add any hydration or energy source during running or training. Additionally, many athletes also avoid eating or drinking before training because if they do so, it also causes GI distress.

Contrary to the belief that one should avoid fueling before or during training due to currently experiencing GI discomfort, nearly everyone can benefit from training the gut (1). So first, what is training the gut?

It’s the digestive system version of what you’re doing day after day and week after week with training the body to run longer distances and more intense paces. Back when I began running, there wasn’t any information available on the topic of “training the gut,” but it was a common recommendation to take carbohydrate fuel during training and races longer than about 90 minutes. That recommendation hasn’t changed, but depending on what event you’re training for, it will be helpful to train the gut to tolerate more fuel. This is a gradual process performed over several different long efforts rather than just testing out your race day fuel once or twice before an event, or not fueling at all.

Why is training the gut important?

 Ever watch (or simply read about) one of those eating competitions like “how many hot dogs can you eat in a certain amount of time?” The amount of food consumed by the top competitors is fairly unbelievable, right? You can bet those individuals cannot eat like that all the time. They have to train their body to tolerate that amount of food. That is an extreme example, but when we look at endurance sports, what we see is that when you fuel consistently and correctly, and depending on the length of time you’ll be competing and at what intensity, fuel A LOT during activity, what we see is better results during the event and better recovery in the days afterwards (3).

Let’s look at an example from athletics rather than eating competitions.

If you’re watching the Tour de France or any other professional cycling these days, amongst the top athletes in the sport of road cycling, staying in the peloton (or riding in front of it!) is almost as much a fueling competition as it is an athletic competition. Riders these days are training their bodies to tolerate upwards of 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour (3). The standard gel packet of endurance fuel has about 24-30 grams of carbs, so for reference that’s about five gels an hour, to give you some perspective.

While that level of fueling is not necessary for everyone for every context (intensity and time of activity matters a lot), it is the amount of fueling –and gut training to be able to take in that amount of sugar—that is leading to top results on the world tour level.

Some Practical Why’s for You

The body can only store a certain amount of glycogen (stored glucose or carbohydrates) in the muscle and liver, and for most endurance events that are lengthy and have some intensity, carbohydrate is going to be the primary type of macronutrient that your body is burning. When we fuel correctly with adequate carbohydrates during activity, you’ll be sparing yourself from depleting all the stored muscle and liver glycogen, and utilizing it from the fuel you ingest during activity instead. This is also why we see better recovery after exercise from those that fuel more during exercise – because the body doesn’t have to go to all the work of restoring as much of the depleted glycogen stores (3).

So what are the other benefits to training the gut?

Repetitive exposure to nutrition both before and during exercise leads to better tolerance of the fuel you’re consuming. Training the gut can also improve GI function during exercise, and reduce how often you might experience the all-too-common exercise-associated GI symptoms, as well as their severity. For all those athletes that have a finicky GI, some of these GI symptoms that gut training can improve or reduce include (2):

  • Gut discomfort
  • Upper GI symptoms like burping, belching, nausea and indigestion
  • Carbohydrate malabsorption (ever feel like you’re fueling during an event and it’s simply not being absorbed)?
  • Gut microbiome dysbiosis and inflammation
  • Changes in GI motility (having to go urgently, or on the flip side, being constipated)
  • Changes in capacity (how much food you can tolerate)

Likewise, the adaptations to training the gut around and during exercise can also result in improved performance (2). This is because consuming a higher carbohydrate amount both during exercise and as part of a daily eating pattern lead to enhanced glucose availability.

Learn More

In the coming weeks, I’m planning to continue this topic of fueling sports performance and gut training in more detail. Stay tuned!

If you’d like to know more, I work with clients in individual nutrition consultations, and as a Licensed Dietician / Nutritionist and Certified Nutrition Specialist, use medical nutrition therapy, integrative health measures, and a root cause approach to heal imbalanced health conditions. 
Conditions I specialize in include all digestive health imbalances and disorders, endurance athlete sports nutrition, vegan/vegetarian diets, intuitive eating, and autoimmune diseases.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your symptoms of imbalance, I’d love to speak with you in a quick phone consultation! 

References

  1. Jeukendrup A. E. (2017). Training the Gut for Athletes. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 47(Suppl 1), 101–110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-017-0690-6
  2. Martinez, I.G., Mika, A.S., et al. (2023). The effect of Gut-Training and Feeding-Challenge on Markers of Gastrointestinal Status in Response to Endurance Exercise: A Systematic Literature Review. Sports Medicine, 53, 1175-1200. doi:10.1007/s40279-023-01841-0.
  3. Viribay, A., Arribalzaga, S., Mielgo-Ayuso, J., Castañeda-Babarro, A., Seco-Calvo, J., & Urdampilleta, A. (2020). Effects of 120 g/h of Carbohydrates Intake during a Mountain Marathon on Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage in Elite Runners. Nutrients, 12(5), 1367. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12051367

GI Problems, Nutrition + Health, Seasonal Eating, Sports Nutrition

Gut Health 101: Adding More in the age of Cutting Out 

by RebeccaLeave a Comment on Gut Health 101: Adding More in the age of Cutting Out 

How to improve your gut health naturally and sustainably 

woman feeling good, with balanced gut health, standing in kitchen

Hi there. Just a quick message today that’s been on my mind lately. As many of you know, within the nutrition clinic, I specialize in digestion and gut health. In reality, even though someone might show up with health goals that don’t seem to do with gut health, nearly everyone with a health condition or imbalance has a gut health imbalance. 

