Metabolic profile

SteveR_100Milers

There are plenty of GPs that understand the metabolic requirements and abnormalities of the 'average' person, but none that I have access to for anyone remotely resembling an athlete (remotely being a loos term in my case); and I also know coaches / sport scientists that have a limited knowledge of the process at a cellular / molecular level.

Where / what / who is the best place to go to discuss abnormailties in your metabolic pathways or processes and what impact they have on your exercise performance and potential. I'm talking about blood lipid profiles, insulin / glucagon levels, effects of certain prescription drugs etc, not a general whether I should eat 3 pieces of fish and only drink soya milk kind of advice (though that of course might be one of the conclusions!). My albeit limited experience of nhs dieticians isn't great - my son has type 1 diabetes, and their advice was pretty general, even though I wanted to talk about glycaemic loading and therefore wanted something a bit more sophisticated.

pbt150

Part of the reason that most doctors don't know much about exercise metabolism is because there simply isn't as much known about exercise metabolism as say diabetes or other metabolic diseases. There isn't the money for research, and sports science is also a notoriously difficult area to do study, due to small sample sizes and largely unavoidable problems with control groups.

Most of what is known is also based on extrapolations from old (1960s) experiments, where mapping metabolic pathways actually was in vogue.

SteveR_100Milers

This is sadly what I have found thus far.