A new study suggests that elite endurance athletes who eat very few carbohydrates burn more than twice as much fat as high-carb athletes during maximum exertion and prolonged exercise.
On average, the low-carb runners’ peak fat-burning rate was a whopping 2.3-fold higher than the rate for high-carb athletes.
While the high-carb runners were already awesome carb-burners by most measurements, they were still only clocking a miserable half of those on the low-carb diets.
“This shows that we have far underestimated how much fat humans can burn,” Volek says. Volek describes this as a paradigm shift for sports nutrition and we’d have to agree with him
Source [Full study online in the journal Metabolism: Clinical and Experimental]