Nutritional Recommendations for Sport Team Athletes

In present days, consistent scientific evidence is confirming that nutritional intake has an essential role in optimizing training and competition performance in athletes.

When nutritional practices are adequate, athletes can exploit their maximum talent performance, while promoting a suitable recovery process with a lower risk of disease and sport injuries.

Therefore, in order to address these issues, it is important to clearly define all the nutritional parameters which optimize the athletes feeding practices: energy intake, macro and micronutrients consumption and hydration practices.

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Nutritional Practices, Interventions and Recommendations for Junior Rugby League Players

Rugby league football is played at junior (Under 12-Under 20) and senior levels in several countries worldwide. For players over 13 years, the game is played under the international rules. It is a physical contact sport lasting between 60-80 minutes (depending on the standard of competition), during which players are subjected to high impact collisions, frequent intense bouts of running and tackling interspersed with short bouts of recovery. 

Players are required to have a highly developed level of strength, power, speed and agility, as well as both aerobic and anaerobic endurance; the levels of which increase with the level of competition. Further, the coordination of neuromuscular tasks including power, speed, strength into functional movements with appropriate psychological skills including pattern recognition, decision-making, dual-task and anticipation within the game are the key factors underpinning success.

Microbiological Connection to Our Food, Nutrition, Health, and Disease

With ever-increasing population, governments across the globe keep feeling the pressure of ensuring availability of food to their masses. Malnutrition has been plaguing a large part of the world population, particularly in the developing and under-developed world. Malnutrition also makes the victims more susceptible to different infections and physiological disorders.

There are large scale social, economic, and political implications of failure of governments in tackling the problem of malnutrition. This problem is related to both quantity as well as quality of the food.Microorganisms in the human gut are intimately associated with digestion and absorption of the food. The human gut microbiome has now been well demonstrated to have a strong connection to our health and disease.

There are approximately 1014 microbial cells inside human gut, which weigh approximately 1 kg. These organisms provide a large array of benefits to their human host, such as protection from the allocthonous pathogens, synthesis of vitamins (e.g. vitamin K), aiding the host in breakdown of complex polysaccharides, etc. The gut microbiome is also able to communicate with the brain

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