Nutrition and Athlete Bone Health

AbstractAthletes should pay more attention to their bone health, whether this relates to their longer-term bone health (e.g. risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis) or their shorter-term risk of bony injuries. Perhaps the easiest way to do this would be to modify their training loads, although this advice rarely seems popular with coaches and athletes for obvious reasons. As such, other possibilities to support the athletes ’ bone health need to be explored. Given that bone is a nutritionally modified tissue and diet has a significant influence on bone health across the lifespan, diet and nutritional composition seem like obvious candidates for manipulation. The nutritional requirements to support the skeleton during growth and development and during ageing are unlikely to be notably different between athletes and the general population, although there are some considerations of specific relevance, including energy availability, low carbohydrate availability, protein intake, vitamin D intake and dermal calcium and sodium losses. Energy availability is important for optimising bone health in the athlete, although normative energy balance targets are highly unrealistic for many athletes. The level of energy availability beyond which there is no negative effect for the bone needs to be established. On the ba lance of the available evidence it would seem unlikely that higher animal protein intakes, in the amounts recommended to athletes, are not harmful to bone health, particular...
Source: Sports Medicine - Category: Sports Medicine Source Type: research