Bulletin #79 – Counting Calories

What role does counting calories have in the Parrillo Nutrition Program? Is it necessary? Do I need bother counting calories if I get enough quality protein and carbohydrates and keep my fat intake low? The answer is unequivocal and absolute: yes, you need to count calories . Calorie counting, in its own way, is as important as knowing how much weight you have on a barbell during a set. Is it really necessary to pay attention to sets, reps and inten-sity? Of course it is, and counting calories is a definitive nutritional benchmark and an important guide for the serious body-builder. Caloric miscalculation is prob-ably the single most common nutritional mistake that people make. I talk every day with aspiring bodybuilders who train hard and correctly yet struggle to put on a few pounds of muscle.

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After a few questions regarding their diet habits, typically I dis-cover that they are underfed. Food has an anabolic effect and underfed bodybuilders often make great gains when they wise up and eat a little more . Weight training is the stimulus that causes muscle growth and the raw material to build new tissue comes from food. If you’re eating barely enough to sustain your present bodyweight and ac-tivity level you’ll have very little left over to build new tissue. And that is the great dilemma of leaning out. On the other side of the coin, if your goal is to lose body fat you need to burn more calories than you consume in order to achieve a net energy (calorie) deficit. How can you strike the delicate balance and lose fat while retaining hard-earned muscle? Consistently, day in and day out, you must pay attention to how many calo-ries you consume . Calories matter . There are three general principles behind the Par-rillo Program: consistency, dedication and hard work. That is what we ask you to sup-ply. We provide the rest. We provide the program, the formula and the road map for your success. If you follow our program you will see fantastic results.

How can I say that with such unflinching confidence? Our program is not based on guesswork or random chance or happy, wishful thinking, but rather on refined scientific principles and careful control. Our approach is a rig-orous, structured, controlled approach and has been proven to work, over and over again. You might wonder how one pro-gram could work successfully for every-one. There are huge differences between people’s physiques and varying degrees of fitness, and common sense would indicate that everyone needs a different game plan. This is true. We teach you how to modify and adjust the basic elements of the Par-rillo Performance Program to suit your individual goals and body type. Exactly how many calories you should ingest depends upon your basal (baseline) metabolic rate and the amount of calories you expend in daily activities. Muscular people have a high metabolic rate in terms of their rate of energy expenditure. Why? Muscle is an active tissue that requires a lot of energy (calories) to fuel and sustain its activity. Active people require a lot more calories than their inactive contemporaries do. I bet you didn’t need Colombo to figure that one out! Serious athletes need a lot more calories than the average couch potato.

A shortcoming of many current caloric calculation methods is that they fail to distinguish between the caloric re-quirements of men and women, who differ drastically due to differences in lean body mass. A 250-pound bodybuilder will have a greater caloric requirement than a 250-pound obese individual, even though they weigh the same. A pound of muscle burns a lot more calories than a pound of fat. A more precise and sophisticated method is known as the Harris-Benedict equation, the exact details of which are not necessary to discuss because I’m about to teach you a better way. The HB equation takes into account gender differences and takes into consideration body fat percentage, though crudely in my opinion . Harris-Benedict is routinely used to estimate energy needs of hospital patients. There is another hi-tech technique that can actually measure a person’s rate of energy expenditure: calo-rimetry. This is a fairly accurate method for determining a person’s resting energy expenditure.

However, it fails to take into account differences in activity level and caloric expenditure during exercise and therefore calorimetry is not especially use-ful for our purposes.  The best approach for our purposes is a homespun method that depends on some trial and error. To determine your rate of to-tal daily energy expenditure you will need a food scale and a nutrition composition guide, both of which are included in the Parrillo Performance Nutrition Program™. Here’s how it works: Stay on your usual diet and continue your usual activity level and exercise pattern for one week. Count every calorie you eat everyday for a full week while maintaining your normal life-style. Check your bodyweight first thing in the morning. If you gain weight from one day to the next, you are in a caloric surplus. If you lose weight you are in a calorie deficit. Liquid intake needs to re-main stable during our experimental period as fluid excess or deprivation can radically influence bodyweight from one day to the next.

Women should not try our seven-day experiment when menstruating. If your weight remains constant the number of calories you are consuming equals the number of calories you are burning. This allows you to determine baseline energy requirements – calories needed to maintain your current body weight. This is an incredibly useful number to know. Calories occupy a central planing position in our nutrition program. If you don’t know how many calories you con-sume you won’t know what to do. If you don’t know how many calories you’re eating you’re working in the dark, guess-ing, hoping to gain or lose, but having no scientific basis to control the outcome. Calorie counting takes considerable ef-fort, especially at the beginning. After a few weeks it will become second nature and you will find that you have memo-rized the nutritional composition of your favorite foods. Soon you will be able to prepare precisely constructed meals with carefully controlled nutrient composition. You will find building muscle and stripping fat works far better when you use natural, whole, unrefined foods. These foods are healthier and easier to control .

When you eat out, ask that your food be prepared without oil, grease or butter. Once you have determined your base-line caloric requirement it becomes much easier to control what happens to your physique. The fast track way to determine your calories needed to gain or lose at your desired rate is to pick a number (an educated guess) as to how many calories you think you need per day and just adjust your calories until your desired goals (either gaining a pound per week or loosing a pound per week) are met. To gain quality bodyweight increase your caloric intake by 300-500 calories a day above your baseline require-ment . This should add to a weight gain of one pound per week, if not adjust your calories accordingly. This will provide the extra nutrients and energy that your body needs to build new muscle tissue. If you eat according to the Parrillo Nutrition Program and train hard and do aerobics, little of the weight you gain will be fat.

Your body can only build muscle so fast and if you increase calories too quickly the excess will be stored as fat. To lose weight (fat) we want to aim for a loss of around one pound of fat per week. It is certainly possibly to lose fat faster but the faster you lose the greater the risk of losing muscle at the same time. The fastest I would advise is two pounds per week. A pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories. To lose a pound a week we need to cre-ate a net calorie deficit of 3,500 calories a week or 500 (7 x 500 = 3,500) calories a day. Time and again, I have seen that the most effective stimulus for fat loss is a combination of a modest energy reduction (food intake) combined with an increased level of high intensity aerobic exercise. I would suggest you reduce caloric intake by 250 calories per day (below your baseline requirement) and perform aerobic exercise that burns 250 calories. I find this approach is twice as effec-tive as classical caloric restriction. You could achieve the target net energy deficit by simply reducing your caloric intake by 500 calories a day below your maintenance requirement - but this has drawbacks. De-spite its mathematical equivalency, de-pleting 500 calories a day will eventually lower your baseline metabolic rate and de-crease your rate of energy expenditure. You will lose fat much more slowly. Better to reduce by only 250 and increase your exercise activity to expend the additional calories. Experience has proven over and over that this approach stimulates rapid fat loss while retaining gym muscle.

Ca-loric consumption is extremely important and a key determinant in weight gain or weight loss. To ignore the calorie factor is to throw away one of your most important control elements. Conversely, by using this information intelligently you can control with great exactitude the whole process of muscle gain and fat loss. This is the same methodology used by top professional bodybuilders to dial in their physiques. For additional reading and more detailed information on the specifics of diet con-struction refer to the Parrillo Performance Nutrition Program™ and purchase the Par-rillo BodyStat Kit™. The book describes in detail which foods to eat, which foods to avoid, how to construct a diet, how to structure a meal and how to adjust things to keep your body composition moving in the right direction. The BodyStat Kit is the report card tool, able to tell you your percentage of fat-to-muscle. Good luck and don’t forget to count those calories!

Bulletin #75 – Controlling Body Fat Metabolism, Part II

Last month we began our discussion about fat metabolism. We noted that the reason most people fail in their weight loss efforts is that they think dieting is a temporary change and eventually re-sume their old eating habits. They then gain back the lost bodyweight when they resume old diet patterns. In addition, many people will try to lose bodyweight by caloric restriction without exercising.

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This doesn’t work very well for a variety of reasons. In Part I of Control of Fat Metabolism, we discussed some simple concepts related to the construction and design of effective diets that maximize muscle mass while minimizing fat stores. Let’s summarize some of the key fea-tures: The first step in designing an effective diet is to determine your current caloric intake. The easiest and best way to do this is to weigh all the food you consume for a week. Pick a week when your body weight is stable and calculate how many calories you consume in an average day by weighing everything you eat. This dai-ly sum, derived from methodically weigh-ing your food, is called the maintenance energy requirement and is the number of calories required to maintain current body weight and activity level. To gain qual-ity bodyweight, increase this amount by around 250-300 calories per day . To lose weight without losing muscle, decrease your caloric intake by 250 calories (per day) below your maintenance require-ment and then perform 250 calories worth of additional aerobics. Since a pound of fat contains 3500 calories, we generate a net energy (calorie) deficit of 500 calories a day, or 3500 per week. This will result in the loss of one pound of fat per week.

We at Parrillo find this approach works very well. Now that you have determined how many calories to eat, the next question is what is the best way to supply these calories to the body? This issue gets a bit complicated. In general, anyone who is working out and lifting weights (and wants to be lean and muscular) should consume at least one gram of protein per pound of body weight each day. Some people do better with two grams per pound per day, but one gram should be the minimum for a high intensity weight trainer. When you are gaining weight you will have a surplus of calories. These ex-tra calories help “spare” protein, meaning excessive calories prevent protein from being burned as fuel. When you are losing weight you are calorie deficient and don’t have extra nutrients lying around. You are prone to lose muscle and utilize protein as a fuel source when you are losing weight. When this occurs, you lose muscle as well as fat.

Therefore you need more protein when dieting than when gaining weight. It sounds paradoxical at first but there is great logic to it. A good rule of thumb would be to take in one to 1½ grams of protein per pound of body weight each day during weight gain or weight main-tenance. For fat loss (not muscle loss) ingest one-and-a-half to two grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. After you have determined the caloric value of your protein requirement, allot another 5-10% of daily calories to fat. After you have determined the number of calories contributed by protein and fat, derive the rest from carbohydrates. We will explain later how to incorporate CapTri® into your diet. The Parrillo Nutrition Manual contains detailed instructions on how to do these calculations and comes with a food scale so you can control everything precisely . Good protein sources include egg whites, fish, chicken breasts and turkey breasts with the skin removed. You will derive tremendous benefit from using our Optimized Whey™ protein powder. It has an ‘optimal’ amino acid profile, one that supports muscular growth and speeds recovery. We divide carbohydrates into two categories: starches and fibrous vegetables.

Good starches include corn, peas, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, oatmeal, and the like. Avoid refined or processed carbohydrates such as bread and pasta. And stay away from simple sugars. Good vegetables include salad greens, green beans, broccoli, spinach, carrots, and so on. Essentially, any veg-etable is OK, except avocados and nuts, which are high in fat. The Parrillo Nutri-tion Manual contains a food composition guide that lists the best foods for our pur-poses: foods optimal for gaining muscle and losing fat. Respective nutrient values are included . Our final issue concerns meal structure and pattern . We recommend each meal contain a balance of nutrients: a portion of protein, some starchy carbohydrates and a fibrous vegetable of some sort. The pro-tein and fiber will slow down the release of glucose into the blood, thereby helping to control insulin levels. We ask that you divide your daily allotment of calories as evenly as possible into six (or more) meals, spaced evenly throughout the day. Try to eat a small, balanced meal every two to three hours. We find that six small meals will result in a leaner physique then the traditional three square meals.

Three meals present twice as large a digestive task as six smaller meals despite equal nutritional makeup and caloric intake. Be sure and divide your protein requirements into near equal portions at each meal. You are free to choose different food items for each meal, but meals need to have ap-proximately the same number of calories and protein. One exception to this rule of caloric balance is during pre-contest dieting when you may find it helpful to eliminate starch from your last meal of the day . CapTri® is a very interesting compound. CapTri®, a special fat, has a different chemical structure than conventional fat. This unique structure causes CapTri® to follow a different metabolic pathway than fat and as a result, CapTri® is digested differently by the body. CapTri® is a con-centrated source of calories: 8.3 calories per gram. But in contrast to regular fat, CapTri® has virtually no tendency to be stored as body fat. Instead, it is rapidly converted to ketones in the liver. These ketones are used immediately as fuel.

This source of immediate energy thereby spares protein and carbohydrate and helps improve protein and glycogen retention. CapTri® can be used in two ways: to gain weight, simply add a tablespoon or two to your regular food. This will increase the caloric content of your diet, promoting weight gain. Since CapTri® has less of a tendency to be stored as body fat, these extra calories will not show up as fat. To promote fat loss we advise that you remove some starch from your diet and replace it with calorically equal amounts of CapTri®. CapTri® generates a higher thermogenic effect than carbohydrates. This means that some of the calories from CapTri® get converted to body heat, the more heat your body produces the higher the metabolic rate and energy expendi-ture. If more of the calories you eat are expended as energy, fewer are available to be retained as body fat, so you’ll lose more fat. By decreasing the carbohydrate content of a diet we reduce insulin levels, further promoting fat loss. The 40-30-30 diet (protein/carb/fat) is very popular right now. This approach reduces insulin levels and promotes fat loss and is actually not a bad idea - although deriving 30% of your calories from conventional fat is in itself problematic. We at Parrillo Performance find that much better results are achieved if CapTri® is used as a fat source.

