What Should Athletes Eat And What To Watch For

Nutrition information for athletes and for health conscious people is very important. Eating fresh vegetables, fruits and proteins most of the time is an ideal worth striving for. Good  supplements  use may also be helpful.

For those times when manufactured products like protein powders and other packaged articles need to be used there is one action that should be taken when deciding on which food products to buy:

Read Nutrition facts labels

You can never know all the ingredients contained in what you eat. However,  it’s very good idea to look at the nutrition facts labels on food products that have them. Then you can make an informed decision whether to buy and use them.

It’s very easy to choose foods based on what they look like since some packaging is very appealing. But packaging is not what you eat.

It gets more difficult when you want to find something that is also good for you.

Nutrition facts labels may not seem like good reading when they reveal the truth about something you really enjoy eating.

But you will want to read them to make sure you are not ingesting frequently and on a regular basis something that you know is bad for your health and for your athletic performance.

Ingredients labels can be especially important to read if you’re trying to avoid or minimize certain substances like sodium, trans fatty acids and refined high glycemic index carbohydrates.

It’s also important to read nutrition facts labels correctly, because they list the nutrients of foods per serving.

Food packages almost always contain more than one serving. It makes sense for food packaged intended for a family or a group of people.

It can be misleading when it comes to snack packs and beverages.

Who eats part of a snack bag or drinks only part of a bottle, saving the rest for later?

Why don’t they just make one serving bags and bottles?

If it’s because they would be too small, that’s probably a food or drink you want to avoid.

Nutrition facts labels also usually pertain to a 2000 calorie diet. So what the nutrition facts mean to you will depend on how you eat or how you should eat.

They will list the number of calories per serving but if you eat the entire contents that consisted of 2 servings you’re actually eating twice the calories listed. This goes for all of the nutrients in the food.

Nutrition facts labels are a good guide, but they’re not always completely factual.

Take Ingredients Labels With A Grain Of Salt

Nutrition facts labels are now required to list the amount of trans fats in the contents.

You will often see products loudly proclaiming that they have zero trans fats but that may be deceptive.

In reality food products manufacturers are allowed to list 0 grams of trans fats on their labels as long as the amount is under 1 g per serving.

So if you eat several servings, it can easily add up to a significant amount of trans fats which is far from zero.

Nutrition information is never one hundred per cent accurate.

When using manufactured, prepackaged and processed foods the ingredients labels are all we can go by. Athletes and everybody who cares about their health need to read them.

When it comes to natural foods, deciding whether something is healthy is pretty straight forward.

Athletes, whether young, developing or at their peak levels as well as healthy conscious people should always strive to eat healthy, natural and fresh foods combined into a healthy diet menu.

When the need to use manufactured products arises as it occasionally will, nutrition information for athletes and anyone else can and should be gleaned from reading nutrition facts labels.