Pasta digestion

alcyst

How long does pasta take to get to energy? I understand that there will be variation for different people & different meal sizes, but do riders need a big bowl the night before, or half an hour before a ride?

pbt150

Night before will see you in good stead if you then have a good breakfast before you head off. Generally I'd try and allow about an hour if you're having a small meal/snack (eg bagel/banana), and at least a couple of hours for a good plate of pasta.

keef66

my brother in law was shovelling pasta down himself the night before he ran the London marathon, which suggests that's the kind of timescale for carbohydrate loading.

I carbohydrate load all the time just in case.

Bhima

Good Link: http://www.unani.com/digestion_time_of_foods.htm

Pasta is not on there but I estimate it's at LEAST 2 hours because if you look at the list of foods taking 2 hours, they seem to be very simple foods to break down. Brown rice is 2 hours according to that, which seems to be on-par with pasta as a carbohydrate source, although it's probably quicker because of its smaller size/increased surface area.

EDIT: Those are digestion times but, does digestion necessarily mean all the energy has been released/is usable?

FCE2007

keef66 wrote:

I carbohydrate load all the time just in case.

Nelson Longflap

Just in case you didn't realise, shovelling down a plate of pasta the night before, isn't really carb-loading. You have to spend a couple of days depleting the muscles' and liver's glycogen stores prior to the enjoyable, face-stuffing part. With depleted stores (done by training on a more-or less empty stomach), you force your body to think it's being starved, so when you give it a load of carbohydrate prior to a race, it is able to store more (as glycogen) than it would be able to normally. Big in the seventies - when riders would train until they bonked - and making a bit of a comeback - although in a modified form.

Bhima

Nelson Longflap wrote:

shovelling down a plate of pasta the night before, isn't really carb-loading.

It is! - Just because it's not as effective as the "starve yourself stupid" method, doesn't mean it doesn't work!

alcyst

Thanks for the replies. Bhima, that list is interesting. Alot of filling foods come in about 2+ hours (potato, beans, rice). Some real oddities, cranberry taking an hour longer than a blueberry! Brown rice, blueberries, and raisins would seem to be a filling easily digested group.

Eating the night before is probably sensible, but runners have a different problem, they have to carry everything with them. Cyclists can, and usually do, carry more.

I have heard Nelson Longflap's point about carb loading before, you do have to push to collapse before loading. Pushing to collapse may be practical for some of the pros in multi-stage races, but all I need to do is get through a 4+ hour ride once or so a week.

It seems sensible that a cyclist facing a 4+ hour ride might want to do it differently to a fast marathon runner? If I could face having a big breakfast first thing in the morning, I would only be getting on the bike an hour later, and usually the first hour is spent rolling at reasonable pace. So a 2 hour digestion budget might work well.

There is only one way to find out.

SBezza

I just eat normally, in fact I don't even like pasta and very rarely eat rice or potato's. Unless you are going for a very long ride, perhaps 8hrs plus, I don't really think you will need to carb load in the traditional sense.

Just eat a proper meal the night before, and have a good decent breakfast in the morning. Make sure you have food with you on your ride, and eat/drink regularly, and I would suspect that the majority wouldn't have any issues.

alcyst

Sbezza, it is lovely to get high science, but there is nothing like being sensible. I feel washed out after a ride, but that may just be fitness vs speed & distance.

grahamcp

Perhaps try a good book on GI foods.

scapaslow

I was browsing some American cycling magazine in WH Smiths at the weekend and it had a Q&A on pre ride nutrition amongst top level cyclists.

One cyclist stated that he eat plain pasta 3 hours before a race. But the big thing they all agreed on was pre race hydration. It seems that without a certain amount of water the body cannot break down the carbs into energy. A lot of these cyclists drink a lot of high energy carb drinks and water before the race for this purpose.

One of the things i really struggle with in cold weather is drinking enough during a ride. So it looks like it makes sense to drink a lot before going out on a longer or higher intensity ride especially if your not going to drink much while out.

Bhima

scapaslow wrote:

without a certain amount of water the body cannot break down the carbs into energy.

Yes. I think 1 gram of Carbohydrate is stored with 6 (I think) grams of water in your body. So if you eat 200 grams of carbs, you need 1.2KG of water (about a bottle and a half) in order to use that carbohydrate as energy.

scapaslow wrote:

One of the things i really struggle with in cold weather is drinking enough during a ride.

