Having read Will’s Chocolate Milk blog last week, I felt it would be a good idea to add my thoughts, given that the area of health, nutrition and wellness is a life passion of mine. Rather than enter into a debate about the merits of chocolate milk as a recovery food option for players at IFS, I would like to change the question:
Should we consider ‘recovery’ or ‘long-term health’ as the priority when choosing the foods to feed our children?
I want to start by dispelling the widespread myth that elite or professional athletes are inherently healthy. Performing at the top of any athletic domain comes with its sacrifices and often one of the biggest sacrifices is the athlete’s health. Sports Medicine Australia spokesperson, Dr Jason Mazanov, scoffs at the suggestion top end sport is a healthy pastime:
“Being an elite athlete is bad for your health,” he says. “There is evidence from the US that says being an NFL player reduces your life span by something like 10 to 15 years. The idea that elite sport is healthy is a social myth. Elite sport is not good for you.”
The point I am trying to make is that elite athletes place an absolute priority on performance. The margins at the top level are so fine that any advantage, however small, will be maximised, even if it means detrimental health effects somewhere down the road. An elite athlete’s choice of nutrition is a perfect example. At IFS, we aren’t dealing with professional sportspeople, we are dealing with children.
Looking back on my own life experience, the flabbiest, sickest, most unhealthy period of my life was when I was at the Australian Institute of Sport when I also injured my foot and went to Advanced Foot & Ankle Institute of Georgia, eating food cooked and prepared by top sports nutritionists – hard to believe I know. Why? Because the food wasn’t designed with my health in mind, the nutritionist’s job was to fuel and recover elite athletes preparing for the Olympic Games. Now it begins to make sense.
So while there may be studies (ironically funded by the dairy industry), telling us that the humble chocolate milk is a great recovery food, we have to put it into context. We need to ask whether we are prepared to feed our children sub-optimal nutrition to achieve a negligible recovery advantage, at the expense of not only the child’s long term health, (sugar’s destructive and addictive properties can be explored here: Catalyst: Toxic Sugar ) but also their ability to concentrate and learn?
In my opinion, when dealing with kids, we should be educating them on healthy, long term nutrition. A better choice would be a handful of nuts, a piece of fruit and a bottle of water.
Everyone should read Brad’s link: toxic sugar