Integrative Sport and Exercise Nutrition: A Practitioner’s Perspective

Integrative Sport and Exercise Nutrition: A Health-Feeds-Performance Perspective defines health as an underpinning requirement for active pursuit and sporting performance. By focusing on the empowerment of scientists and practitioners who support such individuals, this new textbook powerfully disseminates academic and experiential knowledge in a thoroughly applied context. The prevailing paradigm that has existed within the academic enquiry of sports nutrition has typically viewed macronutrients as ’fuel’ for exercise endeavours. While this notion provides a basis of quantitative nutritional support, what happens when our active individual lacks adequate digestive health to assimilate these foods, and in the process creates an inflammatory tone in their body? And what happens when our aspiring athlete is genetically not suited to the diet that is prescribed by the sports nutritionist, which is based merely on the energetic needs of their sport?

The underlying aim of Integrative Sport and Exercise Nutrition is to encourage sport, exercise and nutrition professionals, academics and students to embrace the physiological complexity and individuality of an exercising person. This approach highlights the need to go beyond traditional macronutrient approaches dominant in this field, and consider how our food impacts physiological health from an integrative body systems perspective. Within the context of heavy training loads, often alongside significant life stressors, such practitioners can support the robust health and performance requirements of active individuals. This cutting-edge book thereby brings together the scientific voice of academics with the ’real-world’ experience of nutrition and exercise practitioners, and by doing so, the authors wish to stimulate a new paradigm of thought towards integrative and personalised thinking in sport and exercise.

Ian Craig, MSc, DipCNE, FBANT is the founder of the Centre for Integrative Sports Nutrition, the world’s first organisation to bring integrative thinking into sport and exercise nutrition. With academic backgrounds in both exercise physiology and nutritional therapy, and a long career as a middle-distance athlete and coach, he has been developing the concept of integrative sport and exercise nutrition for the past two decades. As an experienced practitioner and co-author of Wholesome Nutrition, Ian supports athletes (recreational to elite) and individuals with lifestyle-oriented health imbalances, based in his native Scotland.

Justin Roberts, PhD, SFHEA, FBANT is a Professor of Nutritional Physiology, applied to exercise and functional health at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He is a Registered Nutritionist(R) and Fellow of the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine, Editor-in-Chief of the Nutrition Evidence Database (supporting an evidence-based approach for nutrition practitioners, academic researchers and students), and Chair of the Nutritional Therapy Education Commission. With over three decades of experience in nutrition, and sport and exercise physiology, Justin has worked with individuals across a diverse range of sports, including professional athletes and teams.