Nutrition misinformation and food confusion surrounds today’s health-conscious athletes. To arm myself with knowledge to better educate my clients, I (along with 10,000 other registered dietitians) attended the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics annual convention to learn the latest food and nutrition updates. Here is some information that might help you on your health journey.

Stress fractures are a common sports injury. Among 42 Division-1 cross-country runners, 35% of the male and 41% of the female runners reported having had a stress fracture. Inadequate nutrition could have contributed to the problem. Their diets tended to be low in calories, calcium and/or vitamin D. If you are going to push your body to the limits, at least fuel it optimally!

If intestinal distress sidetracks you during exercise, try reducing your intake of apples, onion, garlic and broccoli —particularly for 2 to 3 days before a competitive event.These are just a few commonly eaten foods that are high in fermentable (gas-producing) carbohydrates; they might contribute to undesired pit stops. You could also meet with a sports dietitian to help you systematically discover triggering foods. The referral network at www.SCANdpg.org can help you find your local sports food expert.

Exercise increases harmful free radicals within muscles that can lead to oxidative damage and inflammation. Should athletes supplement with anti-oxidants to counter this? No. The better bet is to let the body adapt to these higher levels (and eat abundant anti-oxidant rich fruits and vegetables). Adaptation creates a change for the better in an athlete’s physiology.

Alcohol contributes to hypoglycemia (low blood glucose) by suppressing the release of glucose from the liver into the blood stream. If an athlete hasn’t eaten much food (as can easily happen after an event), alcohol in an empty stomach can easily lead to hypoglycemia (a lack of glucose for the brain) and a drunken stupor. The same happens when a person with diabetes has low blood glucose; he or she can get mistaken for being drunk (when the brain just needs food).

In contrast to recreational marijuana, which is used with the intent to impair normal functioning, medical marijuana (MM) is used to relieve pain, reduce nausea and vomiting, and to overcome loss of appetite (as with cancer). If you have parents or friends who are new to using MM, caution them about using edibles. When MM is eaten, its pain relieving benefits are delayed for 30 to 120 minutes, as opposed to smoked MM, which offers immediate benefits. The problem with the delayed response with edibles is that a patient can easily overdose while waiting to feel an effect…

Meal timing affects circadian rhythms —as well as weight management. A study (Garaulet, 2013)with 420 subjects who ate an early lunch or a later lunch reports the early lunch eaters lost more weight, despite consuming the same number of calories and getting the same amount of sleep. Your best bet is to eat more food earlier in the day. As you have undoubtedly heard before: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.

We compromise our well-being every time we have a mismatch between the environment and our internal biological clock. (Think jet lag, shift work, sleep apnea, and watching late-night TV.) Every cell has a biological clock; all these cellular clocks need to be synchronized. If not, bodies become unhealthy. For example, shift workers experience more high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes than people who work 9:00 to 5:00. For athletes, jet lag means poorer performance.

Sleep is restorative and helps synchronize cell’s biorhythms. If you have trouble sleeping well:

• avoid caffeine at least 4 hours before bedtime and limit it to 2 mugs (400 mg. caffeine) a day.
• turn off your computer screen/TV an hour before bed.

Consumers are self-defining “healthy food.” It needs to be organic, natural, non-GMO, free of dyes/additives/ colors, and have a “clean” label with no strange words. Will this trendy definition lead to unintended health consequences as food producers try to meet consumers’ demands? Likely yes.

If you make your food decisions based on trends rather than science, you might want to take a step back and look at the whole picture. For example, enriched foods offer added nutrients that can make a label look “dirty” but the extra ingredients are good for your health. Added iron reduces your risk of becoming anemic; folic acid reduces the risk of birth defects; iodine reduces the risk of goiter. Preservatives that have been generally regarded as safe help bread stay fresh for longer, reduce the growth of mold on cheese, and reduce the amount of food you waste. These ingredients can be beneficial for you and for the environment.

Sugar-sweetened beverages are the biggest source of dietary sugar in the US diet. Hence, research on sugar and health has focused on soft drinks. The question remains unanswered: Is sugar added to nourishing foods a health hazard? That is, is sugar added to spaghetti sauce (to make it less acidic) bad for you? What about the sugar added to bread (to help make the dough rise) — Is that a cause for concern?

Doubtful. Yet, too many consumers freak out when a product lists sugar on the food label. Please note: sugar is just one of many nutrients listed on the label. Please look at the whole nutrient package. For example, chocolate milk has sugar (that refuels muscles) but it also offers protein (to repair muscles), sodium (to replace sweat loss), calcium & vitamin D to enhance bone health. Dietary guidelines say 10% of total calories can come from added sugar. That’s 200 to 300 calories a day for athletes. Do you really need to freak out about a little sugar that makes that spaghetti sauce taste better? I think you can find bigger things to worry about.

