Science Overload

Alright, where did I leave off?

Oh, yes, the sports and science portion of our day.

Dr. David Nieman is the director of the Human Performance Lab in North Carolina and did a presentation on Immunonutrition Support for Athletes. The whole presentation was very science heavy (and maybe a bit over my head), but all the facts and figure about recovery for athletes were fascinating.

Dr. Nieman has run over 58 marathons in his lifetime and mainly focuses his research efforts on protecting endurance athletes’ immune systems in recovery. He explained that pupils who do roughly 45 minutes of moderate exercise a day have strong immune systems, but when you add the stress of pushing yourself in endurance events (such as running a marathon) you compromise your immune system and increase your odds of becoming ill after each long workout.

His lab has recently discovered (and is currently testing) that quercetin (a flavatoid) boosts athletes’ immune systems when combined with other flavtoids. The results have been pretty spot-on and I was happy to see that quercetin is naturally found in a lot of my favorite foods.

Unfortunately the subjects were tested with over 1000mg of quercetin up to 3 weeks leading up to the main endurance event, since the most common source of quercetin (apples) only has 10mg of quercetin on average, you would need to eat 100 apples a day to achieve the same results. Yikes!

They’re currently testing supplements and drinks with the necessary amount of quercetin, but I still got the message of making sure to load up on as much fruit and veggies leading up to the event to ensure good health in recovery.

A few other interesting facts I picked up?

• When bananas went head-to-head with gatorade as race fuel in a marathon setting, the results were exactly the same.
• Additional vitamins added to sports drinks were deemed unnecessary in testing. Dr. Nieman referred to it as ‘expensive urine’
• They’re testing traits in non-alcoholic beer that have proven to aide in race recovery. They’re calling it ‘Athletic Beer.’ (I’m going to pretend those same traits are found in regular beer too and drink up in the name of health after Savannah 😉 )
• All the research for race recovery applies to warfighters too and is often funded by the government for that reason.

Again, science overload, but I learned a lot! All of the race recovery stuff was really interesting. 🙂

After our brains were turned to mush over facts and figures, we headed across the street for our buffet lunch.  

Everything on the buffet was made with Dole’s new Mushroom Powder.

The Mushroom Powder is pretty cool because it’s an all natural source of vitamin D (I mean, it’s literally mushroom powder, nothing else) and just one teaspoon added to a meal a day provides all the vitamin D you need for 24 hours. It’s virtually flavorless and can be added to anything and everything (including baked goods).

I loaded my plate up with a little bit of everything and dug in.

Everything was delicious (as I’ve come to expect) and, no, I couldn’t taste the mushroom powder, but I figured if they went though these great lengths to prove it to us, that I wasn’t going to.

I grabbed a soup too, but only had a couple of bites.

Chocolate dipped pineapple for dessert.

A little race recovery knowledge followed by a little food. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Just out of curiosity… what’s your race recovery routine? Do you find you’re often sick following a big race?