On University of Connecticut Sports Science Week: Nutrition is important for athletics, so why are so many athletes poorly informed?
Jennifer B. Fields, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, investigates this question.
Jennifer Fields is an assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences within the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources at the University of Connecticut. Earning her BS at the University of Maryland in 2013, she went on to earn an MS in health promotion and nutrition education at American University and a Ph.D. in Kinesiology at George Mason University. Her research interests focus on optimizing athlete health and sport performance through investigations into low energy availability, nutritional status, nutritional interventions, body composition, and sport technology.
High school student-athletes face unique nutritional challenges. Specifically, they’re training hard while still growing, which increases their energy and nutrient needs compared to adults. If their nutritional needs aren’t met, it can lead to decreased performance and longer recovery, heightened risk of injury, and low energy availability which may have long-lasting effects on their overall health. Unlike collegiate or professional athletes, most high school athletes don’t have access to sports dietitians or formal nutrition education, so their eating habits are often shaped by their parents, social media, or socioeconomic factors. Research also shows that better nutrition knowledge is linked to healthier eating habits, suggesting that education could make a real difference. So, our main question was: do high school athletes truly understand their energy and macronutrient needs, and what is their current level of sports nutrition knowledge?
To explore this, we recruited high school athletes, both boys and girls, and had them complete 2 surveys: one was a validated sports-nutrition knowledge questionnaire and the other was an internally developed survey where they self-reported what they believed their energy and macronutrient needs were for their sport. Then we compared those beliefs against evidence-based recommendations from the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
What we found turned out to be pretty interesting. On the knowledge test, athletes correctly answered only about 43-45% of questions, which was classified as “poor knowledge.” And when we looked at their perceived dietary requirements, they significantly underestimated how many calories and carbohydrates they needed, while highly overestimating how much protein and fat they needed. Overall, it’s recommended that high school athletes be exposed to more educational interventions focused on general nutrition concepts, sports-related fueling strategies, and the unique dietary requirements of athletes to help them better understand fueling strategies for optimal performance and health.
Read More:
[UConn Today] - On the Field with Sports Nutritionist Jennifer Fields
[MDPI] - Nutrition Knowledge and Perceived Dietary Requirements of Adolescent Student-Athletes: A Pilot Study
