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Anthony
Anthony Roberts holds a BA in both English and Philosophy, is the author of Anabolic Steroids: Ultimate Research Guide and Beyond Steroids, and is a staff writer for Muscle Evolution and a contributor to Muscle Insider. He’s a certified trainer and coach as well as having worked as a formulator in the nutritional industry. He is a member in good standing of the Society for Professional Journalists.
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Superstarch or Super Farce?

by: Anthony Roberts

En route to their latest run at taking home football's biggest prize, the New England Patriots had a secret weapon in their arsenal (that didn't involve covertly videotaping other team's signals): Superstarch!

It's a bird....
                   .....it's a plane.....
                                              ....it's total bullsh*t....

In the weeks leading up to the Superbowl, Men's Health revealed this secret weapon to their readers - a high molecular weight starch that we're told is made from:

  • "the same cornstarch sitting in your cupboard, says Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., associate professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut. “The difference is that it’s been through a proprietary heat-moisture treatment, which changes the way the starch gets absorbed.”
At first blush the logic behind this starch seems solid. Hydrothermal treatment of corn starch is used to produce an end product that used to treat children with glycogen storage disease (inability to convert glycogen to glucose in the liver)(1)(2). This type of carb is able to prevent hypoglycemia in long term treatment of this disease.

Pretty cool, right? So the logic is there, and I believe that it's only a small leap of faith to believe that this stuff will provide a performance benefit over other types of carbs. Unfortunately, while it appears logical and sound, Superstarch does nothing for performance. However, Men's Health, quoting Dr. Jeff Volek, tells us that it could translate to performance gains:

  • "One performance benefit of superstarch: Volek says that using it provides a steady source of blood sugar as opposed to the highs and lows that can occur with rapidly absorbed sports drinks. “This more sustained fuel flow has many advantages such as promoting greater use of fat and potentially sparing muscle glycogen,” explains Volek..."
  •  “Most sports like football, basketball, tennis, and hockey, require short bursts of high intensity effort that draw on glycogen,” says Volek. “So anything that spares their use could translate into performance gains.”"
Oh, it could, eh?

That's funny, because to date there has been one study that examined the performance benefits of SuperStarch (3). In study, nine healthy competitive male cyclists participated in a double-blind randomized crossover fashion. Participants cycled at a workload prescribed to elicit 70% of their VO2 peak. After 150 min of steady state exercise, the workload was increased to elicit 100% VO2 peak until the subject could no longer maintain a minimum pedal cadence of 50 revolutions/min or the subject’s power output decreased greater than 10% below the prescribed workload (3).

Essentially, they were doing a test to exhaustion and seeing if the Superstarch would produce greater results than Maltodextrin, which they used as an active control (if you're unfamiliar with that term, it's what you use as a competing compound that has "active" or similar effects to the one your testing - it's not like a placebo which ought to have no similar effect per se).

What happened was surprising; the Maltodextrin produced a similar (insignificantly higher) glucose response during the time trial, but a far greater glucose level during the after-cycling recovery period (when a second drink was consumed).


However, I'm much more interested in the performance effects of this stuff, because in the end, that's what really matters, right? We're not interested in charts that tell us about the physiological response of this enzyme, or that enzyme, or whatever...we're interested in whether or not we're going to perform better. Does this stuff actually help me do something (anything)?

Not really. Quoting directly from the study:

  • "Upon completing the 150-min cycling bout, cyclists per- formed a time trial at 100% VO2 peak to fatigue. Paired-samples t tests revealed that there was no difference between the HMS and MAL trials (HMS 125 28 s, MAL 136  27 s, P 1⁄4 0.66)."
That study was published back in 2010, while the article on the New England Patriots was published in 2012. So it's slightly disappointing that Men's Health would be quoting someone about performance benefits for Superstarch two years after it's been shown to have no such benefit in a published peer-reviewed study.

You wanna hear something even more disappointing?

The guy they were quoting was one of the authors of the study.






References
Bhattacharya K, Orton RC, Qi X, Mundy H, Morley DW, Champion MP, et al.
A novel starch for the treatment of glycogen storage diseases. J Inherit  Metab Dis 2007;30:350–7.

Correia CE, Bhattacharya K, Lee PJ, Shuster JJ, Theriaque DW,  Shankar MN, et al. Use of modified cornstarch therapy to extend fasting  in glycogen storage disease types Ia and Ib. Am J Clin Nutr 20 08;88: 1272–6.

Roberts MD, et al., Ingestion of a high-molecular-weight hydrothermally modified waxy maize starch alters..., Nutrition (2010), doi:10.1016/j.nut.2010.07.008

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