Nutrition plays a crucial role in sports performance, enabling athletes to reach and sustain peak performance. Macronutrients, carbohydrates, and fats serve as fuels for muscle contraction, whereas protein is vital for building and maintaining skeletal muscle mass. Micronutrients play important roles, as does fluid consumption for hydration. There may also be certain supplements that give an edge to athletes. As a result, nutritionists and healthcare providers working with professional and recreational athletes need to carefully consider their clients’ dietary choices to optimize performance.
Despite many research gains, overall, what constitutes proper nutrition for athletes remains unclear, making nutritional choices difficult. Proper sports nutrition, for example, can vary from sporting event to sporting event. Moreover, men and women may have different sports nutrition needs, and athletes of difference age groups may also have different sports nutrition needs. In response, Current Developments in Nutrition has published Sports Nutrition, a special issue offering the latest scientific evidence on what constitutes effective sports and performance nutrition.
This special issue features three expert Guest Editors:
- Professor Jon Buckley, University of South Australia, Areas of Expertise: exercise, nutrition, sporting performance, and recovery
- Professor Stuart Phillips, McMaster University, Areas of Expertise: exercise, nutrition, muscle protein turnover, and body composition
- Doctor Jess Gwin, Military Nutrition Division, US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. Areas of Expertise: nutrition, dietary protein, skeletal muscle, and body composition
The 18 articles in this Special Issue explore a broad range of issues in sports nutrition:
- Nutrition and Athletic Performance, including four papers on the effects of coffee or caffeine on exercise; two on the effects of polyphenols or anthocyanins; and one on the effects of creatine monohydrate.
- Nutrition and Clinical Outcomes, including two papers on the role of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in ameliorating the effects of head impacts, brain injuries, and concussions; one on the associations between dietary protein intake and markers of bone health in endurance athletes; one on the use of the resting metabolic rate ratio as an indicator of the risk of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports; and one on nutritional strategies to promote recovery from injury and return to play.
- Nutritional Knowledge and Diet Quality, including two papers on methods to convey sport nutrition information; three on food choices and diet quality among athletes and military women; and one on the nutritional knowledge and prevalence of dietary supplement use among Iranian bodybuilders.
Overall, this Special Issue identifies nutritional strategies to improve athletic performance and mitigate adverse clinical outcomes associated with injury. Moreover, it identifies key sources of nutritional information for athletes alongside strategies to improve the quality of that information. As a result, the Guest Editors believe that “this Special Issue will make an important contribution to advancing our understanding of a range of factors related to improving sports nutrition outcomes.”
We invite you to peruse the entire Special Issue. Clinical nutritionists and health care practitioners will find valuable information to advise dietary choices for athletes of all ages involved in a broad range of sports activities. Moreover, researchers will find new discoveries that serve as a springboard to guide their own sports nutrition research.
All articles in this special issue of Current Developments in Nutrition are accessible at no cost to all readers regardless of subscription status.