This allows us to reduce carbohydrates (and therefore insulin levels) without restrict-ing calories too severely. The Parrillo Nutrition Manual contains detailed in-structions on this issue and is the single most useful muscle building and weight loss tool available. You will get far better results from your supplements if they are used in conjunction with a proper diet. Diet is the foundation to proper nutrition. Last month I promised some discussion on the biochemistry of fat metabolism. Rather than making this a purely techni-cal exercise, I decided to emphasize the practical aspects and how we can use this information to attain our physique goals. Let’s start with a discussion of how dietary fat is metabolized – then some ex-planation on how body fat is metabolized and finally some discussion on how fatty acids are used by muscle for fuel. Oil and water don’t mix. Your blood, and indeed your whole body, is mostly water. Fats and oils cannot simply float through your blood stream - because they don’t dis-solve in water. Fats are carried by special protein particles made in the intestines and the liver.

Most of the fat we eat is in the form of triglycerides. A triglycer-ide is a glycerol molecule (three-carbon alcohol) with three fatty acid molecules attached: one to each carbon atom of the glycerol backbone. In the small intestine the fatty acids are cleaved from the glyc-erol by an enzyme called lipase which is made in the pancreas. The fatty acids are then absorbed by the intestinal cells and re-combined with glycerol to re-form triglycerides . It sounds crazy, but I think the problem is that native triglycerides are too big to make their way inside the cell. Next, triglycerides are combined with carrier proteins, which act like a detergent and help the fat become soluble – dissolve - in the blood. These particles of triglyc-eride and protein are called chylomicrons and are then released into the lymphatic system . The lymphatic system is a net-work of vessels much like the blood ves-sels - except instead of carrying blood it transports fluids between tissues and ulti-mately dumps it into the blood stream via the thoracic duct .

The thoracic duct is the body’s largest lymph channel and empties into the subclavian vein on the right side of the neck. Once chylomicrons enter the blood stream they are transported to adi-pose tissue and stored as body fat. After a meal, carbohydrates are the preferred en-ergy source and fat is stored as body fat. When carbohydrate stores are depleted, the body will burn bodyfat. This is a ma-jor reason why we encourage a low fat diet. Once fat arrives at an adipose (fat) cell, an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase (LPL) cleaves off the fatty acids, which is then absorbed by the fat cell. Once inside, they are re-combined with glycerol and the triglyceride is stored for later use. It is interesting to note that while fats are transported by the lymphatic system to the bloodstream and then to fat cells, protein and carbohydrate follow a differ-ent route . They are transported directly to the liver by a special vein that runs from the small intestine to the liver called the portal vein.

The liver gets “first dibs” on protein and carbohydrate. Why? Because it has an important job to do: make pro-teins needed for the blood. The liver wants these amino acids first, to make sure it can do its work. The proteins that the liver makes have priorities: they are required for life and are more important (to survival) than muscle. This is why amino acids go straight to the liver in-stead of to muscle cells. Also, the liver wants the carbohydrate because it needs to store glycogen, which helps maintain blood glucose levels for the operation of the brain. Between meals, after blood sugar levels start to drop, the liver slowly releases glucose to keep the level rela-tively constant. Without this procedure, you would pass out, go into a coma and eventually die if you went for more than a few hours without a meal. Not good. The fats bypass the liver and end up getting delivered to the fat cells for storage. It is as if the liver is saying: “I don’t need that fat, it’s just for storage.” So you can un-derstand why we at Parrillo Performance are not fond of dietary fat. Less is better. Another interesting thing about Cap-Tri® is that is it transported to the liver just like carbohydrate. Because of its unique molecular structure it does not require incorporation into chylomicrons for transport.

Instead it is taken directly to the liver where it is broken down into small fragments called ketones which are then released into the bloodstream. These ketones are then used as fuel by muscle, helping to spare carbohydrates and amino acids. Once a fatty acid is stored by a fat cell, it just sits there. It doesn’t do any-thing. It waits until your carbs run low and you need some energy. Insulin blocks the release of fatty acids from fat cells. Once blood sugar levels fall and insulin declines, this inhibition is removed. You begin to use fat as energy to a significant degree. The most potent stimulus for release of fatty acids is norepinephrine (NE). This is a neurotransmitter released from the sympathetic nervous system that stimulates fat cells to release fatty acids. NE activates an enzyme called hormone sensitive lipase, which then breaks down the triglyceride and releases the fatty acids. The fatty acids are delivered by the blood to the muscles and then burned for fuel. When a fatty acid arrives at a muscle cell, it is absorbed and has to wait inside the belly of the cell. Fatty acids are con-verted to energy in a sub-cellular organ-elle called the mitochondria .

These mi-tochondria are like little furnaces inside the cells. In the mitochondria is where food molecules are burned to release energy . They contain enzymes that break down food molecules and combine them with oxygen to produce energy, which is then used to make ATP. (We have discussed ATP in detail before. Refer to your old issues of the press). Fatty acids are unable to enter the mitochondria by themselves. They have to be transported across the mem-brane by a special carrier system called the carnitine shuttle. The problem with the carnitine shuttle is it is inhibited by one of the by-products of carbohydrate metabolism. The shuttle is not very ac-tive if carbohydrates are available. This is another reason why fat metabolism pro-ceeds at a low level until carbohydrates are extensively depleted. You should think of body fat as en-ergy insurance. Your body prefers to use carbohydrate as energy (Hey! – so why not feed it carbohydrates!) and will do so as long as carbs are available. Once the available carbohydrates are depleted, energy substrate utilization switches over to fat. Your stored body fat keeps things going when you run out of carbs. Lesson two: dietary fat is automatically stored as body fat - by and large. So feed your body small frequent meals, give it quality carbs and protein and limit dietary fat. It makes sense and it works. CapTri® is a differ-ent animal from regular fat and behaves completely differently. CapTri® acts like a carbohydrate and does not induce much insulin release . These properties, plus the thermogenic considerations, make CapTri® a very useful tool for anyone wanting to maximize muscle or minimize bodyfat

References

1. For more information about the physi-ology of fat metabolism, refer to Guyton AC and Hall JE. Textbook of Medical Physiology. W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1996.

2. For details about the biochemistry of fat metabolism, consult Devlin TM. Textbook of Biochemistry with Clini-cal Correlations. Wiley-Liss, New York, 1992 .

3. For detailed information about how to construct your diet for optimal body composition, refer to the Parrillo Perfor-mance Nutrition Manual.

Bulletin #64 – Unlocking the Mystery of Fat Loss and Muscle Gain, Part I

Whether you’re a competitive body-builder or just someone trying to get in shape, Parrillo Performance is here to show you how to achieve your best condition ever. We’re the only ones whose program is based on a foundation of solid nutrition from healthy foods and a commitment to consistent training, rather than on some miracle supplement or powder. We show you how to keep producing results month after month, year after year. The truth is, the biggest key to your suc-cess is you. Only you can do what it takes to achieve your dream physique. We can tell you what to do, but we can’t do it for you. The first step is to pick specific goals and to get motivated to do whatever it takes to achieve them. The keys to bodybuilding success and physique transformation are motivation, dedica-tion, consistency, and hard work. Notice that these are all personal qualities that only you can provide-and also notice that supplements and training routines were not mentioned. There are no magic tricks.

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There are no shortcuts. There is no easy way. If this was easy, everyone would look great. I’ve found that people who pick specific goals are more likely to get results than people who just have a general idea of what they want to achieve. It’s not enough to say that you want to get in shape this year, or you want to gain some muscle, or that you want to get stronger. You need to be more specific. A good place to start is to take a “personal inventory” using the BodyStat Kit™. Record your weight, percent fat, pounds lean mass, and pounds of fat. Pick a goal body weight and body composition and a target date for when you plan to achieve this result. If you put on some fat over the holidays and want to get in shape, exactly how many pounds of fat do you need to lose, and when do you want to arrive at your goal? For example let’s say right now you weigh 205 pounds at 14 percent bodyfat. That means you’re carry-ing about 29 pounds of fat (205 X 0.14).

And your goal is to be in shape for your vacation in June. Last summer you got down to nine percent bodyfat, and this year you want to show up at the beach ripped at seven percent fat. This will be the best shape you’ve ever been in. To calculate your goal weight first determine your pres-ent lean body mass, which here would be 205 - 29 = 176 (lean mass equals total body weight minus pounds of fat). Next divide your lean body mass by the quantity (1 - percent fat), so if your goal is 7% body fat (7% = 0.07) your target weight would be 176/(1 - 0.07) = 176/0.93 = 189. This means that if your present lean mass stays the same, at a goal body weight of 189 you would be seven percent fat. Next calculate how many pounds you need to lose. Here that would be 205 - 189 = 16 pounds. I recommend that you lose fat at the rate of one pound per week for optimal results, and never greater than two pounds per week. If you lose weight faster than this you will lose a lot of muscle along with the fat. This means you would need to allow 16 weeks to lose 16 pounds, in this example.

Further-more I suggest after about ten weeks of dieting you take a two week break and gain a couple pounds. If you remain in an energy deficit for too long this will decrease your meta-bolic rate and your rate of fat loss. I have found that people start to lose muscle after awhile if they diet for too long. So for every 10 weeks of dieting I think you should take two weeks off and gain two pounds. During this two week period continue to eat clean, and increase calories mainly by eat-ing more complex carbohydrates. Most of the weight you gain should be muscle, and this should also give a boost to your thyroid hormone levels. Prolonged low calorie di-eting, particularly low carbohydrate diets, will decrease thyroid hormone levels and metabolic rate. Finally, give yourself two weeks at the end to fine tune things. After losing the fat you’ll actually look better if you increase calories for a week or two and fill out your glycogen stores. So to lose 16 pounds of fat you should plan on a total of 20 weeks. If you lose two pounds a week the whole thing could be done in 10 weeks, but be careful not to lose lean mass. If you want to lose two pounds a week I would suggest using Muscle Amino Formula™ (our branched chain amino acid formula) to help minimize catabolism of muscle protein . After deciding that you want to lose a pound a week for 10 weeks, you can then take the next step in planning what to do. Since a pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, to lose a pound a week you need to achieve a net energy (calorie) deficit of 500 calories per day.

Probably the most effective way to do this is by combining a modest decrease in calorie intake with an increase in aerobic exercise activity. For example you may want to decrease energy intake by 250 calo-ries a day while performing 250 calories of additional exercise activity. The combined result is an overall energy deficit of 500 calories per day, which will bring about loss of one pound of fat per week. It is best to do your aerobics first thing in the morn-ing before breakfast on an empty stomach. This is the time of day when your glycogen levels are lowest, causing your body to rely more heavily on fat stores as fuel. You can create a similar plan for whatever your goal is – losing fat, gaining muscle, achieving a desired body weight or body fat percentage – the point is just to be specific. Know how many pounds of fat you want to lose, or how many pounds of muscle you have to gain, and what time with which frame you have to work. I picked fat loss as an example here because that’s a popular goal this time of year. Calculate how many pounds of fat you need to lose, and this will tell you how many weeks to plan on to achieve your goal. If you have to be ready for an event on a certain date, such as a con-test or a photo shoot or a trip to the beech, this will allow you to determine when you need to start your program. Of course you need to know your body composition to do this. Probably the most convenient way to do this is with the BodyStat Kit™. This device consists of a set of precision skinfold calipers and an instruction manual telling you how to determine bodyfat percentage.

The manual also includes instructions on how to modify your training and nutrition program to keep making progress in the right direction. Knowing your body compo-sition is one of the most fundamental facts in bodybuilding, and following how this changes in response to different training and nutrition programs is key to making longterm progress. If you keep track of your body composition, pounds of lean mass and pounds of fat, this will help you figure out which training and diet changes work best for you. Another approach that works very well for many people is what we call controlled weight cycling. It works like this: The first month you gain a pound a week. If you’re training hard and eating right you should be able to gain three pounds of muscle and around one pound of fat. The next month you lose a pound a week and try to lose three pounds of fat and only one pound of muscle. (Of course, when we gain weight we would prefer for it all to be muscle, and when we lose weight we want it all to be fat. However, in reality the two usu-ally go together).

The net result after two months is that you’ve gained two pounds of muscle and lost two pounds of fat. Over a year’s time this adds up to 12 pounds of muscle and 12 pounds of fat, which is quite a physique transforma-tion. The beauty of this approach is that you can do it over and over and keep pilling up the gains. We’ve all heard the inspiring stories of people who have lost 30 pounds of fat and gained 12 pounds of muscle in three months, and although these may be true, the problem is that sort of miraculous progress is usually only attainable by people who start off really out of shape, and gener-ally you can only pull off something like that once. After that it gets harder to continue to make progress. Con-trolled weight cycling offers a way for experienced athletes to continue to grow regardless of their level of development. Obviously there are countless variations on this idea. As outlined above, your over-all body weight would remain constant, and you would gain the same amount of muscle as the amount of fat you lose. If you want to increase overall bodyweight or if you don’t have much fat to lose, you could gain a pound a week for six weeks and then lose a pound a week for three weeks. You get the idea. The point is that whenever you gain weight even if you do everything right most people gain some fat along with the muscle. (Actually, if you gain weight simply by overeating and you don’t exercise about 75 percent of the excess weight will be fat and 25 percent will be muscle, but you can reverse this ratio by a strict diet and intense exercise).

