High Fat Diets

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Assignment Four
Vogt, M., Puntschart, A., Howald, H., Mueller, B., Mannhart, C., Gfeller-Tuescher, L., Mullis, P., and Hoppeler, H. (2003). Effects of dietary fat on muscle substrates, metabolism, and performance in athletes. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 35(6), 952-960. High carbohydrate (CHO) diets have been thoroughly investigated, showing that the increased glycogen stores resulting from such a diet may improve endurance performance. However, the role that high-fat diets play in endurance performance, substrate utilization, and other cellular mechanisms has been investigated to a significantly lesser degree. This is an interesting discrepancy, as it is widely accepted that as exercise duration increases, the role that …show more content…

This decrease in RER, in general terms, means that the utilization of lipids for energy metabolism is increased with an increased amount of fat in the diet as long as exercise intensity stays at an appropriate level. This information does not allow conclusion of high-fat diets being beneficial for endurance athletes, however, as both acute and chronic high-fat content ingestion has been shown to decrease endurance performance as well (Vogt et al., …show more content…

This is likely due to a variety of metabolic adaptations that increase the body’s ability to use fat as a substrate, including the following: “decreased muscle and liver glycogen storage and rate of breakdown, increased gluconeogenesis, increased triacylglycerol storage, and utilization, increased mitochondrial oxidative capacity, increased ketone production, and decrased use of glycolysis-dervied acetyl-CoA” (Fleming et al.,

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