Nutrition influence of Sports and activity

Why use nutrition to enhance health and athletic performance? Many reasons but if you focus on pleasurable eating experiences, improving health outcomes (reduce both acute and chronic disease states), saving money on pharmaceutical drugs, expensive ultra processed nutritional supplements, and generally feeling more energized, is that enough? What better way to improve your quality of life by shifting your economic investments from Doctors visits, medications, packaged vitamins, and minerals to high quality whole food. The trade off is obvious, improved appetite for a healthy diet, a stronger immune system and increased energy.

Exercise and athletic performance can be influenced by the calories you ingest and the amount of refined carbohydrates you consume.. The research is expanding in the field of sports nutrition with studies pointing to measurable benefits when athletes used diet (low refined carbohydrate and nutrient timing) to improve to strength, endurance and recovery.

“…recent studies have shown that periodically completing endurance training sessions (e.g. 30–50% of training sessions) with reduced carbohydrate (CHO) availability modulates the activation of acute cell signaling pathways (73% of 11 studies), promotes training-induced oxidative adaptations of skeletal muscle (78% of 9 studies), and, in some instances, improves exercise performance (although only 37% of 11 studies demonstrated performance improvements) (Impey et al., 2018).

“…the total amount of protein and carbohydrates eaten over the course of the day is more important for body composition and performance than nutrient-timing strategies specific to the workout itself” (Aragon and Schoenfeld, 2013).