Electrolytes, Creatine & Caffeine: What Actually Works? | Ste Winrow | Ep 71

moment.Yeah. That's, so obviously when it comes to, to calories, they're simply a unit of energy.

Um, the same way as a, a minute is a unit of time.

Um, and obviously we all have the same hours in the day, but we all use them very differently.

And you could probably argue the same in terms of food quality in the sense that we can all eat 2,000 calories, but what makes up that 2,000 calories might be very different interindividually.

So, you know, there's, it, the calories get a lot of talk around is a calorie a calorie? Well, the reality is a calorie definitely is a calorie.

You can't avoid that.

But what makes that calorie up might be different in terms of its micronutrient structure or how m- how much, how energy dense it might be, for example.

So if you strip it back to the basics of nutrition, calories into fats is nine, so you've got nine calories per gram.

Whereas in proteins and carbohydrates, you've only got four calories per gram.

So fat is generally more energy dense.

If you think about carbohydrates themselves, you might have a carbohydrate that has relatively low nutrient profile, so quite high in sugar, might be more processed.

Whereas you might have another carbohydrate that is whole grain, maybe a fruit or a vegetable.

So they're very different as well.

So this kind of making up of a calorie is, is important.

So food quality does matter.

Um, macron, we've, we've touched on macronutrients, right? So it, you know, how many calories are in a macronutrient, but you've got to then think about of your total calorie intake, what does the macronutrient structure look like within that? So if you're using percentages, is it 50% carbohydrates, 30% protein, 20% fat, for example? Um-

Do you normally go off percentages when working out someone's macros? Or, because I know s- there's a couple of different ways to do it, whether you go off, uh, grams per kg of body weight, or whether you do percentages.

Like how, how would you go about it?

Usually I, well, I, for the most part, will use grams per kilo of body weight-

Okay

... uh, to, to try to advise athletes on what to use.

That becomes particularly more important the, the higher kind of up the food chain the athlete might be, uh, in terms of his ability or her ability.

S- Because if you are going to need, say 5,000 calories in a day, and you follow the 50/30/20, um, structure in terms of percentages, then all of them will rise exponentially together, um, in terms of how much you might need.

Whereas the reality is you probably can get away with a similar amount of protein and fats per day, but as your own, your output goes up and up, your carbohydrate need will go up.

So if you-