Abstract
Considering nutrition education interventions have been frequently implemented in team sport athletes and have shown promising results, this study aimed to summarize the effects of nutrition education interventions on eating habits, nutrition knowledge, body composition, and physical performance in team sport athletes. A systematic review was conducted using the following databases: PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science and SPORTDiscus. A total of 14 studies met the inclusion criteria for the review. The methodological quality of included studies was evaluated, and each study was assessed according to the analyzed variables (i.e., eating habits, nutrition knowledge, body composition, and physical performance). Most studies showed improvements in or maintenance of variables used to indicate eating habits, nutrition knowledge, and body composition. However, limited studies examined the effect of nutrition education interventions on physical performance, with existing studies demonstrating disparate results. These findings suggest implementation of nutrition education interventions in team sport athletes could be an effective strategy to improve their eating habits, nutrition knowledge, and body composition. Due to the heterogeneity across the included studies regarding sport modality, competition level, age, and sex of the athletes investigated, as well as the intervention type adopted (i.e., online or face-to-face), it is difficult to establish optimal nutrition education interventions for each analyzed variable.
Highlights
Team sports are played around the world [1], accumulating large audiences [2] and generating high economic impact [3]
Full-text text versions the remaining studies were assessed for eligibility, with 14meeting studies the meeting the versions of theofremaining studies were assessed for eligibility, with 14 studies inclusion inclusion criteria beinginretained in our systematic review [22,23,24,25,26,29,30,32,33,34,35,40,41,42]
The aim of our systematic review was to analyze the effects of nutrition education interventions on eating habits, nutrition knowledge, body composition, and physical performance in team sport athletes
Summary
Team sports are played around the world [1], accumulating large audiences [2] and generating high economic impact [3]. The application of sport science has become a staple in most team sports to improve the health and performance of athletes [4]. In this sense, sport science research has grown with most studies focusing on three predominant topic areas including: training and game load monitoring through physical, physiological, and perceptual variables [5]; optimization of athletes’ anthropometric characteristics and physical fitness [6]; and evaluation of injury prevention and rehabilitation programs [7]. Recent research has highlighted the relevance of invisible strategies (i.e., those other than training plans) in the pursuit of optimizing athlete health and performance [8]. Nutrition is considered a key invisible strategy, benefiting performance during competition and facilitating recovery [9].
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