A Review of Factors Influencing Athletes’ Food Choices

Abstract

Athletes make food choices on a daily basis that can affect both health and performance. A well planned nutrition strategy that includes the careful timing and selection of appropriate foods and fluids helps to maximize training adaptations and, thus, should be an integral part of the athlete's training programme. Factors that motivate food selection include taste, convenience, nutrition knowledge and beliefs. Food choice is also influenced by physiological, social, psychological and economic factors and varies both within and between individuals and populations. This review highlights the multidimensional nature of food choice and the depth of previous research investigating eating behaviours. Despite numerous studies with general populations, little exploration has been carried out with athletes, yet the energy demands of sport typically require individuals to make more frequent and/or appropriate food choices. While factors that are important to general populations also apply to athletes, it seems likely, given the competitive demands of sport, that performance would be an important factor influencing food choice. It is unclear if athletes place the same degree of importance on these factors or how food choice is influenced by involvement in sport. There is a clear need for further research exploring the food choice motives of athletes, preferably in conjunction with research investigating dietary intake to establish if intent translates into practice.

Evaluation of Some Ingredients and Energy Content on Front‐of‐Pack Cereal Bar Labeling as Drivers of Choice and Perception of Healthiness: A Case Study with Exercisers

“…Phan and Chambers () found that liking was the strongest motive that drove people to select a snack for consumption. Previous studies have also reported the importance of these motives in active people: Birkenhead & Slater () suggested that some factors such as convenience and taste are important to athletes (not exactly the exercisers of this study), but it remains unclear whether they place the same degree of importance on these factors as the population in general, although this seemed to be the case in this results.…”

Australian team sports athletes prefer dietitians, the internet and nutritionists for sports nutrition information

“…Previous research has shown that Australian athletes have low NK scores and fail to comply with best‐practice sports nutrition guidelines . As NK is one factor that can influence nutrition behaviour, it is pertinent to explore the preferred information sources that athletes use, and how preferences influence NK. This is one of the first papers to investigate these topics in Australian team sports athletes.…”

“…Dietary intake has a significant effect on athletic performance 1 and is influenced by several factors, one of which is nutrition knowledge (NK). 2,3 Therefore, it is not surprising that the assessment and evaluation of athletes' NK is a popular topic. Since 2015 at least 20 papers on the NK of athletes have been published.…”

Validation of a General and Sport Nutrition Knowledge Questionnaire in Adolescents and Young Adults: GeSNK

“…Good nutrition knowledge is one of the few modifiable determinants of dietary behaviors and contributes to strengthening the skills and abilities needed to resist the environmental influences leading to unbalanced and unhealthy diets [7]. For these reasons, the focal point of the assessment of general and sport nutritional knowledge is to raise the awareness of good dietary habits and to improve appropriate nutritional knowledge, thereby helping to dispel myths and false beliefs in young athletes.…”