[quote]Coach Sommer wrote:
I am not an expert in nutrition by any means, however I found the following exchange to be fascinating and would like to share it with you.
Last November, I had an interesting conversation with three Navy SEALs (two active duty and one twelve year veteran) and the world famous alpinist, Mark Twight (check him out on Amazon.com). We were discussing how nutrition affects the body’s ability to perform under extreme circumstances and helps to prevent over-use injuries.
One of the comments, which all four agreed upon, was that in extreme environments, how many calories were consumed was not nearly as important as what comprised the calories. The example given was a cut on the hand in severe artic weather under extreme training conditions. On a diet of 10,000 calories a day without high levels of fat, the cut would remain essentially unhealed, even after a week. Likewise, other physical factors of performance would also deteriorate.
After adding substantial amounts of fat (Mark Twight prefers olive oil and likes to joke that his metabolism prefers a protein/carb/fat ratio of 40-30-200!), the cut rapidly healed even with a significant reduction in calories down to about 7,000.
In this particular instance and situation, high levels of dietary fat were essential for the optimum functioning of the body. I have wondered whether this increased efficiency in bodily performance might extend to other circumstances as well. Likewise, I have been considering the possible implications of this for high level athletic performance ever since.
Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer[/quote]
This is indeed interesting and its possible implications are worth studying.
The fact that they were training in severe arctic conditions may make this an exceptional case. Fats are extremely important in cold weather conditions. The body absolutely needs them to maintain its temperature.
When I did some ski mountaineering, living in snow caves and igloos in the Rockies in January, we packed a lot of high-fat food (cheese, bacon, peanut butter etc) and we were told to constantly eat it, and to eat all of it. If you fried up some bacon, be sure to wipe up and consume the remaining grease with your bread or bagel.
At first, this sounded bizarre to me, who had bought what was then the conventional wisdom about the danger of fat and the superiority of carbs for physical performance. But personal experience quickly taught me that fat is a precious commodity in severely cold conditions.
If these SEALs were training at altitude, and they probably were, the relative lack of oxygen may also have played a role in how their bodies metabolizes nutrients. Or maybe not. I don’t know, but am throwing that out.
Incidentally, another thing that began to shake my belief in the superiority of low-fat diets for athletes was reading an article published in one of the old Soviet Weightlifting yearly almanacs (I think these are available in English translation from Sportivny Press, although I don’t know if this issue is; it was from the early 80s, I think). The article was an analysis of the diet of leading Soviet weightlifters. The amount of fat they consumed was around 40% of the total. At the time, again, that surprised me.
Not that the Soviets paid great attention to sports nutrition. This article was a rarity, and from what I saw with my own eyes athletes knew little and cared less about nutrition. But prior to major competitions they were provided with fresh meat, fish, vegetables, fruit etc. The basics, in other words. Or what used to be the basics - natural, fresh, unprocessed food.