I used to get that. When it's cold, I take out a flask of hot water/orange squash with a bit of honey dissolved into it. I think people tend to not drink when it's cold because we usually associate drinking with cooling down when we're hot, so you just have to reverse that by taking out warm drinks.

jamieleung

Came across this article on the Procycling team Slipstream website a few weeks ago. Very interesting read into pasta and its effects on the body.

http://www.slipstreamsports.com/2008/07 ... atory-diet

enjoy and maybe give it ago by reducing the intake of pasta and switch to oats, rice, chicken, fish and fruit and veg..i'm going to give it ago and see if there are any noticeable effects.

Bhima

That slip-stream article is good, I read it ages ago and have not eaten pasta in ages as a test. My cycling foods have been Porridge, Rice, Fish, Fruit & Veg and have not really noticed much difference apart from the fact that I don't burp as much and any injuries seem to heal incredibly quicker.

jamieleung

certainly interesting, i will give it ago too.

doyler78

There was an article about that in either C+ or Cycling Weekly a while back as well. Dried pasta is still great - leave the fancy fresh egg based stuff that costs a lot more alone. Something in the cycling nutrition that is cheap

jibberjim

alcyst wrote:

I have heard Nelson Longflap's point about carb loading before, you do have to push to collapse before loading. Pushing to collapse may be practical for some of the pros in multi-stage races, but all I need to do is get through a 4+ hour ride once or so a week.

There's almost no chance you can "carbo load" to get enough glycogen to last you 4 hours of hard efffort - the amount of glycogen you use is related to the intensity of the workout, if you're going easy enough you won't use much at all, you'll burn fat, the body prefers it as you have practically unlimited supplies.

However, as you're riding, there's probably no point in trying to, you tend to put on weight, feel bloated, have to eat a higher percentage of carbs than is normally healthy, and it's certainly only useful if you actually do then fully deplete the stores, which is not necessarily the case on a ride.

Cycling gives you the option of easily eating more carbs whilst riding to keep your glycogen topped up, especially if you're at a low intensity for part of the ride (e.g. you hit the hills hard but relax in other bits.) When you're at low intensity, you can probably digest anything on the ride, and if you're at higher intensity, then you can digest various sports gels/drinks (which are essentially just a carbohydrate which your body can absorb rapidly)

As Sbezza and Nelson Longflap have said, simply eating pasta is pretty irrelevant, any good meal the night before will ensure your glycogen stores are topped up to normal levels (Pasta is no different to anything else, to do any sort of extra loading, you do need to do more than simply eating pasta - either the starvation phase, or simply some sprint efforts+recovery drinks which have also been shown to do it.)

Eat on the ride, it's easy. I'd also seriously recommend marathon runners eat on the run too - carbo loading doesn't help much, and even if it did, having another 1000 calories available as well as the glycogen stores will allow you to burn more glycogen and less fat meaning you're almost certainly going to go faster...

Bhima

jibberjim wrote:

glycogen stores will allow you to burn more glycogen and less fat meaning you're almost certainly going to go faster...

When you get into glycogen burning, you don't start burning less fat, you are always buring fat and the glycogen acts as a top-up. So if the max fat you can burn before using glycogen is "x", when sprinting, the value of "x" does not decrease, it's just less of a proportion of energy sources used.

wiffachip

I never realised cycling was so complicated

Eat your dinner, the best stuff is whatever you enjoy most and then ride your bike

Take something to eat and drink with you and if you are going a long way, take a lot. Or take some money and buy some.

Unless of course you're doing the TDF, which I suspect you're not

Gav888

Ive been wondering this for a while, although it takes say 2hrs for pasta to digest, how long does it provide energy for?

For example, you each 100g of white pasta 2 hours before you go out so when you hit the bike its fully digested and your riding at 15mph ave, does that mean you will have enough energy from the pasta to ride for 1 / 2 / 3 hours, excluding and stored glucogen in your muscles / liver?

joeyhalloran

This is going to sound strange but does anyone know the nutritional benefit of raw uncooked pasta Vs cooked pasta. Ever since i was a kid i've got through bags of raw pasta as a snack (many, many people have told me it was very unhealthy but hey, i liked it!). I was just wondering if, nutritionally, there was a difference?

shakey88

How about energy gels? How long does it take for your body to absorb them and you start to feel the benefit?

Bhima

Depends on the type of gel. Average is 20 minutes to absorb.