Beyond Jeez. What Athletes Eat
What athletes eat, or arctic explorers, or astronauts is always fascinating. It pushes the bounds of the possible while at the same time reflecting the culture’s ideas about good food. So the Olympics is reason to just consider the food of athletes.
Athletes in the first Olympics were famous for consuming quantities of meat, as the quote Diana Buja posted indicates. The Greeks who ate very little meat at a rule (“leaf-eaters” was their nickname) found this a little awing, even shocking.
In the 1936 Olympics, most athletes managed 2-1/4 lbs of meat, a quart of milk, and three or four eggs a day. Even the most abstemious, the Japanese, consumed 1-1/2 lbs lightly grilled meat a day. Only a team of eight vegetarians abstained. That’s much more meat, it seems than contemporary athletes who seem to concentrate on carbohydrates and fats. But that was when meat was still king in nutritional theory. And even so, although I don’t know the rest of their diet, it looks as though the overall calorie count might be less than at present.
And there’s just been an interesting discussion of the food of contemporary athletes on the invaluable ASFS listserv. Here are a couple of extracts.
This from David Beriss, Associate Professor and Chair at the University of New Orleans.
“I think that Phelps’ reputation for eating junk is think that Phelp’s reputation for eating junk is surprising, given that in many endurance sports the focus in recent years has been on improving diets as a way of improving performance.
Professional cyclists, for instance, burn as many calories as Phelps does during stage races like the Tour de France (usually 7000-10,000 calories per day, depending on the difficulty). Here is a link to an article about the daily diet of the Garmin-Chipotle team from July’s TDF:
http://www.bicycling.com/tourdefrance/article/0,6802,s1-7-483-17636-1,00.html.
They may have a fast food sponsor, but their diet looks healthy to me. The team has a full time chef who travels with them, which I think is pretty standard for the pro tour teams, as well as other diet advisors. They are focused on insuring the riders have enough energy, but that they also have food that is easy to digest (they eat lunch while riding, so that means having to digest while climbing a mountain on a bike, something that swimmers don’t usually have to deal with). They are also very concerned about hydration, as you might imagine. The riders do seem to eat a fair amount of sports gels, bars, etc., but there is also quite a lot of real food. Interviews I have read suggest that the riders really enjoy the food, as well as the whole team experience of eating together. Maybe cyclists would be better models than swimmers…”
And this from Damon Talbott:
“Phelps diet is normal for elite-level swimmers.
In college, when my wife and her NCAA team were in their peak training period they were burning around 8,000 calories a day . They too ate whatever they could get their hands on that was as high in calories as possible and, more importantly, that they enjoyed. They definitely did not “put pleasure on hold” – they couldn’t wait to get out of the pool and eat! I remember seeing lots of pasta, pizza, burgers, and other high carb, high protein foods. Many of the swimmers would also obsessively crave specific things – for instance, my wife would go through multiple jars of peanut butter in a 2 week period, and then rarely touch the stuff the rest of the year.
The team’s choice in foods was also greatly shaped by their time and energy out of the water, of which they had none. Wake up, swim for 3 hours, eat, immediately pass out for a few hours, wake up again and swim for 3 hours, eat, immediately fall sleep for 10 hours, and then start the cycle again. Despite the license for junk food, keeping weight was a problem, and, unlike gymnastics or cycling, swimmers want to maintain weight. To aid in those efforts, during the middle of workouts they would eat a substance they called “goo” – it’s what marathoners and cylists eat mid-race, squeezed from a tube or pouch – and drink copious amount of fluids.”
Of course, there have to be an army of nutritionists worrying about athletes and sure enough, here is the web site for The International Society of Sports Nutrition.
1. What is often referred to as a healthy diet is in fact a one size fits all diet with the relatively sedentary, well-fed, adult Westerner who intends to live for years and years and years in mind. It obviously doesn’t work for lots of special groups, the athletes being one of them. So it doesn’t really make sense to say, as I’ve heard a lot of people say, that athletes are not eating a healthy diet.
2. I’ve heard people ask whether athletes enjoy their food. And this also brings home that pleasure in food is not one thing. Athletes are really hungry. I suspect that their pleasure has as much to do with satisfying that hunger as it does with the kind of fine discernment and even picky eating that is associated with gastronomy. I don’t think they’d find a nine-course tasting menu prepared by Ferran Adría particularly pleasurable.
It’s not the same situation but I remember asking an elderly Mexican why the food stands at a particular truck stop were so popular. I expected him to say something like, the women prepare a great menudo, or the tacos are delicious. What he actually replied was “Se llena mucho.” You get really full. I realized that most of his life the greatest pleasure he derived from food (and it didn’t happen that often) was having a full belly.
3. Athletes have to eat A LOT. This is time-consuming and it could be difficult to digest if it were full of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Very roughly to get about 3000 cals a day (perhaps a third of what these athletes are consuming), if you eat bread alone you need 4-1/2 lbs, if you eat fruits and vegetables alone you need nearly 30 lbs.
- Wheat to Iran and Chicken Sets: Interesting Articles from the WSJ
- A Wonderful Rainy Season–but no Internet
At the semi-pro, pro or elite level, athletes also eat to fit the physique demands of their sport, not just the physical demands. A sprinter versus a shot put thrower, a sprinter versus marathon runner, a swimmer versus a gymnast, judo master versus sumo wrestler, weight lifter versus body builder, and so on.
THX, Ji-young, for this observation about body types. Here is a link to a NYT article related to this topic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/sports/olympics/20bodies.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=atypical%20athlete&st=cse&oref=slogin
Rachel’s third point fascinated me. As a recreational skier and swimmer (I’ve taught both sports at beginner and intermediate levels) I’ve watched both the record and the average times come down since the 1960s. Common wisdom notes that there is a correlation between this drop and the increase in both duration and intensity of training is the sports. It never occurred to me that the longer/harder training was possible because of new ways of preparing and delivering the necessary nutrients to the individual athlete’s systems.
Ji-Young and Kay, This whole business of feeding athletes is new to me and unexpectedly fascinating. You would think there would be some spillover from this literature to the whole popular literature on diet and health. Maybe there is some in magazines like Men’s Health. But in newspapers (that NY Times article being an exception) and women’s magazines there seems to be none. I wonder why.
The nutrition idea is just speculation on my part Kay but I’m sure someone who knows more about this has written a serious article on the subject.