That’s because, if your hormones or endocrine system are out of wack, there’s a gastrointestinal component that’s involved too. 

Or if you can’t lose weight (or can’t gain weight), there’s usually a gut and inflammation component to that weight resistance. 

Or if your issue is blood sugar dysregulation or some sort of cardiovascular health issue, the gut is involved, and at the microbial level, is often a big component of healing and returning to balance. 

What about common health concerns in athletes?

What about common concerns in athletes, such as low iron or iron deficiency anemia, fatigue without an iron deficiency, or poor workout recovery? First, it’s often as likely that you have an issue absorbing iron as that you’re not eating or supplementing enough, particularly because as your iron needs goes up, the digestive system, when functioning well, will preferentially absorb more iron of every bit you consume. That is true for many other minerals too. 

Inflammation – The Common Culprit

At the heart of nearly every physical ailment is inflammation. Inflammation can be systemic or localized to one body system or part, but it often begins in the gut. 

Gut Healing – Adding More Types of Foods

Over the years, I’ve given out lots of simple to-dos that one can implement to help digestive healing or rebalancing health in general (check out my last post because it’s a really good one!). 

Today, I’ll share something we don’t often hear enough about from Dr. Google or all those companies marketing their products or special diets. And to be fully honest, no single tactic you implement to heal the gut is going to solve the whole issue. This is why it’s a good idea to work with a functional nutritionist (CNS), because then you’ll get unique guidance based on your presentation of symptoms and health imbalance.

But for today, let’s just touch on the importance of eating diversely. 

Many of my clients come to me eating extremely  routine meals from day to day with little variation. That can be because they don’t feel well and don’t know what to eat. Or because they’ve gotten into a routine, or they feel overwhelmed when grocery shopping.  Or they don’t meal plan or prep.

Rather than taking away more foods and restricting your diet more when you don’t feel well or don’t know what to do, when I’m in a clinic with an individual client, I’m often encouraging him or her to be adding more foods. 

Yes, we will screen for reactivity to top foods of concern and then eliminate them when needed, for as long as needed (which doesn’t necessarily mean forever!) But beyond that, a big to-do for clients is to start adding more diversity. Instead of eating just one or two grains, like rice or wheat, I’ll have them start adding a whole host of the many other grains. Instead of eating the same small handful of vegetables from day to day, they’ll begin experimenting and adding in more colors, textures, and flavors of in-season vegetables. Instead of just eating the same almonds or pecans or cashews in their breakfast or snack, I’ll ask them to rotate every day or every time they shop. 

Why is all this important? 

A big component of both gut health and overall health is having high diversity in beneficial gut microbiome species (1,2). And you only get high diversity if you’re eating lots of different (mostly plant) foods. That’s because the food for the bacteria is what you are eating, and each species or strain will have a preferred food, meaning if you feed them what they eat, they’ll thrive, but if you don’t, their population will disappear. 

Now, if you think about the “Standard American Diet,” individuals are often eating different foods like pizza, tacos, pasta, burgers, meat and potatoes…but they’re eating mostly ultra processed foods that are the same small rotation of foods at the ingredient level: corn, soy, wheat, sugar, beef, pork, chicken, cow’s dairy, a small handful of processed oils. 

With a diet with minimal diversity, there’s not much to work with at the gut microbial level, particularly because the balance of microbes that’s going to help the gut thrive, are mostly species that feed on plants.

Eating the Rainbow

When working with clients, a tactic I often recommend is to eat the rainbow – shopping for and preparing foods that are in season, and different from week to week and season to season.


In the nutrition clinic, I work with clients in individual nutrition consultations, and as a Licensed Dietician / Nutritionist (LDN/LD) and Board-Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS), use medical nutrition therapy, integrative health measures, and a root cause approach to heal imbalanced health conditions. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your symptoms of imbalance, I’d love to speak with you in a quick phone consultation! 

References:
1. Gomaa E. Z. (2020). Human gut microbiota/microbiome in health and diseases: a review. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, 113(12), 2019–2040. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-020-01474-7 2. Hills, R. D., Jr, Pontefract, B. A., Mishcon, H. R., Black, C. A., Sutton, S. C., & Theberge, C. R. (2019). Gut Microbiome: Profound Implications for Diet and Disease. Nutrients, 11(7), 1613. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11071613

Ayurveda, GI Problems, Herbal Medicine, Nutrition + Health, Seasonal Eating, Spring, Summertime

Observing the 20 Energies and How To Really Start Intuitive Eating

by Rebecca4 Comments on Observing the 20 Energies and How To Really Start Intuitive Eating

Every day in May is precious.

