Lentils – next big energy food?

January 5, 2007

Kinesiology professor Phil Chilibeck holds the red lentils being tested as energy food for athletes while graduate student John Little monitors a study participant on a treadmill. Photo by Silas Polkinghorne

By David Shield

A U of S research team is hard at work examining a plant that just might become the next big energy food for athletes.

While you might be forgiven for thinkinig this mystery crop is some exotic, trendy food like pomegranates, the team is working on something a little more low-key – red lentils.

Not many people would equate the Indian-food staple with a magical athletic food, but researchers say lentils could become the new food athletes reach for before the big game.

It all started when Plant Sciences professor and pulse crops breeder Bert Vandenberg told Kinesiology professor Phil Chilibeck about his athletic training regimen. An expert on red lentils, and an avid soccer player, Vandenberg said he noticed that eating a bowl of boiled red lentils before his games significantly helped his performance.

Now, a team of researchers from Kinesiology, Plant Sciences and Pharmacy and Nutrition are studying the effect pulses have on athletes. Their test subjects are varsity soccer players who eat a big bowl of lentils, or a control food like mashed potatoes, and then run on a treadmill that simulates a soccer game including the full of sudden starts and pauses. Everything from blood samples to a machine that measures oxygen intake are used to test how their bodies are absorbing the food.

Dawn Ciona, a Pharmacy and Nutrition Masters’ student working on the project says red lentils should be good food for athletes.

“The most interesting thing about lentils is the amount of protein that they have. They really have a substantial amount of protein, and in some of the meals that we’re providing, the athletes are getting their daily intake of protein from just this one meal,” she says.

She added the carbohydrates in red lentils are absorbed slowly by the body, making them perfect food for athletes.

“Theoretically, they should be a wonderful fuel, especially because of the low glycemic carbohydrate. It’s just slow digestion, so you don’t have a very fast insulin response, so you have available energy for a longer period of time.”

Chilibeck says lentils’ combination of protein and carbohydrates has been shown to be very helpful in athletic performance.

“Protein, when you take it along with carbohydrates, has also been shown in some research studies to improve endurance performance,” he said. “So, if you’re looking at it from a nutritional perspective, a lentil meal before an endurance performance theoretically would be quite beneficial.”

Not surprisingly, the lentils’ bland taste has become a bit of an issue in the trials so far. However, Ciona says researchers don’t want to pollute the study by adding any flavoring to the athletes’ meal.

“When you start adding other tastes in foods and spices and things to the meal, then you can skew your results. Athletes eat them because that’s what we give them,” she says.

If they can prove lentils improve athletic performance, Chilibeck says the next step will be developing a pulse-based energy bar. He says current energy bars aren’t very effective.

“Normal energy bars are quite high in simple sugars. And simple sugars, if you consume them and you don’t time it right, you’re going to get a rapid increase in blood glucose and then it is going to crash.”

The study is set to conclude this spring.

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David Shield is a Saskatoon freelance writer.