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Nutrition Department 1 Shields Avenue University of California, Davis Davis, CA 95616 E-mail: eaapplegate{at}ucdavis.edu
Since the Olympiads of antiquity more than 2000 y ago, the significance of diet on an athlete’s performance has been recognized. For example, the philosopher Pythagoras (died 222 AD) was said to train athletes on a meat diet (1). However, not until the past 2 decades has research in the area of nutrition and athletic performance, or sports nutrition, exploded. The practice of sports nutrition—which involves an interdisciplinary team of sports medicine–minded physicians, exercise scientists, and dietitians working to enhance an athlete’s health care, training, and diet—has also only recently developed. The evolution of graduate programs to meet this demand for knowledge and practical application is also in its infancy. Thus, researchers, academicians, and practitioners of sports nutrition often rely on reference books such as this one to aid them in this field. The editors Driskell and Wolinsky have done a marvelous job of assembling an excellent cadre of experts in sports nutrition and of covering a wide array of issues in the nutritional assessment of athletes.
Nutritional Assessment of Athletes is part of a 5-volume miniseries on nutrition and sport written for sports nutritionists, sports-medicine professionals, students, and educated athletes. The 16 chapters are divided into 5 sections: "Dietary Assessment of Athletes," "Anthropometric Assessment of Athletes," "Physical Activity Needs Assessment of Athletes," "Biochemical Assessment of Athletes," and finally, "Clinical Assessment of Athletes." Within each section and its corresponding chapters, the authors review the challenges in each area, provide research-based evaluation tools, and, in some cases, provide practical solutions and specific recommendations. Although some repetition exists among the chapters, which is often the case with books that have many authors, the book provides a comprehensive wealth of in-depth information. Additionally, each chapter provides an extensive list of references that will prove useful to both researchers and clinicians.
In the first section, various methods available to collect information on food intake and eating patterns are discussed, as are the challenges of working with athletes and how these challenges might affect the accuracy of the information. The authors of these chapters do an excellent job of detailing the use of dietary supplements, training and its effect on an athlete’s diet, weight-management issues, and the evaluation and challenges of determining nutrient adequacy in an athlete. An entire chapter is devoted to eating-behavior issues and eating disorders, which are crucial in the health care of athletes.
Subsequent sections detail the anthropometric assessment of children, teens, and adults as well as specific issues related to sex differences and corresponding comparisons of athletic performance. A handful of chapters assess the energy needs of various types of athletes and discuss both the laboratory and the field methods used to assess energy expenditure in athletes. The biochemical assessment of athletes, which is vital in determining diet adequacy and the need for nutrient supplementation, is covered in 4 chapters. A comprehensive listing of the biochemical tests used to assess the status of individual vitamins and minerals in athletes is included in this section, which is of value to both researchers and clinicians. The final section, a guide to the clinical assessment of athletes, is only descriptive in nature; a more comprehensive coverage of this topic would be of greater value to clinicians. In summary, this book is a tremendous resource for persons involved in the field of sports nutrition—researchers, educators, clinicians, students, and even educated athletes.
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