What Do The Top Endurance Athletes In The World Eat?

This is KPBS Midday Edition I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Food she keep you healthy can't maintain your strength and it should be a pleasure to eat. Tell that to the vast number of Americans who are dieting, restricting certain foods, or just overweight and confused. A new book looks at the diets of some of the world's best internship -- endurance athletes and comes to interesting conclusions. It seems the client of diet that keeps him going contains mostly high quality foods and does not skimp on the carbs. Joining me is Matt Fitzgerald the author of the endurance diet. Thank you. When you talk about endurance athletes are talking about runners and cyclists? Yes. It's a long list of specific disciplines everything from cross-country skiers and I went as broad as possible in my research. I looked at the diets of athletes on every continent like growers triathletes runners you name it. What made you interested about what they eat? I am an endurance coach and writer and nutritionist so I am not deep in this world. I'm a big believer in following best practices. A lot of people go to science for guidance on how to train and how to eat and that is fine but it's important not to neglect the real world and when you look at people who are going to the Olympics and winning national championships of this common patterns of what they do it's something we may not to emulate. You did find common patterns. There's a similarity Number one the diet is inclusive. I then as they eat everything. When I say everything they do not eliminate entire food groups Alyssa many popular fad diets do. As a nutritionist I often deal with everyday athletes who have not eliminated grains Army and they often run into problems. Not only does dollars that it makes sense that elite athletes are not doing that. They have an inclusive diet that's not leaving things out. In recent years carbohydrates have been seen as an academic. We endurance athletes have been eating high carb diets ever since the 60s when research came out showing that it is really beneficial to endurance performance and there was kind of a backlash because carbs have been implicated in weight gain and such but it still eating plenty of carbohydrates but what they're doing is not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They are marginalizing refined grains sugars that they are keeping a high quality carbs in the diet so like starchy vegetables and potatoes into given the right balance between high-octane fuel source but are not that mean the way some of the other carbs are. Is it only endurance athletes I -- should eat this way because of the extreme need for energy? The whole thing a point out that these people are training and the respondent you also cannot run hundred 20 miles a week the way an elite runner can do but you can still and -- emulate them it's just a matter of scaling. If you're running 10 or 12 miles a day you don't need 5000 calories you can still follow the pattern that these athletes set but scaling down to your particular athletic level. All of us should do cardiovascular exercise so we are all insurance -- endurance athletes which is not a professional. Number one we already covered which is eating everything number two is the carbohydrate thing and number three is been -- maintaining high diet quality of it publicly that is not discussed enough the do not look at stake? Is it high or low glycemic Alyssa even in ancient times are is a more moderate they just cut to the chase like when you eat it is a good for you or is it not because certain food types are predicts the good in that way. There's nothing particularly shocking here. Make is a confrontation between high quality and processed food. I really try to avoid coming up in place of the quality thing and pick something like you. That's a processed food so it's important not to go too far with anything other than just looking at what are the effects when you use this type of food. Is the endurance diet mainly for people who want to maintain a fitness as opposed to losing weight? Interestingly a lot of this stuff applies to everything -- everyone like the quality thing. There's no reason ever to have a low-quality diet even endurance athletes there will be periods when they are not focused on getting fitter but they are trying to lose bit of weight but they change things up a little bit. They will eat less, hundreds for example. One habit is eating Byfield in terms of how much you eat and listening to your body and trusting the satiety and hunger signals you may want to do less of that when you're trying to get leaner and count calories for a fixed period of time so that sort of is a difference. You are a marathon runner yourself. Is this how you we? I practice what I preach in this regard to The thing that made me want to do it is really two things. A and seemed to get the results that I wanted and it seemed very sustainable. This is not a weird way of eating. Why do you think there's so much confusion about what to eat and so much disagreement among nutritionist and diet doctors? We can go on and on there are lots of reasons. The reason I put that the spec is because I'm frustrated about that very confusion affirmative that trying to give good advice about diet to athletes at this a lot of pushback from other experts that are providing contrary advice and I think it gets the athletes I'm trying to serve in trouble so that's why I decided to say let's put science aside and try another approach look at real-world best practices. I was hoping that that would get through to the people and trying to get through to. And just concentrate on eating healthy. Thank you.