We know that excessive sugar intake is bad
One thing hasn’t changed. The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly supportive of the idea that excessive sugar consumption is bad for health. Its impacts are well documented for dental health and also weight gain, which can lead to type 2 diabetes. There are a lot of studies showing a close connection between an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and overall mortality. You can read more about the risks in our previous article but one thing is for sure – sugar can be a source of health problems.
What’s the official sugar limit?
The keyword when it comes to sugar is excessive. What does excessive consumption mean? The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends limiting added sugar intake to less than 10% of total daily energy intake. It adds that additional health benefits are observed when sugar is further reduced to below 5%. Similarly, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020–2025 advise that anyone over 2 years old should keep added sugars to under 10% of their total daily caloric intake.
The recommended 10% is not very much if we consider an average 2,000 kcal diet. It’s only 200 kcal, which equals 50 g of sugar. Cyclists need that sugar to fuel high-intensity training sessions, races, and recovery between hard days. You can read more about all the ways sugar fits into a cyclist’s diet here. Those 50 g wouldn’t even be enough for an hour of intervals. So, what are cyclists supposed to do?
Excessive is different for a sedentary person and an active cyclist
Thankfully, the average 2,000 kcal diet doesn’t really apply to most active cyclists. This calorie intake would be sufficient for someone who is mostly sedentary. Let’s compare two examples to see the differences more clearly.
- A sedentary adult man who weighs 75 kg is likely to burn around 2,000 kcal per day. With a 10% limit for sugar intake, he should eat fewer than 50 g of sugar.
- An active cyclist who went on a 3-hour ride that included some intervals easily burns upwards of 4,000 kcal that day, which allows for 100 g of sugar.
But there’s one more thing to consider – the demand for sugar. When exercising at high intensity, muscles burn much more sugar for energy, which increases the body’s demands compared to sitting down or low-intensity activities. How does this affect the rules about sugar?
What is a positive sugar balance?
The cyclist could burn something like 450 g of sugar during a hard 3-hour bike ride. Even though they burn 2x the total calories of a sedentary person, they burn about 15x more sugar because of the exercise.
If such a cyclist and a sedentary person ate 200 g of sugar a day, they would technically be over their recommended sugar limit. The cyclist would burn 450 g of sugar during the ride so taking in 200 g of sugar would leave them with a negative sugar balance of -250 g. The sedentary person may only burn something like 30 g of sugar throughout a day so they would be in a positive sugar balance of 170 g.
Plus, the time when you take in sugar matters too. If the cyclist eats sugar on the bike or just after the ride, it’s almost certain that all of that sugar will go directly to the muscle to be used for energy. If the sugar is eaten outside of exercise, the body has to deal with it in other ways such as storing it or converting it into body fat.
This brings us to the question: is exceeding the 10% sugar limit bad for cyclists who burn it immediately for energy and stay in energy balance overall? Let’s explore that in the next article.
