Young people face ‘misinformation’ on sports nutrition

Too much focus on body image, and misinformation about sports nutrition and diet, are having an unhealthy effect on young people, a conference in Dublin has heard.

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland's (FSAI) Food Safety Consultative Council held an open meeting to discuss the effect on young people of performance nutrition and the proliferation of related food products and supplements.

Kilkenny senior hurler Richie Hogan told the event that at one point he had, lived on sports drinks and would arrive for training with "four or five bottles", simply because he had seen them on television.

He was also bringing a bottle of sports drink and high sugar foods into school every day “because I was told that these were good for you and that these were the things you need to take”.

Hogan said the key to his nutrition and performance was to get the basics right for himself.

He said that every time a particular rugby player was doing an interview on screen after his matches “a bottle of Powerade would go flying across the screen and he’d catch it and he’d take a few gulps out of it”.

He said he believed if Conor McGregor tweeted about eating chicken curry, “demand for chicken curry would go through the roof the following day”.

Experts at the “Food and Fitness - The recipe for performance” event debated issues around sports and fitness nutrition, including the use of performance enhancing products and supplements.

Misinformation

Dr Mary Flynn, chief specialist in public health nutrition with the FSAI, said young people were exposed to a "significant amount of misinformation on sports nutrition, which has potential negative implications for their health now and in the future".

The “sports food” industry was worth more than €65 billion a year globally, she said, with product promotion “sometimes targeted along gender lines, promoting muscle gain in males and weight loss in females.

“Young teenagers, who are still growing, need to be protected against unhealthy messages that promote a single unrealistic body image as the ‘ideal’ for young people.

“This weakens self-esteem and leads to unhealthy body image concerns. In reality, the variation of body types is very wide and changes hugely during the growing years of adolescence,” Dr Flynn said.

Dr Flynn also told the event she was “horrified” to see information in the media promoting “ketogenic” diets for cancer prevention.

“There’s no evidence base for that.”

She said there were also claims in the media that “sugar feeds cancer”, when there were people who needed a diet high in energy and sugar just to get through their treatment.

When she read such things, she wondered why nobody had asked a qualified dietician or a nutritionist to balance the claims.

Other speakers at the event included Noreen Roche, sports dietitian to the Kilkenny hurling team, Dr Conor O'Brien, consultant neurophysiologist and physician in sports medicine at the Sports Surgery Clinic, Conn McCluskey of Ireland Active and Ruth Wood-Martin, head of nutrition with the Irish Rugby Football Union.

The event was chaired by food writer and broadcaster Suzanne Campbell.