Welcome to the Dr. Berg's Healthy Keto and Interminute Fasting podcast, where Dr. Berg takes you on the journey for the truth about getting healthy and losing healthy weight.

Let's talk about the pros and cons of carb loading before a sporting event.

So a lot of athletes are doing this, especially for endurance type sports that involve over 90 minutes. And so they might carboload one to four days before this event.

Using all sorts of carbs like sugar, these gels that many times have maltodextrin and dextrin,

which is a synthetic sugar, cliff bars, or I think they have like these cliff gel packs,

energy bars. So the goal is to beef up the glycogen reserve

in the muscle and the liver. Now, glycogen is stored glucose molecules. And so the way that it

works is that the glycogen stored in your muscle actually provides the muscle with glucose.

And glycogen that is stored in the liver provides the blood with glucose as well as the brain.

And there's a big difference between the capacity that you can store glucose in the liver

versus the muscle.

In the liver, it's only like 100 grams, and the muscle, it's 500 grams.

And so the reason why people doing this is just to go longer without fatigue.

But if you look at the type of fuel that they're running on, which is glucose, because

they're not fat adapted, there's a pretty big limited capacity.

Because when you're talking about glycogen, stored sugar, it's only like maybe 1,700 calories

of stored glucose, maybe up to 19, maybe 2,000 calories at the very most of stored glucose.

So that would provide energy roughly about 90 to 120 minutes at the most.

Whereas if you were fat adapted, it's virtually unlimited as far as the amount of calories

that you can use as energy. Even someone that is not overweight has about 100,000 calories

of stored energy as their fat versus like 1,700 calories. So there's a

huge difference. And so more and more athletes are becoming fat adapted because they're finding

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