An athlete takes a high-dose vitamin C and E tablet every single day.
He wants to cut the damage from training and get fitter, faster. It looks like the perfect professional habit.
Last Thursday I asked a digital room of chefs whether it’s helping him or hurting him. The chat split. Three said helping. Four said hurting.
It’s hurting him.
When you train, you flip a switch.
It tells your body, I’m doing hard work, I need to get stronger, fitter and faster to handle this. Stronger muscles, tendons and bones. A stronger heart.
That work creates sparks. Think of a gear grinding. Those sparks are called free radicals, and over time they cause wear and tear.
Antioxidants are the coolant. They calm the sparks down.
So the old thinking was simple. More coolant, faster recovery. Give athletes a big dose in a tablet.
But you want some of those sparks. They’re part of the switch. Cool the body down too much and the switch doesn’t fully flip. He might feel like he recovers faster. He won’t adapt as well as he would from real food.
The tablet cancels out part of the session he just did.
It’s not only elite athletes. It’s the regular in your restaurant training for a marathon with a handful of vitamins next to his plate.
Now, remember, supplements make the loudest promises in sport, and the kitchen is right in the middle of it.
In the
study I co-authored of head chefs in English professional football, 58 of the 62 were working with supplements. Only 18 had ever had some sort of sport nutrition training.
I learned how serious this is the hard way. A player picked up a ban (nothing he’d taken with us), and the anti-doping officers asked me for a certificate for every supplement we’d given players over two seasons.
Then they went up to the kitchen. Who handles the supplements? Where are they stored? Which recipes use them? Show us your process.
Everyone in that building was accountable. Including the chefs.
The tablet is the nutritionist’s call. The coolant the body actually wants comes from your kitchen.
So here’s one thing to do this week.
Put the colour back on the plate after training.
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Try:
A berry compote with the post-training porridge or yoghurt
An acai or mixed berry smoothie
A soup packed with veg
A big, colourful salad on a rest day
Anyone can hand over a tablet. The chef who knows why real food beats it decides how much of the training the body actually keeps.
Some fuel for thought,
Ness.
