Performance Nutrition for Athletes
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PREFACE
Performance Nutrition for Athletes Lawrence L. Spriet1 Published online: 22 January 2019 © The Author(s) 2019
A sound nutritional plan is essential for achieving and maintaining optimal athletic performance. In addition to daily meal planning, a sports nutritionist pays special attention to the needs of athletes before, during and following training sessions and competitions. A wide variety of foods and nutritional products are available for the athlete to meet these needs. Sports nutrition professionals spend a lot of time reading and interpreting the relevant literature, and in many cases, researching the best products and ways to deliver the needed nutrients. In the research world, we often examine individual ingredients that have been removed from foods in an effort to examine the potential beneficial effects in isolation. In the real world, we most often eat foods that contain several important ingredients. So, it is ultimately also necessary to conduct research studies with real foods to determine how the food is received as a whole, and whether the important ingredients reach the target tissues in sufficient amounts, whether they interact with each other, and of course, whether beneficial effects are realized. This supplement examines the potential complications and benefits of eating foods in the context of achieving and maintaining optimal performance. The Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) has been bringing sports nutrition and sports science researchers together for the past 30 years to address many issues that relate to the health, wellbeing and performance of athletes. Since 2012 this gathering has been known as the GSSI Expert Panel, which continued in 2017 with a meeting in October to discuss several nutritional issues that influence athlete performance. Following the meeting, the authors summarized the recent work in their topic area, resulting in the manuscripts in this Sports Medicine supplement (the sixth in a series supported by GSSI).
* Lawrence L. Spriet [email protected] 1
Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
The first paper [1] addresses the intriguing topic of translating sports performance nutrition research into the real world and ultimately the chances of it helping an athlete maximize their performance to reach the “podium.” The authors present a framework they call the “Paper-2-Podium Matrix” which provides several criteria to critically evaluate performance nutrition-related research papers. In this manner, the sports nutrition practitioner can decide whether the research in question can be translated into something useful for the athletes they advise. The second paper [2] in the supplement examines the very timely topic of foods that contain gluten or fermentable oligo-, di-, monosaccharides and polyols (FODMAPS) and their roles in producing gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in athletes. The author suggests that the popularity of gluten-free diets (GFD) among athletes may not be warranted as research investigating
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