In 2010 I attended a consensus meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland organized by Professor Ron Maughan on behalf of the Medical Commission of the International Olympic Committee. Twenty-eight of the world experts were brought together to discuss what is new in Sports Nutrition. The goal was to evaluate the existing literature on the relationship between nutrition, health and performance in order to see if there was sufficient evidence to update the existing recommendations. The overall goal was to achieve consensus in the form of a one page overview of where the field of sports nutrition was at that point of time. As you can imagine reaching a consensus (everyone agrees) with this many scientists is not easy!
I was asked to present on the topic of “Nutrition for endurance sports: Marathon, triathlon, and road cycling”. The paper was scrutinized by the experts and was published in 2011 in the Journal of Sports Sciences. The publisher Taylor & Francis subsequently made the paper freely available for everyone to download and read. Today, the review article reached 30,000 downloads: a big number for any scientific publication, but certainly for a sports science publication.
Here, I wont go into the details of the paper as I will address most for the issues in future blogs. If you want to read more, you can follow this link to the article which is still available to download for free on the website of the Journal of Sports Sciences.
The review article is concerned with endurance exercise lasting 30 min or longer and discusses the most likely contributors to fatigue: dehydration and carbohydrate depletion. In addition there are discussions of gastrointestinal problems, hyperthermia, and hyponatraemia that can all affect endurance exercise performance and are potentially health threatening, especially in longer events (>4 h).
You can also find a related article on this web site, a paper that I co-authored with professors Louise Burke, John Hawley and Stephen Wong. The title of this paper is “Carbohydrates for training and competition”.
Jeukendrup AE. Nutrition for endurance sports: marathon, triathlon, and road cycling. J Sports Sci. 2011;29 Suppl 1:S91-9
Burke LM, Hawley JA, Wong SH, Jeukendrup AE. Carbohydrates for training and competition. J Sports Sci. 2011;29 Suppl 1:S17-2