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Triathlon diet: sugar intake

Dietician and sports nutritionist Renee McGregor discusses the right amount of sugar for a triathlete in training

Renee McGregor

The current guidelines suggest that simple (or ‘extrinsic’) sugars should make up no more than 5% of total energy intake, with a maximum of 30g a day. This includes white table sugar (sucrose), brown sugar, honey and high fructose corn syrup.

If, for example, you’re consuming 3,000Kcals a day then your total amount of extrinsic sugar should be no more than 150Kcals. This excludes sugar naturally found in fruit or milk, (lactose), known as intrinsic sugar.

It’s worth bearing in mind these guidelines have been produced with the general population in mind – and specifically those who may be overweight, living pretty sedentary lifestyles and consuming large quantities of extrinsic sugar.

For an active triathlete, while I’d still encourage you to keep extrinsic sugar intake minimal, it’s more important to think about your overall fuelling considering you’re putting your body under considerably more stress than the general population. If you’re doing a training session of 90mins or more, you may find that you’ll benefit from taking on some simple sugar. Examples would be a gel or a handful of jelly babies to maintain your pace and keep your carbohydrate stores topped up for the duration of the session – around 30-60g of carbs per hour.

Similarly after high-intensity training, it’s important to replace glycogen stores quickly, especially if you have another training session within eight hours. A quick way to do this is to consume some readily available carbohydrate, in the form of simple sugars; a good example is chocolate milk, which contains milk sugar but also additional sugar.

So while we should be wary of sugar, it shouldn’t be demonised – it may contribute to higher energy intake, but it doesn’t actually cause obesity per se. It’s likely that with a moderate to high training load you’ll achieve energy balance, and lucky for you that means you don’t have to be as vigilant over your sugar intake as the official guidelines recommend.

Profile image of Renee McGregor Renee McGregor Sports dietician

About

Renee McGregor (BSc (hons) PGDIP (DIET) PGCERT(sportsnutr) RD BASES) is a leading sports dietitian, specialising in eating disorders, REDs, The Female Athlete, athlete health and performance. Her practice and knowledge is supported by extensive experience of working in both clinical and performance nutrition, including Olympic (London, 2012), Paralympic (Rio, 2016) and Commonwealth (Queensland, 2018) teams. She is presently working with a number of national governing bodies, including Scottish Gymnastics, The GB 24 hour Running squad, Scottish Ballet, Women’s Reading Football and England National Ballet. She has also provided CPD to The Welsh Institute of Sport and Sports Institute, Northern Ireland. On top of this Renee is the diet lead for global ultra-marathon events series Ultra X, part of the Stylist Strong Women series and an ambassador for Bath MIND Charity. She is regularly asked to work directly with high performing and professional athletes that have developed a dysfunctional relationship with food that's impacting their performance, health and career. No matter who she is working with, whether that’s elite, club-level athletes or those with a dysfunctional relationship with food and training, compassion and care is always central to her practice. She provides a person-centred, holistic approach. She's the best-selling author of Training Food, Fast Fuel books. and Orthorexia, When Healthy Eating Goes Bad. She is the co-founder and director of #TRAINBRAVE a campaign raising the awareness of eating disorders in sport; providing resources and practical strategies to reduce the prevalence. In 2020, in order to increase accessibility to her knowledge and experience she started The Trainbrave Podcast and had over 40,000 downloads in its first year. She is on the REDS advisory board for BASES (The British Association of Sport and Exercise Science) and sits on the International Task Force for Orthorexia. Renee has been invited to speak at several high profile events including The European Eating Disorder Society Annual Conference as the UK expert in Orthorexia, Cheltenham Literature Festival, Cheltenham Science Festival, The Stylist Show and Google. She writes for many national publications and is often asked to comment in the national press. She regularly contributes to radio and TV, including News night and BBC 5 Live. On top of this Renee recently appeared on BBC to support as a diet lead in Freddie Flintoff’s ‘Living with Bulimia’ documentary.