Seed for speed

News Release / 11.06.2013

They are currently being touted as the next big thing, as celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to Orlando Bloom sing their praises. But whilst Hollywood stars are using them for their potential beautifying properties there are other benefits of chia seeds that may be of more interest to endurance athletes…

Chia is a flowering plant, from the mint family, which grows in Central and South America. Its seeds have been used as an important food for centuries, but it was not until the 1990’s that chia made an appearance on the sporting scene. After a runner called Cirildo Chacarito won a 100 mile endurance race in California in 1997, which he ran to help highlight his tribe’s poverty, he revealed that he had fuelled himself prior to, and during, the race with chia seeds.

It turns out that Cirildo Chacarito was from the Tarahumara tribe, which is now known to produce a disproportionately high number of successful endurance runners and was made famous in the book Born To Run. The people from the Tarahumara tribe are also known to regularly include chia in their diets.

At first it may seem unlikely that a simple seed could provide enough energy to keep someone running for hours on end, but modern nutritional breakdowns have now shown that Cirlido and the Tarahumara people could well have helped uncover one of the best nutrient-rich power foods for endurance athletes.

When it comes to energy, chia certainly packs a punch. 100g of the seeds provide a whopping 434 calories, which when you compare to 100g of Mars Bar, which provides 448 calories per 100g, puts things into context. There is a major difference however between how the two foods release their energy in the body.

Chocolates, sweets and gels generally contain energy in the form of quick release carbohydrates, which are great for short bursts of exercise, but not so good for longer term endurance. Chia on the other hand almost exclusively stores its energy as fat, largely as polyunsaturated fats (100g of chia seeds provides 6.1g of saturated fats and 22.3g of polyunsaturated fats). Fats are burnt much slower than carbohydrates to produce energy and there is now increasing evidence to show that endurance athletes should rely on this kind of nutrition more than simply carbohydrates alone.

It appears then, as is so often the case, that whilst scientists have been working away in labs to find the next big breakthrough in sports supplementation, nature could have held the answer all along.

Where to buy chia seeds

One of the UK’s leading brands of chia seeds is produced by Naturya. The seeds they use are grown across 30 farms in South America, with production platforms in Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. The production process is standardised to provide a consistently high quality product and the farms are carefully inspected and support is provided for the farmers, with training, harvesting and sales assistance.

Naturya Chia Seeds are available from leading health stores and more information on how to include them in your diet can be found on their website at www.naturya.com

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