The internet’s abuzz with talk of Canadian road cycling champion Mike Woods eating food from a bowl with some 208km still to go in the Elite Men’s Road race at the 2024 World Championships. Turns out it was sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and is believed to help reduce muscle acidity during high intensity activities.
The whole question of nutrition for cyclists is of course much bigger – and choosing what to pack for a ride can feel overwhelming, especially with endless options available. To simplify the process, it’s helpful to ask a few key questions about what type of ride you’re doing, how much fuel will you need, what can your gut stand and how much will it all cost.
What are some of these key questions? 1) How long or intense is the ride? 2) How much fuel will I need? 3) Do I have any dietary limitations, or might an ingredient upset my stomach? And importantly, 4) how much will this all cost?
With these questions in mind, it’s important to understand the different types of ride snacks and the science behind how they work in the body. Whether it’s a whole food, bar, gel, chew, or drink mix, all these products go through similar processes in the body—ingestion, digestion, absorption, and oxidation—before they can be used for energy. Each type of food excels in certain areas but has limitations in others, depending on the situation.
Ingestion
Ingestion involves everything from handling, unwrapping, chewing and swallowing your food. Some of the most important things to consider here are how easy the food is to eat, how much time it takes to eat it, and does it taste good.
Handling and unwrapping can be a weak point for whole food products as their wrapping is not always as consistent or simple to navigate on the bike compared to other products that are designed for ease of use. Chefs, dietitians, and nutrition enthusiasts alike have made recipes and food wrapping schemes designed to simplify whole food options on the bike.
Books like FeedZone Portables and Allen Lim’s popularization of rice cakes are shining examples of using whole foods on the bike in an easy manner. Whole foods help add different flavors and texture to your ride food, and offer a break from the goopy texture of gels and chews. Whole foods can also be cheaper compared to boutique gels and chews, however there’s a time cost and skill requirement for preparation of whole foods.
Ease of use is where pre-made bars, chews, gels, and mixes can have a real advantage. These products are designed for sport, often are portioned to hit certain macronutrient targets, are easy to tear, and require less effort to get down the hatch. That’s worth a lot as taking a hand off the bars or coming out of an aerodynamic position is costly or risky at times and often distracting from pushing the pedals.
Beyond handling these different types of food, ingestion is where the process of digestion starts. With our first bite we are mixing saliva and enzymes into the food while breaking it down into smaller particles, which increase the surface area and allow the next steps of digestion and absorption to continue. A clear advantage goes to chews, gels, and mixes on this point as they require less time to chew and swallow and will therefore be quicker to eat and enter the stomach with more surface area.
Digestion
As food is being ingested, it mixes with saliva and enzymes, before reaching the stomach. The stomach acts as temporary storage, where food is churned and mixed with hydrochloric acid and other secretions before being released into the small intestine, where absorption occurs.
This is also where much gastrointestinal (GI) distress can begin, making the type and amount of food you eat increasingly important.
A key concern for GI distress at this stage is the rate of gastric emptying—how quickly food leaves the stomach and enters the small intestine. This matters because food remaining in the stomach cannot be absorbed by the small intestine or used by working muscles. This is much like a kink in a fuel line: the tank may be full, but the engine gets limited fuel.
Delayed emptying can also lead to bloating, feeling full, belching, and even vomiting, especially during intense exercise, when blood is increasingly redirected away from the stomach to the working muscles, and the diaphragm’s movement presses against the stomach.
Other factors that impact gastric emptying include:
Caloric Content – Higher-calorie meals slow gastric emptying to allow time for digestion and absorption.
Meal Composition
Fats: Slowest gastric emptying.
Proteins: Moderate slowing effect.
Carbohydrates: Empty faster than fats or proteins.
Fiber: Soluble fiber slows emptying by forming a gel.
Liquids empty faster than solids
Particle size – Did you chew your food? Large chunks of food that escape chewing spend significantly longer time in the stomach due to lower surface area.
Volume – Larger meals empty faster initially but slow down as the stomach empties.
Concentration – Also known as osmolality. Highly concentrated (hypertonic) solutions slow emptying, while isotonic or hypotonic fluids empty faster.
Hydration Status – Proper hydration aids in faster gastric emptying, while dehydration slows it down.
Exercise intensity (harder efforts pull blood away from the stomach and to working muscle)
Additional Factors – Hormones, stress, medications, stomach acidity
The digestibility advantage here goes to sports foods like chew, gels, and mixes which are often formulated to enhance gastric emptying and reduce any delays in delivery. For example, isotonic gels contain more water than other gels, preventing the stomach contents from becoming too concentrated. Highly concentrated gels, if not taken with enough water, can delay stomach emptying and increase the risk of GI distress, as water is drawn into the stomach to dilute the concentration through osmosis.
Other products claim to increase gastric emptying through “hiding” carbohydrates in sodium alginate and pectin gels or by using special glucose polymers like highly-branched chain cyclic dextrin that can greatly reduce osmotic pressure compared to regular glucose.
These product differentiators all have layers of science and reasoning behind them (although not always) to find a niche approach to reducing GI distress and helping carbohydrates move on past the stomach to the small intestine without delay. Special ingredients aside, some of the biggest factors that give gels, chews, and mix the edge here is the limited need to chew, and the fact that many whole foods and bars are often paired with fat and protein, which contributes to slowed gastric emptying.
Next time, we will look at absorption to assess how quickly these different foods get from the small intestine to the working muscle.
The post What Makes for Good Ride Food? appeared first on PezCycling News.