Where I live, the months of February through April are often the most challenging – January and the post-holiday, beginning of year hope always seem to fly by, but it’s in February, and March, and April that every day can feel like a grind. 

It’s not the sunshine that May can bring that necessarily turns it all around for me. I do love the sun and warmer days, but I also enjoy the rain. 

It’s the flowers and the fully leafed out trees that late winter and early spring lacks. The sheer density of foliage that has returned by early May.

A heavy blanket or extra padding of plant life that soothes my nervous system as I go out into the world, making everything hard, more bearable, and everything mundane or merely good, elevated. 

The twenty Gunas valued in Ayurvedic medicine.

One thing that is inevitably helpful from day to day, whether it’s in those more difficult late winter and early spring months, in May, or in the heat of peak summer, is tuning into and adjusting my food and lifestyle choices based on the energies around and inside me. What I’m referring to are the 20 Gunas in Ayurvedic wisdom. These are a set of 10 pairs of opposing qualities or energies that describe the different attributes inherent in all substances. 

For instance, a rock is hard. Feathers are soft. 
A rainy day is wet. A clear, sunny day in August in Oregon is dry. 
Fresh ginger is heating. Coconut milk and coconut water are cooling.  

What is so powerful about observing these qualities in your body and everyday life, and then using them to make subtle food and lifestyle adjustments, is that it’s a way to bring balance to your body, mind and health.

This daily adjusting is especially helpful as a preventative measure, but should also be used when there is clear illness or disease. Our body’s prefer to operate at homeostasis. Even with everything we do in our everyday that knocks the body out of homeostasis, its object is always to return to ‘baseline’ as quickly as possible. When there are too many blocks in its ability to do so, that’s when illness and disease, abnormal lab values, pain and aches, and injuries occur.  

The 20 Qualities are:
Heavy | Light
Cold | Hot
Soft | Hard
Oily | Dry
Smooth | Rough
Dense or Solid | Liquid
Slow or Dull | Sharp
Stable | Unstable or Mobile
Cloudy, Sticky or Slimy | Clear
Gross or Big | Subtle or Small

Observing and using the 20 qualities or gunas is a way to help the body system return to homeostasis. How you do that is for every quality that is out of balance, utilize the opposite quality instead. 

For instance, if I am currently experiencing hot, itchy skin rashes or acne, I know that adding more heating substances, foods, and heating spices will further increase the heat condition. Reducing the amount of spices in food, the type of foods that are hot in nature, and increasing cooling foods will help to clear the heat. Adding cooling, bitter vegetables like broccoli and asparagus and more cooling spices and herbs like fennel, coriander, mint and cilantro,  instead of eating a dish with garlic, onions, ginger, mustard seeds, and chili peppers will slowly (or sometimes quickly) assist in coming back to equilibrium. 

Or say I have a tendency towards being constipated and gassy, and I eat lots of dry, airy foods. Snacking on popcorn, granola, chips, crackers, yeasted bread, and raw, crunchy salads, which I eat while on the go, or eat while talking. All are dry and/or contain a lot of air.
A way towards balance is to increase the moisture — both through adding liquid into the foods consumed, and cooking foods until they’re soft, and by adding liquid fats and oils instead of dry, crunchy roasted nuts or seeds, etc.

A Daily Check-In

One way to begin to use this method is by doing a short daily check-in. Take a few minutes near the beginning of each day to journal or jot down the answers to these questions:

– What is Present today? 
– And What is Needed?

Getting more granular, it can sometimes be helpful to do a quick scan or review of different body systems, the mind and emotions, and the weather to help. Is something feeling dry? Hot? Slimy and mucousy? Slow and sluggish? Adjust your food and lifestyle choices with the opposite qualities, and see where it begins to bring more balance. 

As we weave into the summer months in the northern hemisphere, it’s often that the qualities on display in the environment become hotter, dryer (or more humid, depending on where you live), and this can be mirrored in the body more rapidly, especially when we likewise choose heating and drying foods. Here’s a recipe for summer that can give you a good example of how to balance the heat and dryness with cooling spices, coconut and gently cooked, more liquid-containing meals. 

Observing what’s occurring internally and externally and adjusting to quickly reach equilibrium is the very definition of true intuitive eating. It’s tuning into what the body needs rather than what the mind craves. 


If you’d like to know more, there is a free download in more detail to use this idea in the Resources section. I also work with clients in individual nutrition consultations, and as a Licensed Dietician / Nutritionist (LDN /LD) and Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS), use medical nutrition therapy, integrative health measures, and a root cause approach to heal imbalanced health conditions. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your symptoms of imbalance, I’d love to speak with you in a quick phone consultation!