Then, by going on a weight loss cycle you can take off any fat you gained. Furthermore, any time you lose weight you will lose some muscle along with the fat (generally). This, along with a decrease in thyroid hormone levels, will decrease metabolic rate. So by following every weight loss cycle with a weight gain cycle we can maintain muscle mass and meta-bolic rate. So this two-pronged approach really does make a lot of metabolic sense. The length of each cycle depends on your specific goals. If your goal is fat loss you could lose a pound a week for 10 weeks and then gain a pound a week for two weeks, then repeat (if you have a lot of fat to lose). If your goal is weight gain you could gain a pound a week for 10 weeks, then lose a pound a week for two weeks, and so on . Well, all of this sounds good, but as with most things it’s easier said than done. Let’s talk a bit about the specifics of how to do this. We will discuss both the fat loss phase and the muscle building phase. For each phase we need to talk about nutrition, training, and supplementation. Of course, in an article this size I can only hit on the basics. For more details you should consult the Parrillo Performance Nutrition Manual and the BodyStat Manual. Proper diet is key to both losing fat and gaining muscle. Remember that food is the foundation of nutrition and the role of supplements is to increase the cellular levels of specific nu-trients beyond what can be achieved from whole foods alone. If someone tries to tell you that their supplement is the key to your bodybuilding success, they’re trying to sell you something.

The fundamentals for bodybuilding success are proper training and proper nutrition from food. So where do we start? There are a few key pieces of information you should have right from the start. First is your present bodyweight and body composi-tion, and then your goal bodyweight and body composition. Set realistic goals and a realistic time frame. It’s perfectly OK to set some long range goals of where you want to be two years from now, but really that’s too far away to be useful for the short term. You will get better results if you break up your long-term goals into a series of smaller steps that are more immediately achievable and easier to obtain and verify. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but usually people get stale on a particular workout routine and the gains start to diminish after four to six weeks. Therefore it works best for most people to make some change in their workout routines every three to six weeks. This could be a change in exercise selection, the amount of weight used, rep ranges, training frequency, workout structure, tempo, etc . The point is, plan on changing something every month or so to keep presenting your body with a new chal-lenge and a new stimulus. So if you plan on switching around your workout every month, then it seems logical to have some goals for that month. A month is a long enough period of time that you can actually see some changes, but not so long that you get stale. So break up your longterm goals into monthlong blocks, and maybe even weeklong blocks. As an example let’s pick a simple goal: to lose 10 pounds of fat.

At a pound a week, this will take 10 weeks. This gives us some kind of benchmark we can go by to monitor our progress. Every week we need to check bodyweight and body composition to confirm things are going as planned. By evaluating things frequently we can make adjustments to keep things moving in the right direction. The second key piece of information is your current caloric intake, because all of our dietary calculations are based upon that . To determine this, simply start weighing your food and calculate how many calories you consume in an average day. The Parrillo Nutrition Manual comes complete with a food scale, a nutrient composition guide, and Diet Trac Sheets, plus directions on how to determine the number of calories and the grams of protein, carbohydrate and fat in all your foods. You will soon determine the num-ber of calories needed to maintain your present body weight, which we call your maintenance energy requirement, or MER. As mentioned above, a pound of bodyfat contains around 3,500 calories, so to lose a pound a week we need to create a net energy deficit of 3,500 calories a week, or 500 calories per day. We have found that the best results are usually (but not always) achieved by a combination of reducing caloric intake plus increasing exercise activity. You might eat 250 calories less than your MER plus perform 250 calories more of aerobic exercise to generate this energy deficit. The notable exceptions are people we think of as “chronic dieters” who have been trying to starve their bodies into submission for a long time. These individu-als often have tried lots of diets and have a hard time losing weight. Their bodies seem to have adapted to low calorie diets and continue to hoard fat in the face of rela-tively low energy intake.

Sometimes these people get better results by paradoxically increasing calories while simultaneously increasing exercise activity. This seems to help them gain muscle tissue, which in turn raises metabolic rate and helps them burn more fat. Presumably this also reverses the hormonal and enzymatic adaptations to prolonged caloric restriction . During the times when the goal is to gain muscle tissue we need to increase calories above the MER. The exact number of calories it takes to build a pound of muscle is not precisely known, but is probably around 2,500. (Note that this is much more than the mere energy content of the muscle tissue.) Although the exact numbers are not known, it seems to work well to strive for an energy surplus of about 300 calories a day when you’re trying to gain a pound of muscle per week. You may find that you need to go higher than this, but this is a good starting place . Some people gain too much fat if they have an energy excess of 500 calories a day, and other people can tolerate it . We suggest you continue to perform aerobic exercise while you gain weight, although not as much as during weight loss. By continuing to do your aerobics you will minimize fat accumula-tion during weight gain as well as maintain your cardiovascular fitness. A good starting place would be to plan for doing 60 min-utes of aerobics a day when you’re losing weight and 30 minutes a day while you’re gaining weight. Then simply adjust calorie intake so that you gain a pound a week, without gaining an unacceptable amount of fat. For most people this works out to be between 300-500 calories a day above MER.

During weight gain or weight loss we generally accept the 75:25 ratio as being good results. In other words if 75 percent of the weight you gain is muscle and 25 percent is fat, that’s good. Conversely, if 75 percent of the weight you lose if fat and only 25 percent is muscle, that’s also acceptable. Sometimes people can achieve better results than this, but these are usually beginners who start off pretty far out of shape. It is possible, in fact, to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, especially for people just starting to lift weights. However, you can see that with more experience your bodyfat percentage will eventually get very low and advanced athletes inevitably resort to some form of weight cycling. The traditional way of doing this was to gain 50 pounds during the “off season” and then lose 40 pounds during the pre-contest diet, and hope to come in ten pounds heavier than last year and still in good shape. Generally, I think it works better to use shorter cycles. The kinds of food to eat are really not much different for weight gain and weight loss. What changes are the overall number of calories and the ratio of protein to carbo-hydrate. Good protein sources include skin-less chicken breast, skinless turkey breast, egg whites, and fish.

Carbohydrates are best divided into two general categories: starchy carbs and fibrous vegetables. Good starches are potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, beans, peas, corn and oatmeal. Good fi-brous vegetables are salad greens, broccoli, green beans, asparagus, spinach, squash, and so on. The Parrillo Performance Nutri-tion Manual contains an extensive list of foods that are appropriate for bodybuilders as well as their nutrient breakdown. To design your diet the first step is to determine the number of calories you need. This depends on if your goal is to gain muscle or lose fat. Next, limit fat to 10 percent of total calories, and fewer if possible. (Refer to recent issues of this magazine for a detailed discussion about nutrient balance and why dietary fat is more prone to be stored as bodyfat than is protein or carbohydrate.) For weight gain you should consume about one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight each day.

This should come from complete protein sources such as those listed above or from a high efficiency protein formula such as Parrillo Optimized Whey Protein™. Dur-ing weight loss I would increase protein to one-and-a-half grams per pound of body weight a day. This extra protein helps pre-vent loss of muscle tissue while dieting. Then the remainder of your calories are derived from complex carbohydrates (and Unlocking the Mystery of Fat Loss and Muscle Gain, Part ICapTri®, if you’re using that). Be sure to have both a source of fiber and starch at each meal. For breakfast oatmeal is a good carbohydrate choice since it is high in fiber, although considered a starchy carbohy-drate. Divide your total daily calories and protein grams roughly into five or six small meals and try to eat every three hours. With this as a background, next bulletin I’ll talk more about how to modify your program to optimize muscle gain and fat loss and also discuss changes in exercise routine and supplementation strategies .

Bulletin #63 – Losing Body Fat With CapTri

It is well understood that medium chain triglycerides (MCT) have a higher thermogenic effect than long chain tri-glycerides (LCT) and this fact has stimu-lated considerable interest in the possible use of MCT for body fat control. Me-dium chain triglycerides are prepared by the esterification (addition) of medium chain fatty acids (MCFA) to a glycerol backbone. Medium chain fatty acids are themselves naturally occurring in certain tropical oils and are commercially ob-tained from fractionation of coconut oil. Medium chain fatty acids, by definition, contain from six to 10-12 carbon atoms in their hydrocarbon chain, whereas long chain fatty acids are 14 or more carbon atoms in length. Animal fats and most vegetable oils (“typical dietary fats”) are comprised of long chain triglycerides. CapTri® is comprised of mostly pure C8 fatty acids with with some C10s and absolutely no C12s since these can uplink to long chain fats. The difference in physical structure of MCT as compared to LCT (that is, the shorter fatty acid chains) confer different chemical properties to these fat molecules, which results in MCT following a differ-ent metabolic pathway in the body. Con-ventional fats (LCT) are released from the intestines in complex with carrier proteins in special particles called chylomicrons .

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Rather than being released directly into the bloodstream, the chylomicrons are released into the lymphatic system and then enter the blood via the thoracic duct. This circulatory route results in the LCT bypassing the liver and instead being cir-culated throughout the body. Capillaries can bind the chylomicrons where they are acted on by an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase, which releases the long chain fatty acids from the chylomicron particle. The long chain fats are then stored in fat cells where they remain (generally) until they are needed as a fuel source. The basic concept is that conventional dietary fat is not utilized immediately as a fuel source but instead is preferentially stored in fat cells. Fat is the biochemical form in which the body stores excess energy. Fat is, in essence, a storage molecule . So it makes sense that dietary fat would be preferentially stored. In contrast, MCT is not incorporated into chylomicrons and instead is absorbed directly into the bloodstream.

It is carried to the liver by the portal vein where it is rapidly metabolized. Several things can happen to MCT in the liver, but the pri-mary metabolic fate is the conversion of MCFAs into ketone bodies. Ketone bod-ies are partially metabolized fatty acids which are then released from the liver into the general circulation. The ketones are then used as an immediate fuel source by peripheral tissues such as muscle. Another important difference between MCFAs and conventional fats is that long chain fats require a transport sys-tem called the carnitine shuttle to enter mitochondria . Mitochondria are special structures inside cells where fats and other substrate molecules are converted into ATP, the form of energy which di-rectly powers cellular work. The carnitine shuttle transports long chain fats from the cytoplasm to the interior of the mitochon-dria, where they are burned as fuel. The activity of the carnitine shuttle is inhib-ited by a metabolic intermediate called malonyl-CoA, which is generated as a byproduct of carbohydrate metabolism.

This means that metabolism of long chain fats occurs only slowly as long as carbo-hydrate is available as a fuel source. Once carbohydrate levels are depleted, there is less malonyl-CoA around and the activity of the carnitine shuttle increases and long chain fats are more readily used as fuel. MCFAs, on the other hand, do not require the carnitine shuttle for transport, so they are rapidly metabolized as fuel even in the presence of carbohydrate. These properties result in MCT behaving very differently from conventional fats in the body. Instead of being preferentially stored as body fat (as are LCT), MCT is preferentially used as fuel with very little MCT being stored as body fat (1-3). Since MCT can be oxidized at the same time as glucose, this alternative fuel source has the potential to spare carbohydrate oxidation. This could delay depletion of muscle glycogen and the onset of fatigue during prolonged endurance exercise. We talked about a study demonstrating this last month . Your total energy expenditure (TEE) is the total number of calories you burn in a day. (See reference 4 for a nice discussion of the components of energy expenditure, especially as relates to food intake and ex-ercise activity.) The biggest component of TEE is the basal metabolic rate, or BMR. This is the number of calories you burn at rest just to maintain life. Things like maintenance of body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, nerve transmission, ionic gradients across cell membranes, and things like that account for about 70 percent of the total number of calories the average person burns in a day.

Another significant factor of TEE is the thermic effect of activity (TEA) which basically is energy spent in activity, in-cluding exercise. The next component of your daily energy expenditure is the ther-mic effect of feeding, or TEF. This is es-sentially energy lost as body heat during fuel (food) metabolism. When your car engine burns gasoline some of the energy is converted into useful work—making the car move. Some of the energy from burning the gasoline is simply lost as heat to the environment. You know how hot a car engine gets? A lot of the energy from burning the gasoline is simply lost as heat. All of that energy which heats up the engine and the radiator and the exhaust system is not being used to make the car go— it’s just lost to the environment. What happens inside the human body during fuel metabolism is significantly more complicated, but a general analogy exists. When your body burns food as fuel some of the energy which is produced is captured as ATP and can be used to power the body, but some of it is simply lost as body heat and dissipated into the environ-ment. The proportion of the food energy which is lost as heat during metabolism is the TEF, and it’s different for different foods.

(See “The Biochemistry of Energy Expenditure” by J.P. Flatt in reference 5 for a detailed discussion.) Conventional fats have a TEF around five percent, which means five percent of the calo-ries supplied by the fat are lost as heat. Carbohydrate has a TEF of eight to 10 percent and protein around 20-25 percent . Different fuel substrates (protein, fat, and carbohydrate) follow different metabolic pathways and are converted into ATP with different efficiencies. So it seems logical that some foods might generate more body heat during metabolism than others. Some people think that when it comes to dieting and body weight control that a calorie is a calorie and it doesn’t mat-ter much what you eat. However, since different foods have differing energetic efficiencies it would seem that all calories are not created equal. Several studies in laboratory animals have shown that diets high in MCT result in increased thermogenesis and less depo-sition of body fat than diets high in LCT (1,2,3,6). Studies in humans have simi-larly demonstrated an increase in thermo-genesis after feeding MCT as compared to an equivalent amount of LCT (7-10). This month we want to discuss a recent paper comparing the effects of MCT and LCT on energy expenditure in humans (11). Eight healthy young men were each fed four different diets on separate occasions and their metabolic responses were mea-sured in a respiratory chamber.

