Fuel Your Fitness: Snack for Success
Science weakly (at best) supports snacking for health. Based on simple logic, I would expect this is for a number of reasons including the following:
- Somehow, the term “snack” has become synonymous with “junk food”.
- People typically don’t shrink the size of their three standard meals to compensate for snacks.
- Many people also do not exercise to offset the consumption of extra calories from snacks.
Science has, however, shown that regular snacking presents numerous benefits to athletes. While the sports nutrition research I have spent the most time reviewing pertains to collegiate athletes, most of the principles can be extrapolated to other types of “athletes” in varying regards. For example, it is known that collegiate athletes have higher energy needs that their nonathletic peers. Intuitively, this is true of other types of athletes based on the fact that athletes burn more energy (through their training) than do their non-physically active counterparts. Anyways, as a fair disclaimer, below are the benefits of snacking found to be true for collegiate athletes:
- Maximize athletic performance
- Positively affect adaptive response to exercise
- Adequate provision of energy
- Minimize GI complaints that follow large meals
- Better improvements in strength and body composition
