Carbohydrate Loading You lead research scientist WooWoo Pharmaceuticals. As a research scientist, responsible testing efficacy newly designed drugs. However, recently assigned a task. Your task determine effect eating pasta marathon performance.

WooWoo Pharmaceuticals:

Research study on eating pasta (carbohydrate loading) before a marathon

Carbo-loading before a marathon has been a staple of many runners' dietary programs. However, athletes are notoriously superstitious and frequently base their training regimes on anecdotes rather than sound science. The scientific method demands a rigorous process involving researching a particular phenomenon (in this case, athletic performance); formulating a hypothesis; creating an experiment that effectively isolates the variable under study in the form of an experimental and control group; confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis and then retesting the experiment.

The existing literature notes "the practice of carbo-loading dates back to the late 1960s. The first carbo-loading protocol was developed by a Swedish physiologist named Gunvar Ahlborg after he discovered a positive relationship between the amount of glycogen (carbs stored in the muscles and liver) in the body and endurance performance" and through high carbohydrate intake runners could avoid hitting the dreaded 'wall' of carbo-depletion...

Although many different carbo-loading techniques have evolved, one common method "calls for athletes to eat a normal diet of 55 to 60% carbohydrate until three days before racing, and then switch to a 70% carbohydrate diet for the final three days, plus race morning" (Fitzgerald 2013). This is why pasta and other high-carbohydrate foods are such popular pre-marathon staples.
The hypothesis of the experiment, based upon the existing research literature would thus be that a pre-marathon meal of pasta would be a superior dinner to a meal low in carbohydrates. The experimental and control groups in this study would obviously have to be of similar states of athletic fitness. Ideally, the groups would have completed marathons before, to give the researchers a sense of their race times and to isolate other factors which might influence poor performance. The experimental and control groups would have to contain the same gender balance and health status (no major injuries like stress fractures and no metabolic conditions like diabetes which might affect results). The groups would have to have had similar training regimes and eating habits before the marathon, ideally the standard suggested diet of 55 to 60% carbohydrate (Fitzgerald…