Abstract
State-of-the art of sports nutrition recommendations may be adapted to athletes’ individual needs. However, many studies show that athletes from different countries, ages, and sports do not consume diets in line with these recommendations. The aim of this study is to understand how the conceptions, perceptions, and meanings of food influence athletes’ food choices and eating practices. Amateur and semi-professional Brazilian (n=28) and Spanish (n=38) athletes, aged between 15 and 42 years old, from different sports (aesthetics, martial arts, and team sports) were interviewed about their conceptions of an ideal diet, the determinants of their food choices and their eating practices. Verbatim transcriptions were analyzed through the Content Analysis method. Results show that factors such as how athletes perceive themselves (identity), their performance and body goals (both athletic and sociocultural), the pleasure to eat, food beliefs, to have financial/professional support and with whom they eat (family) are important determinants of food choices and food practices leading to a discrepancy between athletes’ discourse of what they think is the ideal diet and their eating practices. The results show that to understand how athletes think and perceive food, to explore meanings, representations, and values they attribute to food, to understand how they organize information and how they apply these to their eating practices is important for the professionals who work with athletes to develop effective nutrition strategies which meet not only their physiological needs, but also the socio-cultural aspects that permeate their practices.
Presenters
Claudia JuzwiakAssociate Professor, Human Movement Sciences, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Sporting Cultures and Identities
KEYWORDS
Food behavior, Food choices, Sports nutrition