A respira-tory chamber is a special room where the atmosphere of the room can be monitored for the amounts of oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide produced by the person inside. From this information we can calculate total energy expenditure as well as the metabolism of carbohydrate and fat as fuel. Urinary nitrogen excretion is used to monitor protein metabolism. The men were fed four different diets all providing the same number of calories. Each diet contained a total of 30 grams (about two tablespoons) of a fat supplement. The diets differed in the ratio of MCT to LCT in the fat supplement. The ratios of MCT to LCT (grams to grams) in the four diets were as follows: zero to 30 (no MCT), five to 25, 15 to 15 (half MCT, half LCT), and 30 to zero (all MCT). During the study period the men were fed their baseline diets, which consisted of approximately 15 percent protein, 40 percent fat, and 45 percent carbohydrate. Each subject spent 24 hours in the respiratory chamber on four separate occasions, once for each of the fat supplements. During the stay in the chamber each man was fed his baseline diet plus 30 grams of one of the fat supplements at a total calorie intake designed to match maintenance energy requirements. In other words the subjects were fed at a calorie level intended to re-sult in weight maintenance and were not intentionally overfed or underfed.

The 30 gram fat supplement was fed in three 10 gram doses with each of three meals of the baseline diet. This amounts to about two teaspoons or 2/3 tablespoon of added oil per meal . It was found that 24 hour total energy expenditure differed substantially in diets containing 15 and 30 grams of MCT, with average increases of 38 and 113 calories per day respectively as compared to the diet providing only LCT. The diet provid-ing five grams of MCT supplement dur-ing the 24 hour period (about a teaspoon) did not show an effect. Thus there seems to be a dose-dependent increase in energy expenditure—diets providing more MCT result in higher metabolic rate. No differ-ence was seen in respiratory quotient or in nitrogen excretion, indicating that the overall balance between carbohydrate, fat, and protein metabolism was not af-fected—just the total energy expenditure. When fed the 30 gram MCT supplement, the subjects’ metabolic rates increased from between 64 to 180 calories per day, with an average increase of 113 calories per day. This was statistically significant (p < 0.001). This amounts to roughly a five percent increase in metabolic rate by switching from the LCT diet to the MCT-containing diet. We find this remarkable especially considering the small amount of MCT used in this study.

They used a total of 30 grams divided among three meals, which is about 2/3 of a tablespoon per meal. It should be noted that within the range studied, an increase in the amount of MCT resulted in an increase in metabolic rate. It seems reasonable that an even larger effect might be seen if larger amounts of MCT are employed.  (Actually, this has been observed in other studies. One of the main purposes of this paper was to examine if diets containing small amounts of MCT would be effective in increasing metabolic rate.) We usually recommend people use between one and three tablespoons of MCT per meal to see a real effect, and most of our athletes eat more than three meals per day . This paper is important in demonstrating that a significant increase in metabolic rate can be achieved by incorporating as little as two tablespoons of MCT per day into the diet . So how does a diet containing MCT increase energy expenditure and meta-bolic rate? There are probably a couple of mechanisms at work. As we discussed earlier, conventional fats are preferen-tially routed for storage in adipose depots, a process which does not consume much energy . MCTs on the other hand are rap-idly metabolized and some of their energy is lost as heat during nutrient processing .

Another factor which may be responsible for the increase in metabolic rate seen with MCT feeding could be activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). In the present study they observed an in-crease in 24 hour urinary norepinephrine excretion with increasing MCT to LCT ratio in the diet, suggesting possible acti-vation of the sympathetic nervous system by MCT (11). Interestingly, in rats fed MCT the increase in metabolic rate could by blocked by propanolol, a drug which blocks the SNS. The SNS is definitely involved in controlling metabolic rate and fat metabolism, and may in part be responsible for the increase in metabolic rate seen with MCT. Exactly how this effect is mediated is not clear, but it is known that SNS activity is stimulated by 3-hydroxybutyrate, one of the ketone bodies produced by MCT metabolism. At this point it is important to discuss the right way and the wrong way to use MCT. (Our concern here is with potential uses of MCT to affect changes in body composition. Last month we talked about how to use MCT to enhance endurance performance, which is a totally different topic.) If your goal is to gain weight, then it is as simple as adding CapTri® to your baseline diet. This will add extra calories to your diet and promote weight gain.

The beauty of CapTri® is that it has very little tendency to be stored as body fat, so you can increase calories and gain weight while minimizing fat accumulation. Keep in mind if you are in a calorie surplus and gaining weight that any conventional fat (LCT) you consume will be very prone to be stored as body fat. Any time you are gaining weight this means you are in a net positive energy balance—a calorie sur-plus. If any of those calories are supplied as long chain fats, then they will simply be stored as body fat. So to properly use CapTri® to promote weight gain, simply add it to your food to supply extra calo-ries, but be sure to minimize your intake of regular fat first and do your aerobics to burn off any excess fat. To use CapTri® to promote loss of body fat, it’s not as simple as just pouring some CapTri® onto your food. Some people have this misconception. There’s nothing magical about CapTri® that makes you burn more calories than you eat or any-thing like that. It’s that a higher propor-tion of the calories from CapTri® are lost as body heat as compared to other foods and therefore fewer calories are available to be retained as body weight. This results in greater reliance on stored body fat as a fuel source. So the idea is to replace a giv-en number of calories from conventional fat with an equivalent number of calories from CapTri®. For example, to achieve the results seen in this paper you would remove 30 grams of conventional fat from your diet and replace these with 30 grams of CapTri®.

CapTri® has a much higher thermogenic effect than regular fat and is much less prone to be stored as body fat, so by substituting CapTri® for regular fat this should increase energy expenditure and possibly over time reduce body fat levels. If you have already minimized your intake of conventional fat as much as possible, you could next try substitut-ing CapTri® for an equivalent amount of carbohydrate calories. This, theoretically, should further increase energy expendi-ture. This strategy would allow you to try the low carb approach without relying on conventional fat as the alternative fuel source. Many of our bodybuilders have used this approach with great results. CapTri® is very concentrated in calories, so you really need to weigh your food, count calories, and watch what you’re do-ing. But if you use it properly, you should achieve very good results. You might ask if you’re going to re-move 30 grams of conventional fat from your diet, why bother to replace it with 30 grams of CapTri®? Why not just cut out the calories? Won’t that work even better? Such an approach would result in faster overall weight loss, at least initially. However we have found that if people cut calories too much they end up losing muscle mass .

This ultimately results in de-creased metabolic rate and energy expen-diture. On low calorie diets your metabo-lism slows down and eventually weight loss grinds to a halt. By keeping energy intake up, this helps keep the metabolic rate from declining. The key is to provide the calories in a form which minimizes body fat accumulation. Of course, a small decrease in calorie intake is reasonable and can be very effective in promoting use of stored body fat as energy. The point is that you have to rely on something as your energy source, and we have found that many people can get a good result by minimizing conventional fats, consuming one to one-and-a-half grams of protein per pound of body weight per day, and then by meeting the remainder of their energy requirement by some combination of complex carbohydrates and CapTri®. The Parrillo Nutrition Manual goes into great detail in exactly how to do this and provides detailed information on how to adjust your diet to maximize muscle mass while minimizing body fat. You should also consult the BodyStat kit for impor-tant advice on how to change your diet to achieve your body composition goals.

References

1. Baba N, Bracco EF, and Hashim SA. Enhanced thermogenesis and diminished deposition of fat in response to overfeed-ing with diet containing medium chain triglyceride. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 35: 678-682, 1982 .

2. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Medium chain triglycerides: an update. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 36: 950-962, 1982.

3. Geliebter A, Torbay N, Bracco EF, Hashim SA, and Van Itallie TB. Over-feeding with medium chain triglyceride diet results in diminished deposition of fat. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 37: 1-4, 1983.

4. Van Zant RS. Influence of diet and ex-ercise on energy expenditure - a review. Int. J. Sports Nutr. 2: 1-19, 1992.

5. Bjorntorp P, and Brodoff BN. Obesity. J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1992.

6. Lavau MM and Hashim SA. Effect of medium chain triglyceride on lipogenesis and body fat in the rat. J. Nutr. 108: 613-620, 1978 .

7. Seaton TB, Welle SL, Warenko MK, and Campbell RG. Thermic effect of me-dium-chain and long-chain triglycerides in man. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 44: 630-634, 1986 .

8. Hill JO, Peters JC, Yang D, Sharp T, Kaler M, Abumrad N, and Greene HL. Thermogenesis in humans during over-feeding with medium chain triglycerides. Metab. 38: 641-648, 198

9.Losing Body Fat With CapTri®9. Flatt JP, Ravussin E, Acheson KJ, and Jaquier E. Effects of dietary fat on postprandial substrate oxidation and on carbohydrate and fat balances. J. Clin. Invest. 76: 1019-1024, 1985.

10. Scalfi L, Coltorti A, and Contaldo F. Postprandial thermogenesis in lean and obese subjects after meals supplemented with medium chain and long chain tri-glycerides. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 53: 1130-1133, 1991 .

11. Dulloo AG, Fathi M, Mensi N, and Girardier L. Twenty-four hour energy expenditure and urinary catecholamines of humans consuming low to moderate amounts of medium chain triglycerides: a dose response study in a human respira-tory chamber. European Journal of Clini-cal Nutrition 50: 152-158, 1996.

Bulletin #61 – The Energetics of Nutrient Metabolism, Part II

Bulletin #48 – Exploring The High Fat Diet, Part 2

As I mentioned in Part I of thisseries last month, any energy deficient dietwill result in fat loss. So the high fat dietwill work for weight loss, providing youeat fewer calories than you burn (it hasto). The biggest problem comes duringweight gain. There are several big theo-retical problems with using the high fatapproach for weight gain. First is the factthat insulin is the most important anabolichormone in the body, and on these cyclicdiets we only get the benefit of insulinaround two days every week. Second isthat during energy excess (that is, duringweight gain) excess dietary fat is prefer-entially stored as body fat. There is nobiochemical pathway in the human bodyfor converting fat into carbohydrate, soexcess dietary fat cannot be stored as gly-cogen. Fatty acids cannot be incorporatedinto protein either. Possibly the carbonsderived from fatty acid metabolism couldbe used to build the carbon skeleton ofnonessential amino acids, but since fattyacids do not contain nitrogen, a nitrogenfrom the pre-existing amino acid poolwould have to be donated to form a newamino acid molecule.

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Therefore, net pro-tein synthesis cannot occur from fat.Thus, dietary fat really has only two quan-titatively significant metabolic fates: to beused as energy or be stored as body fat.(Of course, dietary fats are also used toform structural components of cell mem-branes, steroid hormones, eicosanoids,and many other extremely important bio-logically active molecules, but this ac-counts for only a tiny fraction of ingestedfat, especially during a high fat diet.) Sincedietary fat cannot be converted to proteinor glycogen, excess dietary fat can onlybe stored as fat. By definition, duringweight gain we must be in a calorie sur-plus. This means that not all of the in-gested fat can be burned as fuel, sincewe are by definition consuming an excessof fuel. To gain weight you must con-sume more calories than you expend(simple thermodynamics) and if thoseexcess calories are supplied in the formof dietary fat, then it seems inescapablethat they must be stored as fat.So where have we come so far?The high fat-low carb approach has a goodtheoretical basis for working to maximizefat loss while on an energy deficient diet,but would be expected to result in fat gainduring an energy sur-plus. This leads to ageneral principle inbodybuilding nutrition:Diet composition ismore critical duringweight gain thanweight loss. Duringweight loss, you willbe in an energy deficit.Over a 24 hour periodessentially all of the fatand carbs you eat willbe burned as fuel.

Theprotein that you eatwill be used to main-tain protein tissues andto replenish worn outenzymes and otherprotein cellular com-ponents (that is, for protein turnover). Anyextra dietary protein left over will also beused as fuel. Finally, body fat will also beused as fuel to supply whatever amountof expended energy was not supplied bythe diet. So when you’re in an energy(calorie) deficit, it does matter that youget enough protein, but after that the pre-eminent consideration is just how muchenergy you consume. As a first approxi-mation, it appears as if it doesn’t matterthat much if you supply the rest of theenergy as carbs or fat or some mixture ofthe two, because it’s all going to be burnedanyway. (Actually, it does matter, but I’llget to that later.) So during weight loss allof the food you eat will be burned for fuel,and none of it will be retained by the body(except some protein). During weightgain, on the other hand, diet compositionis everything.

As explained above, if youconsume excess energy in the form of(conventional) dietary fat, it is extremelyprone to be stored as body fat (1-13).Although I’ve had good success with lowcarb diets to lose fat, I’ve never had goodresults from low carb diets in terms ofgaining muscle. I think you need insulin,which seems to have asynergistic interactionwith growth hormoneand testosterone, to geta good anabolic effect.Now back tothe issue of diet com-position during weightloss. Like I said above,after meeting your pro-tein requirement thenext most importantthing is how manycalories you consume.You will lose weight re-gardless of how thosecalories are supplied solong as you maintain anenergy deficit. But notall weight loss is cre-ated equal. Really we’re not interested inweight loss per se but in fat loss, and wewant to preserve as much muscle duringthe diet as possible. Serious bodybuilderscarefully follow their body composition(using a tool such as The Parrillo BodyStatKit) during their diets to make sure they’relosing fat and not muscle. Adjustmentsare made along the way to keep thingsmoving in the right direction. While dietcomposition has only a minor effect onoverall weight loss, it has a more substan-tial effect on determining how much ofthat weight is fat versus muscle.

