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Originally Posted by Cowman
I disagree. Without proper fuel, ie protein, your body will run the risk of slipping into a catabolic state after a X hours of sleep. This is the basis behind the idea of eating cassein protein before you go to bed.
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it's not a risk. while you sleep, you have a Respiratory Exchange Ratio of about .7 (maybe a tiny bit higher, like .72). The RER is a measurement of the amount of carbon being expelled when you breath and is used to determine the fuel and amount that is being burned. at .7 you are burning pure fat. at 1.0 you are burning pure carbohydrate. above 1.0 and you are in an anaerobic state.
the amount of energy your body needs while sleeping is not enough to enter someone into a catabolic state. in order for that to happen, you either need to be starving yourself (and sleep doesn't cut it, 8 hours of sleep probably won't burn the same amount of energy as 3 or four hours awake) or doing endurance training and have been running for more than an hour, it's not going to happen.
also (going back to 3 posts ago), according to my studies (i believe it was in either my sports nutrition class or my ex. phys. class) we learned that digestion will only increase your metabolism by about 5%. not that much over all. obviously any boost is good as long as the increase in metabolism is not less than than the food being eaten. and when you eat before bed yoru metabolism will be at a crawl while your digesting food, so you're going to add that on as fat since it won't be used right away.