Eat food, not nutrients

Ask an endurance athlete what they eat, and many will answer in numbers. Grams of protein a day. Grams of carbohydrate an hour. A shake after the session, a gel every half hour, a pill to help recovery. Food has become a list of macros and micros. Macros are carbohydrate, protein and fat. Micros are the vitamins and minerals.

Some of those numbers are worth knowing, and some of the products work. But the research keeps finding the same thing, from the protein in an egg to the vitamin C in an orange. A food is more than the sum of its parts.

01

Macros are a useful map.

The numbers are a useful map, and two of them are worth knowing.

Protein first. A review of 49 trials with 1,863 people found that extra protein helped weight training build more muscle and strength. The gains levelled off at about 1.6 grams per kilo of body weight a day. For a 70-kilo athlete, that is about 110 grams a day.

Then carbohydrate, the fuel for long and hard sessions. For efforts of two to three hours, the guidance from sports nutrition research is about 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour, and about 90 for the longest days. It can come as a drink, a gel or solid food. Not every long session is fuelled. We fuel a run past about two and a half hours, a ride past about four, and a long run that rehearses a race. Others we leave unfuelled on purpose.

But the map is not the ground. In a US lab, ten trained young men lifted weights and then ate either whole eggs or egg whites, with the same 18 grams of protein in each. Their muscles built more new protein after the whole eggs. On the label, the protein was identical. The yolk made the difference. It was one meal in a small group, but it shows the same thing again: the food is more than the number.

02

What the tub can and cannot do.

Protein powder works. Most of the trials in that review used it. It is a convenient way to reach the number on a busy day, not a better one than a plate of fish, eggs, meat, dairy or beans.

Gels work too. They are carbohydrate in a form you can swallow while breathing hard. But they are not magic. Fourteen trained cyclists rode 75 kilometres twice, once with a sports drink and once with bananas, each giving the same carbohydrate. They finished in about two hours and 20 minutes either way, with the same blood sugar. Real food did the same job. Keep gels for when chewing is hard.

BCAAs, the branched-chain amino acids, are three of the building blocks of protein, sold on their own. A review of the evidence found no study in people showing that BCAAs alone, swallowed, increase muscle building. Muscle needs all nine essential amino acids, the ones your body cannot make, to build anything, and any meal with protein in it already has them. If you eat enough protein, BCAAs are an expensive way to eat part of it again.

Creatine is the one with real promise. It is one of the most studied supplements in sport. A sports nutrition society's position stand found that it improves short, maximal efforts and helps athletes handle heavy training. It found it safe in healthy people at the usual doses. The evidence is for short, hard work rather than long, steady endurance. It is one of the few things in a tub that does what it says.

03

Then the micros.

A hard block of training leaves your legs heavy and your body sore, so it seems sensible to help it along with a big dose of vitamin C and E.

In Norway, researchers tested exactly that. Fifty-four young men and women trained three to four times a week for 11 weeks, mostly running: hard intervals and steady runs. Half took 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 235 milligrams of vitamin E every day. The other half took a placebo. Both groups got fitter by the same amount. But inside the muscle, the signs of new mitochondria, the parts of each cell that burn fuel with oxygen, rose only in the group without the vitamins.

The vitamins did not help the training. They took part of it away.

Hard training produces reactive molecules in the working muscle. Vitamins C and E mop them up, which is why taking them sounds like help with recovery. But those molecules are not just damage. They are part of the signal that tells the body to adapt: build more mitochondria, handle sugar better, defend itself better next time.

In Germany, young men trained for four weeks, some of them taking the same vitamins. Only the men without the vitamins got better at handling sugar. Mop up the signal and the body hears less of it. In Norway, the performance tests did not show the difference in 11 weeks. The muscle did.

04

A food is not its label.

These trials tested pills, not food. An ordinary orange has around 80 milligrams of vitamin C, packed in with everything else the fruit is. The pill in Norway had 1,000 milligrams on its own, a dose no meal contains.

The list is useful. It is how science measures what we eat. But it is not the food. An orange is fibre, water, sugars and many other compounds, held together in a structure your gut has to take apart. The writer Michael Pollan spent a book on this mistake: treating food as the sum of its nutrients, then trusting the nutrients over the food. Take one part out and it behaves differently on its own.

05

Same nutrients, different food.

At the US National Institutes of Health, 20 adults lived in the clinic for four weeks. For two weeks they ate ultra-processed food, the kind made in factories from refined ingredients and additives. For two weeks they ate unprocessed food. The meals on offer were matched for calories, sugar, fat, fibre and salt, and everyone ate as much as they liked.

On the ultra-processed food, they ate about 500 calories a day more and gained close to a kilo in two weeks. On the real food, they lost about the same. On paper, the nutrients were the same. The food was not, and the body treated it differently. It was a small group and a short trial, but it was a controlled one, and nobody was told to eat more. The food decided.

06

The kitchen is where food stays food.

When you cook, you choose every ingredient. A ragù is meat, vegetables, wine, tomato and time. A curry is a paste, coconut milk, chicken and rice. Nothing in your kitchen needs a preservative, an emulsifier or a flavouring, because the food is eaten the day it is made and it already tastes of something.

This is the case for cooking at home. Not a diet, and not a list of numbers to hit. Real ingredients, cooked well, eaten while they are good.

What this means for you

Eat food, not nutrients. Build your meals from whole ingredients you cook yourself: grains, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, beans. Use the macros as a map. Put protein on every plate. On the long sessions you fuel, take about 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour, from food when you can and gels when you cannot.

Get your vitamins from the plate rather than from pills. While you train, leave out high-dose vitamin C and E. Skip the BCAAs. Protein powder is fine when a meal is not possible, and creatine is worth considering if you do short, hard work. If a blood test shows you are short of something, a supplement for it is a different matter.

Then train, and let real food carry the adaptation. Your body has been turning food into movement for as long as there have been humans. It knows what to do with an orange.

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