By Kevin Kolodziejski
While pedaling at more than 30 miles per hour and minutes ahead of the peloton, two pros touch wheels. The guy in the back goes down and slides across pavement.
He pops up, duck-runs to his bicycle, and hops back on. His kit is badly torn. What the tears expose and the cameras show is not pretty. It looks like raw meat. Your spouse, who’s not much of a rider, quickly looks away and makes that same face some of your second grade classmates used to make when Miss Johnson would scrape her nails across the chalkboard.
She says, “Oh, my god.”
You smile and then pause a while before saying, “Ohhh, the memories.”
Remembering Road Rash
While you may not possess such a wry wit, if you’ve ridden on the roads for any length of time, you do possess memories of road rash. So take a moment and recall one in detail. Can you hear the crack of carbon fiber? The feel of sliding across asphalt while wondering when it’s going to begin to hurt? The smell of singed flesh?
If you can, take another moment and absolutely revel in it. Not because you’re some sort of cycling masochist, but simply because you can. Remember, that is.
Reveling in Road Rash
And while you’re remembering and reveling, don’t forget what you would lose if you would ever lose the ability to remember — although that flat 15-mile loop around the lake you tend to ride twice a week would no longer be quite so boring. Memories provide perspective and give you a sense of identity. The positive ones give you joy and a sense of satisfaction.
You need to do whatever you can in order to keep your recall.
While wearing a helmet when riding is one such measure, so too may be eating the right diet. For a recent study found if you eat a “wrong” one, one high in sugars or one high in both fats and sugars, you’re likely doing damage to your memory.
While you’re surely well aware of other health damage that can result from eating in either of these wrong ways — like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease — switching diets when they first manifest (often in concert with other lifestyle changes) typically ameliorates or even reverses these conditions. But the researchers who conducted this systematic review of the cognitive and behavioral effects of a high-sugar or a high-sugar and high-fat diet found the part of the memory lost from eating either way never comes back. At least that’s what happens to rodents.
Reviewing the Rodent Studies
But don’t pooh-pooh this discovery published in May by Nutritional Neuroscience because rodents rather than humans were studied. Instead, consider why Michael D. Kendig, PhD, the senior author of the study and senior lecturer in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, tells Medical News Today why animals are often preferable to humans in diet studies. Change someone’s diet for the better, Kendig explains, and “multiple aspects of lifestyle are likely to change.” They’re more likely to exercise more, reduce or cut out consumption of alcohol, and make other healthy changes as a result of “feel[ing] more confident about their ability to look after themselves.” All of which makes it “more difficult to isolate the effects of nutrition specifically” with human subjects.
So Kendig and colleagues screened 3291 previously published papers and found 27 that met their criteria. These studies fed rodents a high-sugar diet, a high-fat diet, or a combined high-sugar, high-fat diet and then followed that diet with one where the rodents consumed normal rodent “chow.”
On the average in the studies, the rodents ate the first diet for 9 weeks and rodent chow — what the researchers call “the reversal diet” — for 6 weeks. “Although extrapolating [these time periods] to humans is difficult and imprecise,” the researchers cite past estimates to suggest the equivalents here are 5 and 3.5 years. And although the reversal diet did indeed lead to memory recovery in the rodents first fed a high-fat diet, recovery of memory was “incomplete” in those fed a high-sugar diet or a high-sugar, high-fat diet, with their performance on memory tests at the end “remaining significantly poorer than in chow-fed controls.”
Such study results might lead you to believe an impassioned plea from me for you to reduce or even abstain from eating sugar will come next. Instead, it’s time to strike a balance and confess to the ulterior motive behind beginning this article with an example of a cycling pro crashing. It’s because when the pros aren’t crashing these days, they’re definitely going faster in races than ever before. And it seems to be, in large part, because they’re consuming more sugar than ever before.
Racing Faster By Far
That’s easily substantiated by citing the dozens of faster winning times in the annual races over the last few seasons. Here’s one so unbelievable you’ll think it’s a typo. The winner of this year’s Paris-Roubaix, that oh-so famous 160-mile race where 34 of them traverse cobbled roads, bested the prior record set in 2024 by 4 minutes and 32 seconds. Yet even more unbelievable is that the last place finisher this year recorded a faster time than the 2018 winner.
Visma-Lease a Bike coach Mathieu Hejboer is just one of the many who believes that better nutrition and “especially” better race fueling is the “biggest reason for the performance leap,” and told Cycling News just that earlier this year. And better race fueling means (yes, you guessed it right) consuming lots and lots of sugar. Amounts you might find hard to comprehend.
For years, the general advice in the cycling world was for a typically built male to consume about 280 calories of carbs in different forms of sugar per hour on the bicycle. Now, however, many pros ingest double that amount during racing and hard training. Yet just a few years ago some of these same pros, especially the ones doing ultra-distances, were convinced limiting their ingestion of carbs and replacing them with fats was the way to go and did so.
All of This Just Goes to Show
All of this just goes to show what I’ve written a few times before. That the field of nutrition is always evolving, so how you eat and exercise should be, too.
That means you need to stay abreast of the latest health and fitness findings and when it makes sense, craft common-sense experiments based upon them.
Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.
A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.
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