Whatwe’re trying to do here is prevent muscleloss. In my experience with bodybuild-ers, carbs work better than fat to spareprotein (the technical term for preventingthe use of protein as fuel) during energy restricted diets. In other words, both ap-proaches (the high fat diet and the highercarb diet) work in terms of losing fat, butthe higher carb diet results in less muscleloss during the diet. Overall, you end upleaner (lower percent body fat) becauseyou have more lean body mass remainingafter you’ve lost the fat. Why is this? Thebiochemistry is fairly straight-forward.The brain’s preferred fuel is glucose, andyour body will go to extraordinary mea-sures to provide glucose for the brain. (Af-ter several days of glucose deprivation,the brain can adapt and switch over touse ketones as fuel, but this is not it’s pre-ferred choice.) Following a very low carbdiet, liver glycogen stores are depleted inabout a day or two. (Note: muscle glyco-gen can only be used as fuel by the muscle,and cannot be released back into thebloodstream for use by the brain. Musclecells lack the glucose phosphatase enzymeneeded to release glucose stored as gly-cogen back into the blood. Therefore, onlyliver glycogen is available to help main-tain blood glucose levels.) Therefore, af-ter a day or so of severe carb depletionblood glucose levels begin to fall. Unfor-tunately, fatty acids cannot be convertedto glucose by humans (although bears can,and this is why they can hibernate). Thebody has another way of maintaining bloodglucose levels, however, and this is tobreak down skeletal muscle protein (andvisceral, or organ, proteins too, for thatmatter).

The muscle proteins are brokendown into their constituent amino acids,the amino group is then removed formingan alpha-keto-acid, and these “carbonskeletons” of amino acids are transportedto the liver which can use them to makeglucose. To sum up, if you use a low fat-moderate carb diet to lose weight yourbody doesn’t have to break down muscleto convert amino acids into glucose, be-cause you’re getting enough glucose inthe diet. If, however, you use an extremelylow carb diet you will necessarily breakdown some muscle. This catabolic pro-cess is reduced during ketosis, but it takesabout two days or so of carb restrictionto get into ketosis. So there will be twodays during every seven day cycle whenyou’re breaking down muscle.Another problem with the verylow carb approach is that energy levelsfall dramatically. Recall that anaerobicexercise, such as weight lifting, is fueledalmost exclusively by carbs.

Fat cannotbe used as an anaerobic energy source, itcan only be oxidized aerobically. There-fore strength and energy levels fall dra-matically without carbs. This results inmore muscle catabolism, as the musclesturn to branched chain amino acids asfuel.There are also several technicalaspects of energy metabolism that sug-gest severe carb restriction might not bethe best way to go. Low carbohydratediets have been found to reduce thyroidhormone level, which is one of the chiefcontrollers of metabolic rate. After a pe-riod of carbohydrate restriction (probablyon the order of several weeks to a coupleof months) you will likely find your weightloss plateaus. This is probably due to de-creased thyroid level and decreased meta-bolic rate. The only real cure for this (be-sides taking thyroid medication) is to in-crease calories and add some carbs backto your diet. Unfortunately, since yourmetabolic rate is slow and your thyroidhormone level is low, when you do thisyour body is primed for fat storage andyou’ll likely put on a few pounds of fat.Also, there’s the issue of thermogenesis.After you eat a meal some portion of thedietary energy is released as body heat.This process is called diet-induced ther-mogenesis (DIT) and the amount of heatenergy released is called the thermic ef-fect of feeding (TEF).

Protein and carbo-hydrate both have a significant ther-mogenic effect, but (conventional) dietaryfat has virtually no thermogenic effect.Carbohydrate feeding stimulates thesympathetic nervous system which in-creases metabolic rate. What this meansis that for a given level of energy intake(caloric consumption) more of the foodenergy will be given off as heat if youeat a high carb diet as compared to ahigh fat diet. With the high fat diet lessof the food energy is lost as heat, leav-ing more available for use as fuel (or evenworse, for storage as body fat). If moredietary energy is available for use as fuel,then you’ll burn less body fat as fuel.Energetic and metabolic considerationsexplain why most people get better re-sults using a higher carb diet.So are there any useful lessonswe can learn from this? You bet thereare, some very important ones that canpropel you to the next level of physiquedevelopment. First off, notice that it’snot the carbohydrates themselves thatmake fat loss more difficult, but ratherthe insulin release they induce. Insulin in-hibits lipolysis, not carbs per se. There-fore, by proper food selection and mealstructuring we can do a lot to reduce in-sulin levels and still be able to eat somecarbs. First off, avoid all simple sugars,including not only refined sugar andsweets but also foods that contain naturalsugars such as fruit, juice, dairy products,honey, and syrup. Limit your carbohydrateselections to natural, unrefined, complexcarbohydrates such as potatoes, rice, andvegetables. Avoid refined carbohydratessuch as bread and pasta. Always consumeyour carbs with protein, and make sureto eat plenty fibrous carbohydrates, such as brocolli, cauliflower, asparagus, greenbeans and other salad vegetables, alongwith your starches.

These measures dra-matically slow the rate of release of glu-cose into your bloodstream, which helpskeep insulin levels low. Eat many smallfrequent meals instead of a few big ones,for the same reason. Also, as you getleaner gradually consume less starches andmore vegetables. Start by eliminatingstarch from your last meal of the day.During the last week or two you may vir-tually eliminate starches, but you can stilleat vegetables.So does the high fat-low carbapproach have anything going for it? Youbet it does. The strategy of reducing carbsto lower insulin and stimulate fat burningreally works. I’ve used this approachmyself and it works very well, especiallywith endomorphic type people who havea hard time losing fat. Like I said in thebeginning, my point is not to insult theauthors of the high fat diets. But there aretheoretical reasons having to do with en-ergy metabolism, thermogenesis, endocri-nology, and protein catabolism (see above)which explain why reducing carbs toomuch is not a good idea. The ideal ap-proach would be if we could combine thebest aspects of both diets to generatesomething even better. Technology hasmade this possible, with the developmentof CapTri®.

CapTri® is a specially engi-neered fat, and by incorporating it in thediet in place of starchy carbohydrates wecan lower insulin levels and achieve thefat burning effect of the high fat diets.It’s unique molecular structure overcomesthe problems of conventional dietary fats,making it the ideal energy source for body-builders. For example, CapTri® has vir-tually no tendency to be stored as bodyfat (14,15). It is metabolized in the liverwhere it is converted to ketones whichthen are used as fuel by muscles (14,15).It has a very high thermogenic effect andis converted into energy much morereadily than regular fat. Since it is rapidlyused for energy it has very little tendencyto be stored as body fat. CapTri® is con-verted into ketones, which block proteincatabolism. In fact, CapTri, unlike otherfats, can be digested and converted intoketones even when there are ample carbsalready in the system. In short, CapTri®allows us to reap the benefits of the highfat approach without the problems thatgo along with conventional dietary fat.To use CapTri® during fat loss, keep yourprotein intake high at about one to 1.5grams per pound of body weight per day,then reduce carbohydrate intake and pro-vide an equivalent number of calories fromCapTri®. For example, if you normallyconsume 300 grams of carbs per day(1200 calories worth), reduce that to 150grams per day and add 5 tablespoons ofCapTri® per day (providing 570 calories).A good way to gauge how far to reducecarbs is to gradually decrease them untilyou find that you lose your pump aboutone-half to two-thirds of the way throughyour workout.

This means that glycogenstores are depleted, and this is where youwant to be for maximum fat loss. TheCapTri® diet allows you to reduce carbswithout cutting calories, which wouldslow your metabolism and cause muscleloss. Many people find they don’t need toreduce caloric intake below maintenancewhile using this regimen since the ther-mogenic effect of CapTri® provides a“built in” energy deficit (more of the di-etary energy contained in CapTri® is lostas body heat than for regular foods). Thisapproach allows you to reduce carbs with-out having to use regular dietary fat as anenergy source. I have a problem going aslow in carbs as the other diets recom-mend. I think you should eat some carbsso you can continue to perform intensetraining while you diet. Plus, if you’ve evertried the near-zero-carb diet you know thatit makes you feel like death. By reducingcarbs and always combining your starcheswith protein, vegetables, and CapTri® ateach meal, you will dramatically reduceinsulin levels and maximize fat loss. Un-like conventional fats, CapTri® alsoworks well during weight gain because itdoesn’t contribute to fat stores (14,15).The Parrillo Performance NutritionManual contains much more detailed in-formation about how to design your dietfor maximum muscle gain and fat loss. Ifyou want more information on CapTri®call and request our CapTri® TechnicalReports.I expect over the next few yearsdrugs will become relatively less impor-tant in bodybuilding and precision nutri-tion and supplementation will becomemore important. The next generation ofCapTri® will undoubtedly help propeltomorrow’s competitors to the next level.

References

1. Horton TJ, Drougas H, Brachey A,Reed GW, Peters JC, and Hill JO. Fat andcarbohydrate overfeeding in humans: dif-ferent effects on energy storage. Am. J.Clin. Nutr. 62: 19-29, 1995.

2. Flatt JP. Importance of nutrient balancein body weight regulation. Diabetes/Me-tabolism Reviews 4: 571-581, 1988.

3. Flatt JP. Use and storage of carbohy-drate and fat. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 61: 952s-959s, 1995.

4. Hill JO, Peters JC, Reed GW, SchlundtDG, Sharp T, and Greene HL. Nutrientbalance in humans: effects of diet com-position. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 54: 10-17,1991.

Bulletin #47 – Exploring The High Fat Diet

Over the last two or three years several “new”dietary strategies have been advanced whichare specifically designed to help bodybuild-ers get extremely lean for contests. Thesediets have in common a fairly high proteinintake, around 25-30% of calories. Anothercommon feature is that they advocate reduc-ing carbohydrate content in favor of increas-ing dietary fat consumption. Some of theseplans call for limiting carbs to 30-50 gramsper day, or even less, and providing around70% of calories from fat. This low carb regi-men is carried out over a five day (or so)course to deliberately induce ketosis and afat-burning metabolism, to promote the useof stored body fat as energy. This is followedby two or three days of carbing up to pro-vide an anabolic growth phase. Another pro-gram is more moderate, suggesting a diet of30% protein, 40% carbs, and 30% fat, with-out cycling. There is a lot of science andtheory behind these diets, although the highfat recommendation is quite controversial.Without getting too bogged down in the bio-chemical details, the fundamental idea be-hind these approaches is to reduce carbo-hydrate intake in order to reduce insulin lev-els. Insulin is a potent inhibitor of lipolysis,or fat breakdown.

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By reducing insulin levels(and, less importantly, by increasing gluca-gon) we can take the brakes off fat metabo-lism and encourage the use of stored bodyfat for energy.If you’re familiar with my work at all, you willknow that I advocate, in general, a diet highin protein, high in complex carbohydratesand very low in fat. I agree that hard-trainingathletes need more protein than sedentarypeople, at least one gram to 1½ grams perpound of body weight per day. You mightexpect me to flame the authors of these pro-grams (to borrow a little Internet jargon), butI’m not going to. These people all are veryknowledgeable about nutrition and have puta lot of thought and research into their pro-grams, and so have I. They all can point tonumerous examples of great success they’vehad with their programs, and so can I. Theyhave all worked with bodybuilders and havegenerated champions, and so have I. Sowho’s right?Nutrition is a fascinating field. It’s one of thefew areas of science where highly trainedexperts with vast clinical experience can com-pletely disagree about even fundamentalconcepts. This disagreement about funda-mentals suggests that nutrition science isstill in its infancy.

Why is nutrition still in itsinfancy? Because nutrition (at least optimumnutrition) is very complex. Let me explain.On one hand, nutrition seems ridiculouslysimple. If you just eat a fairly balanced diet,you will live and probably do okay. You don’teven need to know what a carbohydrate is.If you just get some food to eat, you prob-ably won’t have any problems. At anotherlevel, however, nutrition can get very com-plex. At this level, we’re not concernedmerely with sustaining life, but with promot-ing a state of optimal health, increased en-ergy, enhanced muscularity, and extremeleanness. At this level, nutrition becomesone of the most complex sciences there isbecause it incorporates every biochemicaland metabolic pathway in the body. We haveto know exactly how every nutrient is me-tabolized and how this affects cellular physi-ology. We have to understand how food af-fects hormones which in turn control fat andmuscle metabolism. At this level food is notmerely fuel thrown into the furnace, butrather the raw materials we use to sculpt ourbodies. To attain a truly top physique, suchas that of a champion bodybuilder, you willfind that nutrition is the most critical vari-able. It is the area where the most mistakesare made, because it is the most complicatedaspect of bodybuilding. At this level, every-one is training hard and heavy and usingproper technique. You won’t even get closeto a bodybuilding stage if you don’t trainhard.

All competitive bodybuilders knowhow to train. Whether you do an extra set ofincline flyes or not won’t make the differ-ence in if you win or lose the contest, butwhether or not you eat an extra bowl of ricethe day before the show very well could.Races are won or lost by a fraction of a sec-ond; bodybuilding shows can be won or lostby a bowl of rice.The point of this is not to get into argumentswith other experts on bodybuilding nutrition.The point is not to call people names or ex-change insults. The point of this is to figureout what is the best diet for bodybuilders(and anyone else, for that matter) to gainmuscle and lose fat and be healthy. I’m al-ways reading and studying to learn newthings, and I am receptive to new ideas andnew approaches. If the high fat, low carbapproach worked better, then I’d switchhorses.

