Burke vs Noakes: Understanding the Real Stakes of Carbohydrates in Endurance

Burke vs Noakes: Why the Carbohydrate and Endurance Debate Doesn’t Reveal What’s Blocking You
by Laurent Glatz – for Athletic Carnivore

You’ve probably already taken a side. Either you believe carbohydrates are the essential fuel for endurance, or you think fat adaptation makes this dependency obsolete. But what if this certainty is exactly what prevents you from correctly reading your own terrain?

In May 2026, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published one of the most anticipated debates in sports nutrition: Louise Burke argued that a low-carbohydrate diet limits endurance performance, while Tim Noakes defended the opposite. Two heavyweights of scientific data, two entire careers built on studying exercise metabolism, and yet, beyond the technical consensus, one question remains unanswered: has your body already cast its vote?

The debate is real and biologically serious. Burke demonstrates that at high intensity, fat oxidation produces less adenosine triphosphate (ATP) per unit of oxygen consumed than glucose oxidation. In other words, for the same amount of air you breathe in, glucose runs the engine faster. She reminds us that elite athletes perfectly adapted to a ketogenic diet have seen their running speed decrease at critical oxidation thresholds.

Noakes, on the other hand, argues that muscle glycogen depletion is not the direct cause of fatigue. He points to blood glucose. When blood sugar drops, the central nervous system reduces motor command even before muscle fibers run dry. Hence his observation: a minimal carbohydrate intake during exercise, sometimes as low as ten grams per hour, would suffice to preserve performance by maintaining blood glucose.

Both are right about the mechanism. The problem is these mechanisms don’t read the same way on every terrain.

What this debate really reveals is a common misreading. We think the question is: should we have carbohydrates or not? The biological question is different: at what point does your central nervous system start interpreting a drop in energy availability as a danger signal, and when do your high-intensity fibers switch to a fuel they can’t burn fast enough? It’s not about the percentage of carbohydrates on your daily plate. It’s about metabolic flux at the precise moment when intensity exceeds your mitochondria’s capacity to extract enough energy from fat before oxygen becomes the limiting factor.

When you cross this threshold, glucose is no longer a comfort option. It becomes the only substrate capable of producing the ATP needed without demanding more oxygen than you can absorb.

But here’s where generic belief becomes a trap. Two athletes can follow the same carbohydrate loading protocol during a long effort and get two completely opposite responses. One will see their blood sugar stabilize, perceived effort decrease, and end-race power maintained. The other will suffer glycemic spikes and drops, early nervous fatigue, perhaps digestive troubles masking the expected energy benefit.

The difference isn’t in the protocol. It lies in the state of the terrain at the moment of effort: the quality of sleep in previous nights, latent cortisol levels, intestinal tolerance, dietary history in recent weeks, and especially the individual capacity to simultaneously oxidize fat and glucose without one blocking the other.

Burke is right to say chronic carbohydrate restriction can be costly at high intensity. Noakes is right to say fat adaptation changes the game. But neither can tell you where your own tipping point lies.

That’s precisely why, at Athletic Carnivore, we don’t pick a side. We use dextrose, pure glucose, as a physiological precision tool—not as a dietary foundation. The logic is simple: dextrose is not a daily food; it’s targeted fuel. At the key moment of effort, when the central nervous system monitors blood glucose and high-intensity fibers demand an oxygen-efficient substrate, pure glucose offers a direct pathway. No fructose to process through the liver, no unnecessary digestive load, no glycemic oscillations linked to complex mixtures. Just the substrate your brain and muscles can immediately oxidize to maintain motor command and metabolic power.

This approach preserves fat adaptation daily, nutritionally, while providing critical fuel when biology demands it. This is not a diet strategy. It’s a signal-reading strategy.

Yet even this logic can’t be applied mechanically. The exact moment when dextrose becomes relevant, the amount relative to your intensity threshold, your stomach’s tolerance under effort, how your sleep and stress modulate fasting blood sugar—all this changes the equation.

Continuing to test random amounts, copying elite strategies, or following scientific debates like recipes is the invisible cost of ambiguity. It’s not just lost time. It’s confusion between a good signal and a poor adjustment. It’s extra fatigue from a body receiving the wrong fuel at the right time, or the right fuel in the wrong metabolic context. It’s the slow demotivation of someone applying solid biological logic without understanding that this logic must first pass through the filter of their own terrain.

If you recognize yourself in this mechanism, the real question is no longer who won the Burke–Noakes debate. It’s understanding why, for you, the answer doesn’t match either generic position.

The problem isn’t always a lack of information. Sometimes it’s not knowing which information truly applies to your case.

Is your body refusing to perform, or is it simply trying to show you that something isn’t yet aligned between your daily fuel and your exercise fuel?

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