 Listen, buddy, I know I'm prettier than your wife, but you can stop looking at me, alright? Many people are curious about the addition of carbohydrates to a ketogenic or carnivore diet for athletic performance as well as muscle growth. This is understandable as just about every single professional athlete is consuming a diet that has a high presence of very readily available carbohydrates. We have to consider the human digestive system before jumping into this. The body is only capable of digesting so many macronutrients at once, carbohydrates, fats and proteins. We produce enzymes and digestive juices, but that amount is not unlimited. So when thinking about maximum performance, the thing to hypothesize is how much of each of these macronutrients can the body absorb? Is there carbohydrate digestive capability that is not being utilized when you remove carbohydrates from the diet? This ties into glycemic index, basically how quickly a food is absorbed and spikes your blood sugar, but this is fairly irrelevant mainly because carbohydrates are usually consumed with proteins or fats slowing their digestion. What separates the high from the low glycemic foods is their ratio of starches. Amylose has a very compact physical structure, inhibiting digestion, making carbohydrate sources with amylopectin easier to digest. The more processed the grain, the higher the amylopectin will be, so short grain rice or sticky rice digest much faster than short grain rice and brown rice. From a traditional health standpoint, we are told to consume these slower digesting carbohydrates to avoid blood sugar spikes as well as increased satiation. But again, these foods are being consumed with fats and proteins, so it's arguable that you would just want something that is easier to digest in general. Starches are composed of sugar molecules as starches are polysaccharides. The ratio of these sugar molecules impacts how they are digested and processed. The predominant sugars are fructose, glucose and sucrose. If we take a look at this chart, we can see a large variance in the sugar content of carbohydrates. So the starch is consumed and then broken down by various enzymes, secreted by saliva, the pancreas as well as the small intestine. First, amylase breaks down the starches into sugars and then the corresponding sugar-digesting enzymes break down those sugars into glucose to be utilized by the body. Talking about the metabolism of these carbohydrates and sugars doesn't really seem to matter as what we want for athletic performance is the most available nutrients possible, preferably in the form of glucose because that is what our body utilizes. Three other starch or sugar needs to be converted into glucose to be utilized efficiently by the body and all of these starches like rice, sweet potatoes, oats all require an extra digestive step. It doesn't make sense to me to consume these starches when we can convert glucose from protein via gluconeogenesis or obtain glucose directly from things like fruit, honey and even supplemental powders. The only benefit to consuming these starches that require an extra digestive step might be something like rice that has a slightly lower fructose content but even then it's so marginal that the extra steps required in digestion would probably cause that to be a net loss. But all of these other starches like sweet potatoes, white potatoes, plantains, you name it, the glucose to fructose ratio is just about identical to fruit and honey. And as I said, these foods require an extra step in digestion to break down the starches. But what's the goal here? To restore our liver and muscle glycogen for physical activity. In general, for anyone not doing very intense exercise, there is no reason to consume starches or sugars from any source. But once we start pushing the body's limits, it becomes pretty clear that these foods can boost athletic performance compared to just protein and fat. So if you are training at a fairly high intensity or for a significant amount of time every day, sugars will restore glycogen faster compared to fat, protein or starches. Personally, my best performance was after drinking some goat's milk but I'm allergic and I think that was just because my heart was beating so fast as I was having an anaphylactic reaction to the goat milk. I've also noticed an increase in performance after using honey. It's very important to keep in mind though that this food needs to be consumed on an empty stomach without anything else. What you want to do is fuel your body with the required nutrients then immediately burn them off in a workout. So like today, I had a pretty large meal of steak and fat in the morning so when I go to work out, I'm not going to have the honey. I'm going to work out for like half an hour, 45 minutes and if I feel like I need some energy, maybe I'll have some honey in the middle or towards the end of the workout. You want to keep sugars and starches separate from the fats and the proteins. If you consume them together, you can cause gut issues, microbiome and balance, dysbiosis. That's what you don't want. You want your body to digest the starches and the sugars on its own and for those carbohydrates or sugars to be utilized before consuming the fats or the proteins. You have to understand that when your body is burning fat, if you consume sugar or carbohydrates, it will switch over to burn those sugar or carbohydrates first. I'll be doing more experimenting in the near future with this but the main point of this video was for me to say that I don't think white rice, sweet potatoes, oats, all of these commonly used starches are the best option for performance. They can certainly be consumed and enjoyed as part of a healthy diet but would not be ideal before or during a workout. I know I mentioned raw milk and honey and fruits but a lot of this stuff is anecdotal and subjective. You have to experiment yourself and see which pre-workout meals work for you. I've noticed that even having a steak before my workout can improve my performance. Let me show you guys what I've been doing lately. What I've noticed is that the honey takes 10, 15, 20 minutes to settle and digest in your stomach. So ideally you would consume this like 10 to 15 minutes before your workout or consume it, do a light warm-up and then workout. What I actually did today was since I had a meal, I did some sprints, I ran around a little bit and now I'm going to have the honey in the middle of my workout, then I'll do some more sprints, maybe hit the gym later. The amount of honey is pretty easy to gauge because what's going to happen is the honey's not going to taste sweet anymore. So you want to eat the honey very slowly. It usually ends up being anywhere from 2 to 4 tablespoons before a workout and that will be it. I do add salt to this sometimes. I don't have salt with me today. I've noticed that adding salt to the honey does aid in performance but it's very dehydrating. Both salt and honey draw moisture from the body. Here I just have some raw Italian honey. Raw honey actually has an enzyme in it that reduces insulin spikes but I would just get any type of local honey, raw is best. This is Italian orange blossom honey. And again what we're doing here is just getting an amount of glucose and fructose that our liver and our stomach can absorb efficiently in about 20 minutes. Honey is one of the few plant foods that's still in its natural wild state compared to a lot of other things we eat today. I'm going to do some sprints then I will probably head to the gym and I don't think I'm going to have a meal later. Maybe I will. But there's no need to have this honey more than once a day. You want to have it to increase the workout performance. You don't need it for muscle recovery. It's just for that extra boost before the workout or during the workout. If you guys could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon and share the video if you can. If you guys would like to support me further definitely check out Frankie's Free Range Meat providing you guys with high quality nutrient dense animal foods at an affordable price. We have grass fed beef, organ meats, high quality raw cheeses. We just added Wagyu beef. Guys our prices on Wagyu beef are absolutely crazy. Definitely check it out. We do want to carry raw honey in the future. I'm just worried about shipping it so we might get our hands on some raw honey but it's going to have to be shipped with the perishable products. So thanks again for joining me guys and enjoy the rest of your week. I was like 10 feet away from that rabbit. I have no idea how to zoom in on my new camera. I'm not even sure if I can with my new lens but it looked like I was a lot further way than I actually was. I'm really surprised you know these animals let you get so close to them. It's pretty pretty unusual.