Reprinted with permission from Nancy Clark.

Sports nutritionist Nancy Clark MS RD CSSD has a private practice in the Boston-area (Newton; 617-795-1875), where she counsels both fitness exercisers and competitive athletes, teaching them how to eat to win. Her popular Sports Nutrition Guidebook, and food guides for marathoners, cyclists and soccer are available at nancyclarkrd.com. For online workshops, see NutritionSportsExerciseCEUs.com.

Food is fuel and food is medicine. Food brings people together and is supposed to be one of life’s pleasures. Shared meals are a vehicle for building relationships, enjoying conversations, and nourishing the soul.

Unfortunately in today’s society, too many athletes and fitness exercisers alike report they have no time to enjoy meals. Sports parents struggle to gather their student athletes for a family dinner; practices and games inevitably interrupt the dinner hour. And even when seated at the same table, some family members may be eating just salad while the rest of the family enjoys steak. So much for eating out of the same pot.

Today’s food conversations commonly refer to good food, bad food, clean food, fattening food. We all know athletes who don’t do sugar, gluten, white flour, or red meat, to say nothing of cake on birthdays, ice cream cones in summer, or apple pie on Thanksgiving.  We live with abundant food, but we have created a fearful eating environment with our words. This article invites you to pay attention to how you think and talk about food. Perhaps it is time to watch your mouth, so you can start to change the current culture that makes food a source of fear for many athletes.

Good food vs. Bad Food

“I eat only healthy foods —lots of fresh fruits and vegetables—and I stay away from stuff in wrappers with ingredients I can’t pronounce.“ While this may seem like a noble stance towards being a responsible caretaker for your body, it raises a few red flags for me.

• One, a diet of only healthy foods can be a very unhealthy diet. For example, apples are a healthy food, but a diet of all apples is a very unhealthy diet.
• Two, a diet with only unprocessed food eliminates refined or lightly processed grains that are enriched with vitamins and iron, nutrients of importance for athletes. For instance, “all natural” breakfast cereals like Puffins and Kashi offer only 4% to 10% of the Daily Value for iron, as compared to iron-enriched cereals like Wheaties, GrapeNuts, and Bran Flakes and that offer 45% to 100% of the recommended intake. If you eat very little red meat (a rich source of dietary iron), do not cook in a cast iron skillet (a meat-free source of iron), and eat only “all natural” grain foods, you could easily have an iron-deficient diet. This shows up in anemia and needless fatigue. A survey of female runners (ages 18-22) reports 50% had anemia, often undiagnosed.

Yes, many hard-to-pronounce and unfamiliar words like niacinamide, ferrous sulfate, and ascorbic acid are listed among the ingredients of many grain foods. These are the scientific names for the same vitamins in pills. There’s a reason why they were added to foods in the first place. Adding folic acid to grains has reduced the risk of having a baby with a birth defect. B-12 is important for vegans. Will the trend to avoid enriched and fortified foods come back to bite us? How about choosing the best of both?

Bad food vs. Fun Food

When athletes feel compelled to confess their nutritional sins to me (“I eat too many bad foods—chips, French fries, nachos… “), I quickly remind them there is no such thing as a bad food (or a good food, for that matter). Is birthday cake really a bad food? Is a hot dog at a baseball game going to ruin your health forever? Should you not make cookies with your children on a snowy day?

Those so-called bad foods are actually fun foods that taste yummy and can fit into an overall balanced diet. Rather than critiquing a single food, please judge your diet by the whole week, month, and year. Halloween candy is a fun treat in the midst of a steady intake of fruits, vegetables, lean meats and wholesome grains. So is pumpkin pie with ice cream.

Depriving yourself of fun foods creates good and bad foods, as well as a really bad relationship with food. Eating a fun food is not cheating. The problem arises when you restrict fun foods, only to succumb to devouring not just one cookie but all 24 of them. Binge-eating burdens you with not only excess body fat, but also (self-imposed) guilt for having broken your food rules, and disgust with yourself for having pigged out.

Eating the whole thing means you like that food and should actually eat it more often, rather than try to stay away from it. Contrary to what you may believe, you are not addicted to cookies. You are simply doing “last chance” eating. Last chance to have cookies (or so you tell yourself) because they are a bad food and I shouldn’t eat them at all.

There’s a more peaceful way to live. Try balancing a cookie or two into your daily menu. After all, you need not have a perfect diet to have an excellent diet. A reasonable goal is 85-90% quality foods; 10-15% “whatever.”