So back to the basic question: Who’sright?The fact that some people have had successwith the high fat diet and that others (actu-ally the majority of bodybuilders) have hadsuccess with the higher carb diet proves thatboth approaches can work. So the answer tothe question is that both camps are right, atleast partially. How can two opposite ap-proaches to nutrition both give good re-sults? Does one approach give better re-sults? Is one approach healthier? Here’swhere the discussion starts to get compli-cated.Back in the early days, before there was aParrillo Performance, I tried all sorts of diets– everything you can imagine. High carbs,high fat, even a liquid protein fast withoutcarbs or fat (that didn’t work). I varied ma-cronutrient ratios (percent of calories fromprotein, carbs, and fat), food choices, mealfrequency, meal structure, protein only meals,carbs only meals, amino acid combinations,you name it. All the while I was chartingpeople’s body weight, body composition,and strength levels. I tried all sorts of vari-ous food combinations to see what wouldwork to help bodybuilders lose the lastounces of fat. During this time I read everymedical book I could find about nutrition,protein metabolism, and fat loss.

Throughmany years of experimentation and plain oldtrial and error, I arrived at the Parrillo diet,now published as the Parrillo NutritionManual, as being the diet which simply gave the best results for most bodybuilders.So how can two very different approachesto bodybuilding nutrition (high fat versuslow fat) both give good results? One thing Ifound during my years of experimentationwas that different body types respond some-what differently to different nutritional struc-tures. There are three very general bodytypes, classified by general appearance.Ectomorphs are naturally skinny people,mesomorphs are naturally lean and muscu-lar, and endomorphs are naturally fat. (Youknow which you are.) Obviously,mesomorphs have the easiest time becom-ing bodybuilders. These are the people weall envy. They were lean and muscular be-fore they ever started training. They gainmuscle easily. They can eat like crap and stilllook good. All they have to do is cut thejunk out of their diet a month before the showand they’re in contest shape. If you’re anectomorph or an endomorph you can stillbecome a good bodybuilder, but it will beharder because you’re working against yournatural genetic tendency to be either skinnyor fat.Ectomorphs get lean easily but have a hardtime putting on muscle.

They can eat a lotand don’t gain much weight. I found thatthese individuals do better on a high carbdiet with moderate to high protein, maybesomewhere around 25-30% protein, 65%carbs, and 5-10% fat. (The actual percent-ages aren’t important, but they usually workout close to those above. These are givenjust as an example.) Basically, they need toget one to 1.5 grams of protein per pound ofbody weight per day, and then keep increas-ing carbs until they gain weight. The prob-lem with using conventional fats for weightgain is that when your body is in a caloriesurplus (gaining weight) virtually all excessfat calories you consume from food will sim-ply be stored as body fat (1-13). Ectomorphswill find that adding some fat to their dietswill help them gain weight, but they’ll gainmore fat along with the muscle than if theyhad followed a low fat diet. It is extensivelydocumented in the medical literature thatexcess feeding of carbohydrates results inless body fat gain than excess feeding ofdietary fat (1-13).Endomorphs gain muscle more easily, butare naturally fat and have a hard time gettinglean. They seem to be very sensitive to thecarbohydrate content of the diet.

Again, forweight gain the body must be in an energysurplus (excess calories) and the bulk ofthese excess calories should come from car-bohydrates, because this results in less bodyfat accumulation than if the excess dietaryenergy is supplied as fat (1-13). However,during weight loss I found that these peopledo better if they reduce their carbohydrateintake. While ectomorphs need to maintaina high carb diet even while losing weight tohelp prevent muscle loss, endomorphs justcan’t seem to lose all their fat without reduc-ing carbs. They seem to be very sensitive toinsulin, and high insulin levels block theburning of stored body fat for energy. (Tobe more precise, they usually have mild in-sulin resistance, which results in increasedinsulin levels and a hard time burning fat.)Just as an example, some representative num-bers for an endomorph might look like this:For weight gain, 30-40% protein, 50-60%carbs,         5-10% fat. For weight loss, 50-60%protein, 30-40% carbs, 5-10% fat. Again, it’snot the actual percentages that are impor-tant, I’m just trying to illustrate the idea thatyou can shift around the structure of yourdiet to achieve different metabolic effects.Changing the ratio of protein to carbs to fatin your diet can have a big effect on the in-sulin-glucagon axis and nutrient partition-ing.On the Parrillo Nutrition Program you startby calculating your daily protein require-ment. One to 1.5 grams of complete proteinper pound of body weight each day is a goodgeneral guideline for hard training athletes,especially during weight gain.

As you de-crease calories to lose fat, it helps to increasethis to as much as 1.5-2 grams per pound perday. The higher dietary protein intake helpsprevent catabolism of muscle protein duringenergy restricted diets. Next you allot 5-10%of daily calories to come from fat. The re-mainder of your calories come from complexcarbohydrates, which I divide into starches(potatoes, rice, beans, etc.) and fibrous carbs(vegetables and salad greens). You adjustcarbohydrate intake appropriately so thatyou’re either gaining muscular weight or los-ing body fat, as desired. So when you struc-ture your diet this way the percentages takecare of themselves. The times when I citevarious nutrient percentages as examples aremerely to illustrate how the balance of yourdiet can change as you’re working to achievedifferent goals.So I have found that reducing carbs doesindeed help to promote fat loss, especiallyin people who have a hard time getting lean.I don’t have a problem with that. The thing Idon’t like about the high fat diets is that di-etary fat is VERY prone to be stored as bodyfat.

I have literally dozens of research articlesfrom the medical literature demonstrating thisand explaining the biochemical reasons why.Several studies have even demonstrated thatbody fat percentage is more highly deter-mined by dietary fat intake than by calorieintake (1,2,3,4,6,8,9,10). This is a concept I’vebeen talking about for years. So my disagree-ment is not about reducing carbs – thatworks. My problem is with supplying somany calories as dietary fat. Not only doesdietary fat contribute more to fat stores thanprotein or carbohydrate (1-13), but dietaryfat (especially saturated fat) increases yourcholesterol level and increases your risk forheart disease.So how do we do the low carb diet at Parrillo?I’ve developed a very special energy supple-ment called CapTri® which allows you toutilize the power of the low carb diet withoutresorting to using regular fat as a foodsource. CapTri® is a specially engineeredfat with a unique molecular structure whichcauses it to follow a different metabolic routethan regular fats (14,15). It behaves more likea carbohydrate in the body, except that itdoesn’t increase insulin levels. This meansyou can use CapTri® in place of carbs todecrease insulin levels and shift your me-tabolism into a fat-burning mode. This is verysimilar to the strategy of the high fat dietsexcept without relying on conventional fatas an energy source. CapTri® has virtuallyno tendency to be stored as body fat, whichis in marked contrast to regular fats (14,15).

Regular fat is metabolized very slowly and isvery easily stored as body fat. CapTri® isburned (converted to usable metabolic en-ergy) very rapidly – in fact, as rapidly asglucose. This energy is used to fuel thebody, which spares protein and glycogen.Since CapTri® is rapidly and completelyused as fuel, this means it won’t be storedas body fat. (Of course, CapTri® does notdefy the laws of thermodynamics, and if youeat too many calories too fast you will gain fat, even if you’re using CapTri®. The pointis that CapTri® results in much less fat gainthan conventional foods, because relativelymore of the calories in CapTri® are immedi-ately converted to energy and lost as bodyheat.) Furthermore, fats like CapTri® havebeen shown to increase growth hormone lev-els, which will also stimulate fat loss andmuscle gain (16). So we use a high fat dietalso, except we use CapTri® instead of con-ventional fats because the heat generatedby CapTri® has a much greater effect of in-creasing metabolic rate and much less ten-dency to be stored as body fat (14,15). It’sthe low carb diet taken to the next level.Another key concept of the Parrillo diet ismeal structuring. By combining protein andfibrous vegetables and CapTri® with yourstarch at each meal you can greatly slow therate of release of glucose into the blood-stream.

This in turn decreases insulin levels,taking the brakes off fat metabolism. You willfind that by proper food combining you canstimulate a powerful fat burning effect with-out eliminating carbs from your diet.Let’s talk for a minute about the theory be-hind the high fat diet and try to clear up someof the confusing issues. You’re probablywondering how can the high fat diet and thelow fat diet both work to get bodybuilderslean? Because any and all energy deficientdiets will result in weight loss. It’s a directconsequence of thermodynamics. If youconsume less calories than you burn, you’lllose weight. Period. So a high fat diet and ahigh carb diet will both produce weight lossso long as an energy (calorie) deficit is main-tained. So to lose body fat we need to achievean energy deficit. There are many ways todo this. The best way is through a combina-tion of aerobic exercise and a modest reduc-tion of caloric intake. It is now well knownthat severe caloric restriction results in de-creased metabolic rate, muscle loss, and in-duction (turning on) of fat-storing metabolicpathways. This is the “starvation response”the body generates during periods of fam-ine to guard against starvation. By decreas-ing energy expenditure (metabolic rate) thebody’s fat supply will last longer.

And byrevving up the fat-storing pathways, oncefood becomes available again fat depots arepreferentially repleted to defend against thenext bout of famine. Therefore bodybuildersknow they should avoid drastic reductionsin calories, since this causes muscle loss andslows fat burning.Increasing aerobic exercise activity on theother hand has the benefit of burning fatwithout slowing metabolic rate. In fact, aero-bic exercise causes metabolic adaptationsthat make the body more efficient at burningfat. In general, it is advised that weight lossbe limited to about one pound per week. Ifyou lose weight faster than this you will bemore likely to lose some muscle along withthe fat. Since one pound of body fat con-tains 3,500 calories, to lose one pound of fatper week you need to achieve a calorie defi-cit of 500 calories per day (3,500 per week).You could do this by cutting 500 caloriesworth of food from your diet, or by doing500 calories worth of aerobics a day, or bysome combination of both. I’ve found thecombination approach works best for mostpeople. Try not to cut your caloric intake bymore than 10% below maintenance. (Yourmaintenance intake is the number of caloriesyou consume everyday to maintain constantbody weight.) A good rule of thumb is toreduce energy intake by 10% below mainte-nance and then do enough aerobics to meetyour 500 calorie deficit for the day.

For ex-ample, if you normally eat 2,500 calories aday, cut that down by 250 per day (10%) anddo 250 calories worth of aerobics a day (that’sabout 30 minutes on a stationary bike). Thatequals a deficit of 500 calories a day, enoughto lose one pound of fat per week. This strat-egy is not an absolute rule carved in stone,but is a good general guideline that workswell for most people. Other people do bettersimply by increasing aerobic exercise with-out reducing calories. With a little experienceyou’ll find what works best for you.If your weight loss plateaus it is better ingeneral to do more aerobics rather than fur-ther reducing calories, because that will likelyslow your metabolic rate and thus your rateof fat loss. From body composition studies(use the Parrillo BodyStat Kit) calculate howmany pounds of fat you have to lose, andthat’s roughly how many weeks your dietwill last. If you need to lose more than 10pounds of fat (the diet will last for more than10 weeks) plan on taking a couple of weeksoff your fat loss diet after every 10 weeksand gain a pound per week. This will helpyou put on some muscle and boost yourmetabolism and get fat loss going again. Ingeneral, it doesn’t work too well to maintaina continuous energy deficit for more than 10weeks because your body adjusts to thisnew level of caloric intake and your metabo-lism slows down.

This reduced level of in-take will eventually become your new main-tenance if you stay on it too long.All right, so now we’ve decided to lose somefat and that we’re going to do more aerobicsand very modestly reduce calories. Now youhave some choices to make, and things canget complicated. We could simply reducecalories across the board – a 10% reductionin protein, carbs, and fat will obviously equala 10% reduction in total calories. Or alterna-tively we could alter the ratios of protein,carbs, and fat in the diet. As you reduce ca-loric intake, you should supply relativelymore of your calories as protein to preventor reduce skeletal muscle catabolism. So yourreduction in energy intake should come fromcarbs or fat, but not protein. As we’re diet-ing to lose fat we still need at least one gramof protein per pound of body weight eachday, and 1.5 grams may be better. Onceyou’ve decided on your protein intake thequestion then becomes should you supplythe remainder of your dietary energy require-ment as carbohydrate, fat, or some combina-tion of both. Any of these approaches willresult in weight loss, provided you maintainyour calorie deficit.

Which approach willwork best?The VAST majority of medical research indi-cates that a low fat diet achieves better fatloss results than a high fat diet (1-13). Sev-eral studies even show that reduction of di-etary fat content is as important, if not moreimportant, than reducing caloric intake. No-tably, and in fairness to the high fat diet, Ihave not seen any formal medical studiesusing diets comprised of approximately 70%fat and essentially no carbs. I imagine doc-tors are reluctant to carry out clinical trialsusing a diet so high in fat out of concern forit’s attendant health risks. Most of the medi-cal clinical trials comparing diets still includea significant carbohydrate load even in their“high fat” protocol, so they’re not reallycomparable to the extremely high fat – lowcarb diets which are currently being ad-vanced for bodybuilders.So what’s going on here? By reducing carbs to near zero levels (5-10% of calories per day)insulin production decreases dramatically.This eliminates its inhibitory effect on lipoly-sis. Human body fat is stored in the form oftriglycerides in fat cells (adipocytes). Releaseof fatty acids from fat cells is controlled byenzymes called lipases, which break downthe triglyceride into free fatty acids and glyc-erol. Once released from fat cells, the fattyacids are bound to a serum protein calledalbumin and transported in the blood to theliver and muscles where they are used forenergy. The lipases are activated by the cat-echolamines epinephrine and norepineph-rine (adrenaline and noradrenaline) which arereleased by the adrenal glands and the sym-pathetic nervous system.

