There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Athletes continually push themselves to achieve improvements in performance and success
in personal and competitive athletic situations. Many researchers are actively engaged
in investigating approaches to improve ‘real-world’ athletic performance and this
extends far beyond traditional laboratory-based testing and experimentation. These
applied researchers realize that to maximize the potential for success, what happens
outside of training and competition situations can have a major impact on performance.
The concept of ‘staying healthy’ or ‘optimizing health’ is paramount for maintaining
a stable environment where the athlete can engage in fruitful training sessions and
successful competitions.
The Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) has been bringing basic and applied sports
nutrition researchers together for the past 5 years to address many issues that relate
to the health and success of athletes. This continued in 2016 with a meeting held
in October to discuss several nutritional and environmental issues that influence
athlete health and performance. Following the meeting, the authors summarized the
recent work in their topic area, resulting in the articles in this Sports Medicine
supplement. This collection of papers is the fifth in a series of GSSI-supported Sports
Medicine supplements.
The first paper addresses whether athletes need to supplement with vitamin D. This
topic is controversial as a clear understanding of what to measure in blood samples
is far from decided and results vary as a function of ethnicity. Future testing for
vitamin D status will need to address the bioavailable or ‘free’ vitamin D levels
in athletic groups to permit new and accurate thresholds and target concentrations
to be established. The next two papers in the supplement examine the value of drinking
during exercise. One paper examines the potential of ingesting cold water/ice slurries
to cool the body during endurance exercise in the heat. While it seems intuitive that
this would be effective, there is a compensatory decrease in sweating that negates
any cooling advantage in many exercise situations. The second paper addresses the
much-debated topic of how much an athlete should drink during exercise to maintain
or improve performance. The paper addresses ‘planned drinking’ versus ‘drinking to
thirst’ and outlines when these approaches to maintaining hydration are appropriate.
The final four papers of the supplement address the roles that nutrition may play
in minimizing injury, remodeling skeletal muscle, maintaining health, and improving
performance. Sports-related head trauma is a topic that concerns many athletes, coaches
and athletic support personnel in today’s sporting culture. Attempts at protecting
the head from injury with education, rule changes and equipment have not yet been
fully successful and nutritional supplementation may help minimize the effects of
head trauma and/or speed recovery from these injuries. Remodeling of skeletal muscle
is an important and ongoing process with highly active athletes. While methods and
mechanisms of stimulating muscle protein synthesis have been widely studied, muscle
protein breakdown has received less attention, even though it is important for muscle
remodeling, adaptation to training, and increasing muscle mass. The paper devoted
to this topic concludes that little is known about the effects of nutrition on muscle
protein breakdown and that new methods are needed to gain insight in this area. Nutrition
also plays a very important role in maintaining the health of athletes, and this is
especially true in the areas of respiratory and gut health, and mucosal immunity.
While upper respiratory symptoms are the most common illness in athletes, nutrition
can have a positive effect on the microbiota of the nose, mouth, respiratory tract
and gut to ultimately strengthen mucosal immunity. Lastly, moderate doses of caffeine
delivered in capsules and coffee improve performance in a wide variety of athletic
and sporting situations for athletes of all levels. With the realization that low
doses of caffeine are also ergogenic, the administration of caffeine in a variety
of alternate forms has emerged. This includes chewing gums, gels, bars, lozenges,
aerosols, etc., with varying success in delivering caffeine to critical locations
in the body and improving athletic performance.
A common theme in the papers of this supplement examining the nutritional and environmental
influences that may affect the health and performance of athletes is that a great
deal of additional research is needed! Hopefully, these papers will stimulate thinking
and excite sports nutrition researchers to conduct additional research in these areas
in the years to come.
Lawrence L. Spriet, PhD
Guest Editor
This article was published in a supplement supported by the GSSI. The supplement was
guest edited by Lawrence L. Spriet, who attended a meeting of the GSSI Expert Panel
in October 2016 and received honoraria from the GSSI, a division of PepsiCo, Inc.,
for his participation in the meeting and the writing of a manuscript. He received
no honoraria for guest editing the supplement. Dr. Spriet selected peer reviewers
for each paper and managed the process, except for his own paper.
Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link
to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.