Healthy diet vs. A single ingredient

Salt, sugar, and saturated fat seem to be today’s food demons. Rather than look at each ingredient, I cannot encourage you enough to look at the entire food (and your entire diet). Take sugar, for example. Are the 3 grams of sugar in Skippy peanut butter really a source of evil? What about the 10 grams of refined sugar in chocolate milk? That (“evil”) sugar quickly refuels muscles after a hard workout. That’s why chocolate milk is an effective recovery food. After a hard workout, when you are tired and thirsty, but not yet hungry, the sugar in chocolate milk offers a quick energy boost that normalizes your low blood glucose and replenishes depleted muscle glycogen. While some athletes focus on chocolate milk’s 10 grams (40 calories) of added sugar, I invite you to welcome its high quality protein (needed to repair muscles) and abundant vitamins and minerals that invest in your good health. The fit bodies of athletes can metabolize sugar much better than the unfit bodies of couch potatoes.

The bottom line

You want to enjoy an excellent diet, and not strive for a “perfect” (but very strict) diet. You can win good health and perform well with a balanced diet, filled with a variety of foods, and enjoyed in moderation.

Sports nutritionist Nancy Clark MS RD CSSD has a private practice in the Boston-area (Newton; 617-795-1875), where she helps both fitness exercisers and competitive athletes create winning food plans. Her best-selling Sports Nutrition Guidebook, and food guides for marathoners, cyclists and soccer are available at nancyclarkrd.com. For online workshops, see www.NutritionSportsExerciseCEUs.com.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a Super Food! Like the arrival of super heroes to save the day, super foods landed upon us in the last decade and now we are all supposed to load up on them to save our days. But are they really so super? Let’s get better Super Food nutrition, simplified and see!

Super Food Rule #1

ORGANIC FOOD is SUPER, chemistry lab projects are not. No bells and whistles required, no need to be found or able to leap tall plants in the Amazon or Balinese jungle, no need to grow where no one else grows… just need to be food, from a seed or having eaten the plant, whole or minimally processed, grown without excess of harmful pesticides. So while chemistry is a SUPER fun class (or can be), and is SUPER awesome at helping us test and learn things, let’s focus on consuming more organic food, most often.

Super Food Rule #2

Better Nutrition is SUPER. When your body gets what it needs, wants, and recognizes most easily it functions most efficiently and effectively to deliver you the better health you seek. Whether it’s better energy, better skin, better heart health, better immune health, better all of the above health – you get it, your body will too when it gets better nutrition. So check out the Better Nutrition Simplified plan and assess how SUPER your nutrition is today to fuel better health tomorrow.

Super Food Rule #3

Nutrient balance, not calorie counting, is SUPER. Your body doesn’t need fuel, it needs the right fuel for the right parts and activities. That means carbs for quick energy including brain fuel, fats to promote healthy inflammatory response and sustainable energy, proteins for muscles, hormones, and enzymes and all your non-starchy vegetables for routine and deep clean up and removal of unwanted “dirt.” So make any nutrition pit stop SUPER by balancing your nutrients.

Super Food Rule #4

SUPER is as much about what a food is free from as it is about what it contains. Plenty of super food products and ingredients being sold may be full of a high amount of an antioxidant but also full of binders, highly processed and even artificial ingredients. Conversely, some may be isolates of the “super” ingredient but it is not so super without its comrades from the whole food form. For example, if your gluten free cereal is made from refined flour and then has added isolated ingredients like a vitamin or mineral (not even in the same form as found in the food) then there’s nothing SUPER about it. Instead get an organic gluten free cereal with whole or minimally processed ingredients and if you need it, take a quality organic multi as a supplement (not sure if you need it a supplement, that’s what I am here for, fill out the supplement evaluation form here and send it to me so I can help you)

Super Food Rule #5

DIY is SUPER, but so is Some Assemble Required (thanks IKEA for that phrase). When you buy ready to eat food, it may be ready and fast but it likely has ingredients that keep it ready and fast and as such make it a little less super. For example, instead of buying a ready to eat yogurt parfait, try adding Nature’s Path Qi’a coconut chia super flakes to your plain almond yogurt (or make my cashew cream and top it with the super flakes) for a delicious, better nutrition pit stop because you control the quality, quantity, and nutrient balance making it a SUPER FOOD version of your desired eats or sips (same goes for your lattes and your smoothies, see the Better Liquid Nutrition Simplified quick start guide).

If you know me, you know that I believe in Better, not superlatives like Super or Healthiest and certainly not Perfect. I am in the business of helping you have more, better days and that begins with better nutrition. But I get that we may want things to feel SUPER, so I hope this helped you sort the SUPER from the Not So. Got more questions? I have Answers, so send them my way for an #AskAshley answer to help you have another better day fueled by better nutrition.

Originally printed on ashleykoffapproved.com. Reprinted with permission.

Ashley Koff RD is your better health enabler. For decades, Koff has helped thousands get and keep better health by learning to make their better not perfect nutrition choices more often. A go-to nutrition expert for the country’s leading doctors, media, companies and non-profit organizations, Koff regularly shares her Better Nutrition message with millions on national and local television, magazines and newspapers. Visit her website at ashleykoffapproved.com.