Healthier meals and snacks can equate to improved performance. It can be difficult to make sure kids are eating healthfully enough to perform at their best on and off the field. Families and athletes often face challenges including late-night practices, inconvenient lunchtimes, demanding tournament schedules, travel leagues and lack of sleep. In her first book, Fueling Young Athletes, author and registered dietitian nutritionist, Heather Mangieri, RDN, CSSD, MS, offers parents and coaches the tools and references to better understand the nutritional needs of young athletes and manageable solutions to help overcome barriers that may stand in the way of making healthful food and hydration choices consistently. Sought-after topics of weight management, supplementation, fueling and hydration can all be found inside. In addition, Mangieri presents easy, appetizing recipes for smoothies, energy bars and sport drinks that conveniently supply a mix of necessary nutrients in liquid or solid form.
Dietitians can provide valuable science-based nutritional guidance to parents, coaches and athletes themselves. Fueling Young Athletes introduces sport nutrition for today’s athletic youth and discusses nutritional needs for specific sports and individual goals. Mangieri also draws on her years of experience counseling young athletes to cite relatable case studies that support specific recommendations. The reader will find tips on how to fuel before, during and after exertion. It also contains supportive guidance to help an athlete step through the process of creating a personal eating plan by categorizing foods as fuel, learning serving sizes, estimating nutrient and energy needs and developing a skeleton plan for the timing and composition of meals and snacks. Not all young athletes will have an opportunity to work, one-on-one, with a registered dietitian nutritionist who is a board-certified specialist in sport dietetics (CSSD) to learn how to power their bodies for performance. This affordable, comprehensive resource brings such credible guidance to masses of active youth, parents and coaches everywhere.
Look for it in paperback retailing for $19.95 in bookstores or on Amazon or read it on Kindle for $9.99. If you decide to use this book yourself or recommend it to clients, please share your experience. Comment below, tag me on Facebook.com/NutritionConnectionsLLC, or tweet me @karenbuch using #FoodNewsReviews
Disclosure: A similar book review first appeared on Nutrition 411. The reviewer received a review copy and was compensated by Nutrition 411 to write this post. Thoughts and opinions expressed are the reviewer’s own.