Ketogenic diet and sport performance

Abstract

Many athletes are concerned about attaining or maintaining optimal body weight and composition for their sport. Athletes may want to reduce body weight to ensure optimal performance, to improve aesthetic appearance, or to compete in weight category sports. This leads to efforts to reduce body fat without losing muscle mass and often to nutritional practices that may have severe health consequences. A ketogenic diet is high in fat and low in carbohydrates (≤50 g d-1) and fairly high in protein. There are numerous randomized controlled studies showing that ketogenic diets effectively reduce body fat without causing excessive loss of lean body tissue. The crucial question is whether these diets influence sports performance and, if so, how. Many nutrition-exercise combinations have been studied in an effort to increase rates of fatty acid oxidation and attenuate the rate of carbohydrate utilization, thus potentially augmenting exercise performance. The evidence suggests that increased fat availability transfers into higher rates of both whole-body and muscle lipid utilization during standardized submaximal aerobic exercise. However, despite greater rates of fat oxidation, these diets consistently fail to improve endurance performance compared with a carbohydrate-rich diet, and little is known about the effect of a ketogenic diet on strength performance.