Exercise Metabolism Lab Report

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The Effects of Dietary Acid Load on Exercise Metabolism and Anaerobic Exercise Performance, outlines experimentation designed to determine how systemic pH affects exercise metabolism and anaerobic exercise performance. Since systemic pH can be varied through diet, determining how exercise metabolism as well as anaerobic exercise performance changes in response to systemic pH can help athletes make more educated decisions on dietary consumption before competitions. Caciano, Inman, Gockel-Blessing, and Weiss sought to measure these affects by conducting a cross-over trial, using randomized and counterbalanced intervention of participants’ diet. A low-potential renal acid load (PRAL) diet is alkaline promoting, and includes foods such as fruits …show more content…

They were randomly assigned an order in which to vary their diet. Five participants ate a low-PRAL diet followed by a high-PRAL diet, and the other five ate a high-PRAL diet followed by a low-PRAL diet. Diets were tracked by participants and evaluated by dietitians. Each phase of the diet lasted 4-9 days, until the ideal urinary pH was achieved (≥7.0 for low-PRAL; ≤6.0 for high-PRAL). Urinary pH was tested with pH strips by participants and again by researchers to confirm. To test exercise metabolism, participants performed a graded treadmill exercise test (GXT) to exhaustion. The participants started with a warm-up, from which a speed was determined to increase their heart rate to about 70% of their age-predicted maximal heart rate at an incline of 0%. Every 2 minutes, the incline was increased by 2% until the participant felt fatigued. During this test, the reparatory exchange ratio (RER) was determined by finding the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations and tracking the change throughout the GXT. A RER of 0.7 indicates fat as the primary fuel source with 1.0 indicating carbohydrates as the primary fuel source. A number in between indicates a combination of the two fueling the body during exercise. When exploring the effects of systemic pH on submaximal exercise metabolism, data was collected during the test until exhaustion. To test the affect of …show more content…

A randomized, counterbalanced intervention approach increased validity of the data compared to the previous observational study. However, there were only 10 participants who were studied over a short period of time. Increasing the number of participants would be a valid approach to either confirm or negate the most recent findings. In addition, a short-time period is not ideal when studying the body of adults who have had steady eating habits for at least 10 years. Extending the time period over which participants alter their diets would allow more time for adjustments to be made within the body. While the data was determined to be significant, it is hard to tell if one would have similar findings if done over a longer period of time, or if the body would continue to change. Furthermore, testing was not inclusive of the causation of the results; while there are implications of causation seen by the correlation of the studied factors, it is possible that other factors were involved and influenced results. By altering the systemic pH, it is possible that the enzymes responsible for the breakdown of the macronutrients were not able to function at their optimal level. By changing the diet, and therefore the systemic pH, enzymes may not have been able to break down nutrients as efficiently, therefore causing a difference in RER during exercise. However, further research is

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