The most impor-tant activator of lipolysis is release of nore-pinephrine by the sympathetic nervous sys-tem. Lipolysis turns out to be the rate limit-ing step in fat catabolism. (The rate limitingstep in a metabolic pathway is the sloweststep, which acts to limit the rate of the over-all pathway. It also is frequently the key pointof metabolic control for turning the pathwayon or off.) The catecholamines, in turn, arereleased when blood sugar gets too low andduring exercise. Another lipase is activatedby glucagon, which also promotes fat burn-ing. Glucagon is a hormone produced by thepancreas which has essentially the oppo-site actions of insulin. Insulin promotes glu-cose transport into cells, promotes the useof glucose as energy, promotes storage ofexcess glucose as glycogen, promotes trans-port of some amino acids into cells, promotesprotein synthesis, promotes fat synthesisand storage, and prevents fat breakdown.Insulin is released from the pancreas whenblood glucose levels are high, such as aftera meal, and acts as a storage hormone pro-moting storage of nutrients as glycogen,protein, and fat. Glucagon is released whenblood sugar levels are low, with the primarypurpose of increasing blood glucose levelsto provide fuel for the brain. Glucagon stimu-lates breakdown of glycogen and release ofglucose into the bloodstream, fat breakdown(lipolysis) and release of fatty acids into theblood (this use of fat as energy helps spareglucose for the brain), and protein break-down with release of amino acids into thebloodstream which can be converted intoglucose by the liver.

So lipolysis and the use of stored body fatfor energy is controlled by lipases which arein turn stimulated by catecholamines andglucagon. Glucagon turns out to be a minorplayer since virtually all of the glucagon re-leased by the pancreas is retained by theliver, and essentially none escapes into thegeneral circulation to reach peripheral fatdepots. (The small amount of glucagonwhich reaches adipose cells is too low inconcentration to have an effect.) So gluca-gon is primarily concerned with glycogenand fat metabolism in the liver. These samelipases that govern fat loss are inhibited byinsulin, which means if insulin levels are highyou won’t be able to use body fat for en-ergy. The high fat diets take this strategy tothe extreme by virtually eliminating carbo-hydrates from the diet in order to minimizeinsulin levels. The body can only storeenough glucose (as glycogen) to last aboutone day, so by eliminating carbs from thediet you force the body into a fat burningmode.Our discussion is far from over. Next monthI’ll dig deeper into these diets and show youwhy I believe bodybuilders who want thebest results possible should be eating a low-fat, moderate- to high-carb diet.

References

1. Horton TJ, Drougas H, Brachey A, ReedGW, Peters JC, and Hill JO. Fat and carbohy-drate overfeeding in humans: different ef-fects on energy storage. Am. J. Clin. Nutr.62: 19-29, 1995.

2. Flatt JP. Importance of nutrient balance inbody weight regulation. Diabetes/Metabo-lism Reviews 4: 571-581, 1988.

3. Flatt JP. Use and storage of carbohydrateand fat. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 61: 952s-959s, 1995.

4. Hill JO, Peters JC, Reed GW, Schlundt DG,Sharp T, and Greene HL. Nutrient balance inhumans: effects of diet composition. Am. J.Clin. Nutr. 54: 10-17, 1991.

5. Hill JO, Drougas H, and Peters JC. Obesitytreatment: can diet composition play a role?Ann. Intern. Med. 119: 694-697, 1993.

6. Bray GA. Obesity – a disease of nutrient orenergy balance? Nutrition Reviews 45: 33-43, 1987.

7. Thomas CD, Peters JC, Reed GW,Abumrad NN, Sun M, and Hill JO. Nutrientbalance and energy expenditure during adlibitum feeding of high-fat and high-carbo-hydrate diets in humans. Am. J. Clin. Nutr.55: 934-942, 1992.

8. Astrup A, Buemann B, Western, ToubroS, Raben A, and Christensen NJ. Obesity asan adaptation to a high-fat diet: evidencefrom a cross-sectional study. Am. J. Clin.Nutr. 59: 350-355, 1994.

9. Schutz Y, Flatt JP, and Jequier E. Failure ofdietary fat intake to promote fat oxidation: afactor favoring the development of obesity.Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 50: 307-314, 1989.

10. Miller WC, Niederpruem MG, Wallace JP,and Lindeman AK. Dietary fat, sugar, andfiber predict percent body fat content. J. Am.Diet. Assoc. 94: 612-615, 1994.

11. Tucker LA and Kano MJ. Dietary fat andbody fat: a multivariate study of 205 adultfemales. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 56: 616-622, 1992

12. Acheson KJ, Flatt JP, and Jequier E. Gly-cogen synthesis versus lipogenesis after a500 gram carbohydrate meal in man. Metabo-lism 31: 1234-1240, 1982.

13. Flatt JP. Dietary fat, carbohydrate bal-ance, and weight maintenance: effects ofexercise. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 45: 296-306, 1987.

14. Baba N, Bracco EF, and Hashim SA. En-hanced thermogenesis and diminished depo-sition of fat in response to overfeeding withdiet containing medium chain triglyceride.Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 35: 678-682, 1982.

15. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Mediumchain triglycerides: an update. Am. J. Clin.Nutr. 36: 950-962, 1982.

16. Valls E, Herrera F, Diaz M, Barreiro P, andValls A. Modifications in plasmatic insulinand growth hormone induced by mediumchain triglycerides. Span. Anal. Ped. 11: 675-682, 1978.

Bulletin #44 – Gain Muscle & Lose Fat: Breakthrough News For CapTri® Users

If there were a nutritional supplement thatcould dramatically—and naturally—elevateyour levels of growth, would you want totake it?You bet you would! So hold onto your hat,we’ve got some exciting news that maychange the way you think about your dietand the kinds of supplements you use.Researchers in Spain have released a studyproving that dietary manipulation with spe-cial lipids, like CapTri, can cause more than a900 percent increase in growth hormone lev-els—a peak that is reached two hours afteringestion and is maintained for over threehours (1).Just think: If you’re eating every two or threehours like you should be on the Parrillo Nu-trition Program and supplementing withCapTri®, you can keep your growth hor-mone levels naturally elevated each day.So that’s why CapTri®, a powerful mediumchain triglyceride oil formulated by ParrilloPerformance, works so well when used inconjunction with proper nutrition. Butyou’re probably saying, “Hold on, isn’tCapTri a supplement for adding calories toyour diet or replacing a portion of carbohy-drates when dieting?”Yes, you’re right, but there’s even a biggerpicture to look at when using CapTri as partof your nutrition program.There is evidence that by combining the rightfoods and supplements you can actuallymanipulate the body’s hormones.

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This iscalled “Dietary Endocrinology” and it’s anarea we’ve been working in for years. Butnow there’s research to prove that thismethod of regulating the hormones doeswork and is being used in he field of medi-cine as well.So let’s find out more about how CapTri®can help increase your body’s ability to regu-late it’s own hormones. So let’s start withgrowth hormone.In case you’re not familiar with the physi-ological benefits of increasing GH levels, let’sreview them. Growth hormone acts to chan-nel the protein portion of your meals tomuscle tissue for growth and repair of tis-sues. It does this by increasing nitrogen re-tention, meaning that more of the protein youeat is turned into metabolically active muscletissue instead of being broken down andexcreted as waste products in the urine. Ineffect, GH switches on the cellular machin-ery that makes muscle proteins.At the same time, it shuts down the use ofglucose for energy, helping to spare muscleglycogen stores. GH literally shifts the bodyfrom a carbohydrate-burning mode into thefat-burning mode. By sparing muscle glyco-gen, GH helps yield more energy for muscle-building workouts.What’s more, GH promotes fat burning.

Thispowerful hormone stimulates “lipolysis,”which is the breakdown of body fat stores.Fat is released from storage tissues into thebloodstream and is then taken up by the cellsand burned for energy.Also, the researchers found that the speciallipids did not increase blood glucose levels,so there’s no danger of a hypoglycemic re-action. Translated to real-world nutrition,here’s what that means to you: By combin-ing CapTri with slow-release, high-fiber car-bohydrates as recommended in the ParrilloNutrition Program, you should be able to anincrease in insulin with very little increase inblood glucose. In theory, this lets you havethe muscle-building action of GH and insu-lin, without suffering the fat-building activ-ity that usually accompanies insulin.The practice of using food and nutritionalsupplements like CapTri to manipulate bodyhormones, called “dietary endocrinology,”was developed by Dr. Barry Sears. Dietaryendocrinology asserts that food, when prop-erly used, can be as powerful as drugs incontrolling the body. In fact, Dr. Sears is con-ducting research using foods as replacementfor drugs in treatment of life-threatening ill-nesses such as diabetes and cardiovasculardisease (2).Along parallel lines, Parrillo Performance isresearching the use of foods to substitutefor drugs in bodybuilding and other sports.

The results on both fronts have been im-pressive, particularly the results achievedwhen CapTri is added to one’s diet. Frankly,I believe that during the next century, thescience of dietary endocrinology with revo-lutionize the fields of medicine and athletics.In truth, though, this is happening today. Isee it with the people following the our pro-gram. How then can you fast-forward your-self into the next century of nutrition, to-day?First, understand that the flow of dietaryenergy to either fat stores or muscle is con-trolled by hormones. So is the rate of fatburning. Thanks to research, we alreadyknow that the hormones of greatest impor-tance to bodybuilders and athletes can belargely controlled by diet or exercise. Properdiet and exercise can alter the levels of keyhormones in your bloodstream, and thesehormones act as the triggers for musclegrowth and fat loss.The three most important hormones con-trolled muscle growth and fat loss are insu-lin, glucagon and GH. All are responsive todiet, and of particular importance is GH be-cause of its unique ability to stimulate musclegrowth and fat loss at the same time.You’ve just seen how GH works its magic.But what about insulin and glucagon?Where do they fit into the picture?  At the cellular level, insulin binds to the glu-cose transporter present on cell membranesso that glucose can be ferried into cells to beburned as fuel or stored as glycogen.

Insu-lin also does two other things: It drives aminoacids into cells and stimulates protein syn-thesis—both powerful and anabolic actions(3).Insulin, however, is a double-edged swordbecause it acts to increase fat synthesis andfat storage (3). Fortunately, this fat-storingactivity of insulin is kept in check by gluca-gon. The primary action of glucagon is totrigger the breakdown of fat and glycogenfor energy. The key is to keep insulin andglucagon in proper balance to get themuscle-building effect of insulin andthe fat-burning effect of glucagon.As it turns out, the ratio of insulin toglucagon is a consequence of the ra-tio of carbohydrate to protein in thediet (2,4). Furthermore, additional re-search has shown that the insulin toglucagon ratio is a major determinantof the set point—the amount of fatyour body is programmed to carry (5).Too much insulin will make you fat,while more glucagon will make youlean, all on the same number of calo-ries (5). In simple terms, this meansthat not only the number of calories,but the type of calories, will determinewhether you get fat or lean.Precise dietary control of insulin andglucagon through manipulation of the car-bohydrate and protein ratios, plus the useof CapTri, is no doubt why people have suchgreat success on the Parrillo PerformanceNutrition Program. Often I see people eatingmore calories on our diet than they diet be-fore, yet they’re still losing fat at a rapid rate.

Our program is structured to cause a hor-monal response in your body that turns onthe muscle-building and fat-burning meta-bolic pathways. Dietary energy is thus chan-neled toward muscle-building, while caus-ing the body to use stored fat for energy.Besides protein and carbohydrate, yourother major source of calories is fat. Dr. Sears,in his work in dietary endocrinology recom-mends a ratio of 30 percent protein, 40 per-cent carbohydrate and 30 percent fat (asenergy) for optimal muscle growth and fatloss. These are essentially the same num-bers we use in our Nutrition Manual, whichcontains detailed instructions on how toadjust this ratio to meet your individualneeds.An important difference, however, is that wehave found a tremendous increase in fat losswhen CapTri® is used in place of regularoils and fats. CapTri simply works differentlythan conventional fats. It is burned very rap-idly, more like a carbohydrate than a fat. Con-ventional fats go through a complicatedmetabolic pathway, requiring incorporationinto protein substances called chylomicronswhich transport through the lymphatic sys-tem. Furthermore, before conventional fat canbe burned as fuel, it must be carried into themitochondria (cellular furnaces) by a specialtransport system called the carnitine shuttle.This is the reason why conventional fat isso readily stored as body fat: the carnitineshuttle is not activated as long as carbohy-drates are available for use as energy. Youbasically have to use up all your blood sugarbefore fat-burning will proceed at a signifi-cant rate.CapTri, on the other hand, has a speciallydesigned molecular structure that lets it by-pass these steps that limit the burning rateof regular fats. CapTri is absorbed directlyinto the bloodstream as rapidly as glucose,without going through the lymphatic sys-tem (6). Even more impressive, CapTri directlyenters the mitochondria and is immediatelyburned as fuel, not needing to ride throughon the carnitine shuttle (6). Finally, CapTrihas virtually no tendency to be stored asbody fat, in marked contrast to other fatsand oils (6).Add those beneficial actions to the abilityof CapTri to elevate GH levels, and you’vegot a very potent supplement. CapTri andthe Parrillo Performance Nutrition Programare like a metabolic switch, that, when flippedon, lets you turn on muscle growth and fat-burning at the same time. Let’s face it, if foodsand nutritional supplements like CapTri canexert such a powerful effect on the body,then who needs drugs? Dietary endocrinol-ogy is the future of sports nutrition, and thefuture is here at Parrillo Performance.

