Meet the food professionals fuelling peak performance
Have you ever wondered what elite athletes eat to compete at the highest level? Or what supplements, if any, they use to prepare for competition? Over the years, Food Matters Live have sat down with numerous professionals across sports nutrition, from performance chefs and professional athletes to performance coaches and supplement manufacturers.
Curated from the Food Matters Live podcast, the following episodes explore the ingredients and products fuelling peak performance, be that for elite rugby players, professional triathletes or world-class cyclists undertaking the gruelling Tour de France. Let’s dive in:
The chef fuelling the Tour de France peloton, featuring James Forsyth
James Forsyth, Performance Chef for elite cycling team the INEOS Grenadiers
James Forsyth, Performance Chef for elite cycling team the INEOS Grenadiers
The Tour de France is one of the most demanding athletic feats in modern sports, pushing riders to their mental and physical limits. Split into 21 stages over 21 days, those competing travel over 3000km and burn roughly 6000 calories daily.
Fuelling athletes to finish the race is a feat in itself requiring extensive nutritional expertise to achieve. The Food Matters Live podcast welcomes James Forsyth, Performance Chef for world-class cycling team the INEOS Grenadiers. James shares how he went from a Michelin star kitchen to elite performance chef and reveals what it takes to fuel one of the best cycling teams in one of the world’s toughest competitions.
The man elite athletes turn to for nutrition advice, featuring James Morehen
In this Career Conversations episode, Food Matters Live sits down with Dr. James Morehen, Performance Nutritionist at the Bristol Bears. Throughout his career, James has worked with some of the world’s top athletes, including the England Women’s football team and West Ham United.
Whilst you may think professional athletes are immune from nutritional misinformation, James says this is far from the case. In fact, sometimes these are the people most vulnerable to food myths: “You would be surprised at how many athletes are uneducated, or have been fed the wrong information over their career”.
Listen to the full episode to learn how you can follow a similar career path to Dr. Morehen and what it takes to fuel athletes at the highest level.
The elite athlete getting back on track with collagen peptides, featuring Justus Nieschlag
Justus Nieschlag is Germany’s middle-distance IRONMAN 70.3 Kraichgau record holder, with five Arena Games podium finishes to his name. You can watch him in action in the video above.
In 2020, he was chosen to represent Germany in the Tokyo Olympic Games, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So you can imagine Nieschlag’s dismay when he suffered a ruptured Achilles in the lead up to the event.
Up until he suffered the partial rupture of his Achilles tendon, Justus admits that nutrition was “never a big part” of his thinking. That changed when his management team recommended he start working with GELITA and, in particular, their bioactive collagen peptide supplement TENDOFORTE.
Listen to the full episode to hear how GELITA’s collagen peptide supplements, in conjunction with nutritional coaching, helped aid his recovery and bring the team to an impressive sixth-place finish in the team relay.
Marginal gains – the growing role of nutrition in eSports
As the stakes increase in e-sports, players are increasingly paying attention to their nutrition and overall health. Whereas junk food and energy drinks once dominated the space, the top-level teams are now recruiting nutritional coaches to improve their focus, reaction times and overall wellbeing. But research is lacking in this nascent space, with much of the nutritional coaching simply educated guesswork at present.
Amidst this quickly moving landscape, the Food Matters Live podcast explores the role of nutrition in this field and asks: how can it be used to optimise a gamer’s performance? Joining us for this discussion is Klaudia Buczek, Founder of Made By Diet and Nicholas Morgan, Managing Director at Sports Integrated.
