grueling stages by avoiding wheat. Moreover, they knew that the team could get all the carbs they needed by eating other foods.
"I was pleasantly surprised," says Christian Vande Velde, Garmin-Transitions's team leader, who was the first member of the team to experiment with going wheat-free during the racing season. "I just had all-around better digestion, and digestion is the biggest thing in utilizing the energy I consume." Teammate Tom Danielson had a similar experience when he started following the diet during the Tour of Missouri in 2008. "My performance really improved a lot – there was definitely a correlation," says Danielson. "I think that my digestion is better, and because of that my sleep is better and my recovery is better."
The riders' results aren't surprising given the fact that humans are ill-equipped to digest wheat. Besides people who suffer from wheat allergies and celiac disease – an autoimmune condition triggered by exposure to gluten that affects about one in 133 Americans, causing everything from diarrhea to fatigue – doctors and nutritionists frequently see patients who simply feel healthier and more energetic when they're eating wheat-free. That's because, unlike cows, we lack the enzymes in our saliva and stomach to fully break down and absorb gluten for nutritional use, so parts of the protein just get smashed up before exiting to the small bowel in large pieces. More than 50 different types of those fragments have been shown to cause adverse reactions, according to Dr. Michelle Pietzak, a celiac expert at the University of Southern California. "So depending on your genetic makeup, you can have an allergy, you can have celiac disease, or it could be that you're just not digesting it well," Pietzak says. And if smooth digestion seems minor compared with strength and VO2max, think again. "It's a huge deal," says Lim. "It might be the hugest deal."
Gluten-free Diet
For endurance athletes, carbo-loading on pasta and bread is as much a part of their sports as spandex and heart-rate monitors. So when Dr. Allen Lim, former exercise physiologist for the Garmin-Transitions pro cycling team, and Jonathan Vaughters, Garmin's founder and CEO, suggested the squad switch to a wheat-free diet, the riders thought they were crazy. "Their first reaction was, 'What? No! We can't race the Tour de France without pasta,' " recalls Vaughters. But the two men were banking on the idea that gluten, a composite of proteins in wheat, is responsible for bloating, stiffness, and gastrointestinal distress – huge performance-hindering problems – and the theory that their riders would recover better from
Winning Without Wheat
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