References

1. Valls E, Herrera F, Diaz M, Barreiro P,and Valls A. Modification in plasmaticinsulin and growth hormone induced bymedium chain triglycerides. Span. Ana.Ped. 11: 675-682, 1978.

2. Sears, B. Essential fatty acids and di-etary endocrinology: A hypothesis forcardiovascular treatment. Journal of Ad-vancement in Medicine. 6: 211-224, 1993.

3. Guyton AC. Textbook of MedicalPhysiology. W.B. Saunders, 1991.

4. Westphal SA, Gannon MC, Nuttall FQ.Metabolic response to glucose ingestedwith various amounts of protein. Am. J. ofClin. Nutr. 52: 267-272, 1990.

5. de Castro JM, Paulin SK and DeLugas GM.Insulin and glucagon as determinants ofbody weight set point and microregulationin rats. J. Comp. Physiol. Physcol. 92: 571-579, 1978.

6. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Medium chaintriglycerides: an update. Am. J. Clin Nutr. 36:950-962, 1982.

CapTri® – The MCT Metabolic Enhancer

Now Available in Plain & Butter Flavors!

With overeating and obesity on the rise, researchers are working hard at finding a “cure,” so it doesn’t surprise me that there’s more good news coming from labs on the power of medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs) to fight fat.

For background, MCTs are a special class of fatty acids; our MCT oil is CapTri^®. Normal fats and oils contain long-chain fatty acids (LCTs). Compared to these fatty acids, MCTs are much shorter in length. Therefore, they resemble carbohydrates, and act like them in the body, more than fat. As a result, CapTri^® is more easily absorbed, digested, and utilized as energy than conventional fats. This structure accounts for the ability of CapTri^® to stimulate the thermic effect of food and increase body temperature.

Read more

Bulletin #36 – MCT’s – Setting The Record Straight

There has been some confusion in therecent bodybuilding literature about me-tabolism of medium chain fatty acids, ormore precisely, medium chain triglycer-ides. The specific areas of uncertaintyrevolve around whether MCTs are con-verted into ketones and if they are storedas body fat.Since what has been written containscome misinfomation, let’s start with thegeneral and move to the specific. First,when people disagree about technicalmatters like this it’s always nice to checktheir references. If somebody takes a po-sition and defends it by citing referencesto the scientific literature, he might beright or he might be wrong, but at leastyou have the option of checking the in-formation out for yourself to see if he hasinterpreted it correctly. When people com-ment on research results and don’t citeany references, then they’re asking youto take their word for it without furnish-ing any proof one way or the other. I tryto stay out of discussions like this becausewithout any objective data it just turns intoan argument about opinions. Don’t get mewrong: expert opinions are important andcount for a lot, but you can’t really havemuch of a discussion of scientific researchwithout citing the literature.The next general issue has to do withif MCTs are stored as body fat. Thisseemingly simple question has a relativelycomplex answer. Literally speaking, thehuman animal stores fat in the form oflong chain triglycerides, LCTs.

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These aretriglycerides comprised of fatty acids 14carbons long or longer.  Most fatty acidsin human fat are either 16 or 18 carbonslong, with a small percentage being longer.So, literally speaking, MCTs are not storedas fat in the human (or in rats, where a lotof research was also done). Does thismean we can eat all the MCTs we wantand never get fat? Of course not. If youeat too many calories you will gain weight,and for most people, most of the time,any extra weight they gain from over-eat-ing will be fat mass. I’ve said this beforemany times, but I’ll say it again to makesure I’m understood: too many caloriesfrom any source can be converted to fat.What you have to realize is that differentfoods are metabolized differently in thebody, and don’t all have the same tendencyto store as fat. So all foods have the po-tential to be converted into body fat ifconsumed in excess, and what bodybuild-ers want to do is pick the food choicesthat have the least tendency to do so, whilehaving the greatest tendency to contrib-ute to muscle tissue.So what is this business about differ-ent foods having different tendencies tobe converted to fat?

This is one of themost exciting and important discoveriesin nutrition since vitamins. It comes fromthe realization that while protein, carbo-hydrate, and fat can all be converted intousable energy in the form of ATP, theyfollow different metabolic pathways andare thus converted into energy with dif-ferent efficiencies. Chapter 8 in reference1 contains detailed calculations showingthat different dietary energy substrates areconverted into ATP with different yields.The experiments done specificallywith MCTs sought to determine if includ-ing MCTs in the diet can reduce fat accu-mulation during over-feeding, comparedto other foods. References 2-6 describewhat are the best studies done to date onthis issue. These studies are well-con-trolled trails in rats and humans that mea-sure the effect of replacing some part ofdietary energy as MCT. It was found thatif conventional fats (LCTs) are replacedby MCTs this results in diminution of fatstores. This is explained by the fact thatMCTs are profoundly thermogenic, so asignificant fraction of the dietary energysupplied by MCT is released as body heat,making it not available for storage as fat.References 2, 4, and 6 specially demon-strate the thermogenic effects of MCTs,including studies in humans.

Reference 7is an excellent review article on the sub-ject.Let me clear up one minor area ofconfusion on thermogenesis, while I’mon the subject. Thermogenesis, or moreproperly the thermic effect of feeding,refers to increases in body heat produc-tion following feeding.  All foods releaseheat when they are burned. Indeed, main-tenance of core temperature is one of themain functions of dietary energy. Differ-ent foods release different amounts of heatwhen they are burned. MCTs happen tobe profoundly thermogenic, meaning thatthey release a lot of heat (2,4,6,7). This isa consequence of the metabolic pathwaythey follow, which is in turn a conse-quence of their unique molecular struc-ture (7). It has nothing to do with increas-ing thyroid hormone or noradrenaline lev-els and re-setting the thermostat in thehypothalamus, but is merely a result ofrapid metabolism and conversion of di-etary energy to heat within the liver. Thisdoes not mean however that they increase body temperature. It has been well knownfor years that MCTs are thermogenic with-out increasing body temperature (7). Thisjust means that as more heat is produced,it is liberated to the environment. If foods,including MCTs, elevated body tempera-ture then we would get a fever after weate, and if we ate too much we would diefrom hyperthermia.

It doesn’t work thatway.Regarding the question of ketogen-esis, I’m glad that was brought up be-cause that’s one of the key things thatmakes MCTs so special. It is quite cor-rect that regular fats, including conven-tional dietary fats as well as body fat, arenot converted into ketones to any appre-ciable extent as long as carbohydrate fuelis available. This is because regular fatsrequire the carnitine shuttle to transportthem across the mitochondria membraneto the mitochondrial matrix, where theyare metabolized to produce ATP or elseconverted into ketones. The carnitineshuttle requires the activity of an enzymecalled carnitine acyl-transferase I, or CAT-I, which sticks a fatty acid onto carnitine,which then carries it across the mitochon-drial membrane. CAT-I is inhibited bymalonyl-CoA, a byproduct of carbohy-drate metabolism. This means that fatmetabolism is effectively shut down (orat least significantly down regulated) aslong as carbohydrate fuel is available, andthis is the molecular switch that does it.The special thing about MCTs is that theycan enter the mitochondria by passive dif-fusion, without the help of the carnitineshuttle (7). This means they are rapidlyoxidized as fuel even in the presence ofglucose (7). The MCT is burned so rap-idly, in fact, that the capacity of the Krebscycle to produce ATP (literally reducingequivalents, which are later converted toATP) is overwhelmed (7). This means thatMCT is burned faster than the mitochon-dria can produce ATP, so the rest of theenergy is converted into ketones.

Theketones then leave the liver cell and arecarried by the blood to muscle, where theyare used for energy (7). One of the mostamazing things about MCT is that it isconverted into ketones even in the pres-ence of glucose (7). This is a well estab-lished fact that has been in the literaturefor years. Many studies (reviewed in ref-erence 7) have shown a sharp increase inketone production following MCT inges-tion, even in the presence of glucose lev-els which inhibit ketone production fromregular fats.These ketones are taken up mostlyby muscle (the brain continues to run onglucose as long as it’s available) and rap-idly burned for energy. In fact, they areconverted into ATP preferentially over glu-cose, having what is called a “glucose-sparing” effect (7). The ketones areburned first, saving the glucose for later.If you don’t see ketones in your urine withKetosticks while you’re using MCT, thismeans it is working like it is supposed to,and the ketones are being used as fuel in-side muscle cells. If you use more andmore MCT, eventually you will indeed seeketones spilling over into your urine. Atthat point it means you’re using too muchand your supplement dollars are just end-ing up in the toilet.Now I want to get back to a questionI touched on earlier, and that is the issueof storage of MCTs as body fat. As I ex-plained, MCT is not directly stored as fat,but it is a concentrated source of calo-ries.

Too many calories in any form cancontribute to fat stores. How this happenswith MCTs is that they are broken downinto acetyl-CoA, which are two carbonfragments of fatty acids (acetate) attachedto co-enzyme A (Co-A). These acetyl-CoA units then can be re-assembled intolong chain fats, most commonly 16 car-bons long, and subsequently stored asbody fat (8). So while MCT is not storeddirectly as fat, it can be converted intoLCT which is stored as fat, just like anyother food. The point, which has beenproven over and over in the literature(2-8), is that calories derived from MCThave much less tendency to be con-verted into body fat than excess calo-ries from other food sources. This isbecause excess calories from MCT arepreferentially lost as heat through theprocess of thermogenesis, making themnot available for storage (2,4,6,7). Thismakes MCT the ultimate energy sourcefor bodybuilders, since it is a form ofcalories with less tendency to store asfat than conventional fats or even car-bohydrates.Finally, it deserves mention that noneof the scientific studies in the medicalliterature were done with bodybuilders.That’s where our research here atParrillo Performance picks up. We learnas much as we can from the literature,and then work on how to best use thatinformation to make better bodybuild-ers. We’ve personally done the researchover the years to determine the best wayto incorporate MCTs into a diet to de-rive maximum benefit from this uniqueenergy source.

If you’re still confusedand don’t know what to believe, youhave two options left. One is check outthe scientific literature for yourself. Bysiting specific references, I’ve givenyou that option. Second, try MCT foryourself and see if it works. Be sure touse it as instructed in the Parrillo Per-formance Nutrition Manual. The basicconcept is to substitute MCT-derivedcalories for an equivalent amount ofcalories from convention fat or carbo-hydrates. This increases the ther-mogenic effect of the meal, thus de-creasing fat storage. Some people makethe mistake of simply adding severalhundred calories a day of CapTri® to their normal diet without making anyother changes. This, of course, justadds calories to the diet and may in-crease fat accumulation and as men-tioned earlier, excess calories from yourdiet can be converted to body fat.CapTri® is not some magic fat-burn-ing chemical. CapTri® is not a drug.It’s just a very special nutrient that sup-plies energy in a way less likely to bestored as fat that regular foods.As with any supplement, the key isto use it in the proper way in combina-tion with the proper diet. There’s nosubstitute for a sound nutrition pro-gram, but by using supplements tocomplement your nutrition program,you can take your training and physiqueeven further. CapTri® is an extensionof the Nutrition Program. You use it foradded calories in your diet.

But youcan’t just start taking it, without firstestablishing a good nutrition program.So why use it? Here’s some of theways bodybuilders and other athletesutilize  this supplement in a positive way.First, CapTri® can help you gainmuscle, by providing extra energy forincreased intensity in workouts and bysparing amino acids that could be oxi-dized during this training. Second,CapTri® is used by bodybuilders as areplacement for carbohydrates whendieting. The key here is to change theinsulin:glucagon ratio so more fat isburned. By replacing carbs withCapTri®, you increase yourprotein:carbs ratio, thus decreasing theamount of insulin in the blood. Thatsparks the release of glucagon whichpromotes fat metabolism for energy inthe body. And while a low-carb dietalone would tired and lifeless, the calo-ries from CapTri® provide the energyto continue training hard and burningfat. Third, bodybuilder and enduranceathletes alike use CapTri® to increaseenergy for tremendous workouts. It’san additional energy source that can beused in the presence of carbohydratesto keep you going harder for a longerperiod of time.

References

1. Bjorntorp P, and Brodoff BN. Obe-sity. J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia,1992.

2. Baba N, Bracco EF, and HashimSA. Enhanced thermogenesis and dimin-ished deposition of fat in response to over-feeding with diet containing medium chaintriglyceride. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 35: 678-682, 1982.

3. Geliebter A, Torbay N, Bracco EF,Hashim SA, and Van Itallie TB. Overfeed-ing with medium chain triglyceride dietresults in diminished deposition of fat.Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 37: 1-4, 1983.

4. Hill JO, Peters JC, Yang D, SharpT, Kaler M, Abumrad N, and Greene HL.Thermogenesis in humans during over-feeding with medium chain triglycerides.Metab. 38: 641-648, 1989.

5. Lavau MM and Hashim SA. Effectof medium chain triglyceride on lipogen-esis and body fat in the rat. J. Nutr. 108:613-620, 1978.

6. Seaton TB, Welle SL, Warenko MK,and Campbell RG. Thermic effect of me-dium-chain and long-chain triglycerides inman. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 44: 630-634,1986.

7. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Me-dium chain triglycerides: an update. Am.J. Clin. Nutr. 36: 950-962, 1982.

8. Hill JO, Peters JC, Swift LL, YangD, Sharp T, Abumrad N, and Greene HL.Changes in blood lipids during six days ofoverfeeding with medium or long chaintriglycerides. J. Lipid Res. 31: 407-416,1990.

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