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Showing all 10 resources
- Clinical guidance
The AAP's playbook for eating around a packed weeknight schedule
American Academy of Pediatrics — HealthyChildren.org
This is the closest thing to an official answer for parents juggling practice, homework and dinner in the same three-hour window. It gives concrete timing — a carb-forward, low-fibre, low-fat meal about three to four hours out, with fluid volumes scaled to the child's size, and small sips every fifteen minutes or so during activity. If you read one thing before your next tournament weekend, make it this; it's also the clearest illustration of why meal timing has to bend around the schedule rather than the other way around.
- Clinical guidance
What the AAP actually says about supplements for kids
American Academy of Pediatrics — HealthyChildren.org
Every parent of a competitive athlete eventually gets asked about creatine or a protein powder, usually because a teammate's parent mentioned it first. The AAP's position is direct: creatine shows no added benefit during puberty, and most young athletes eating a balanced diet gain nothing from protein supplements. Worth bookmarking before that conversation happens rather than after.
- Parent guide
Feeding your child athlete
Nemours KidsHealth
Written for parents rather than practitioners, and it covers the part most nutrition content skips — the pressure kids feel around weight in sports like wrestling, swimming, gymnastics and dance. It's blunt that dieting is usually the wrong move for an active kid, because restriction costs strength, endurance and concentration. Share this one with a parent who's worried about a coach's offhand comment about weight.
- Governing body
NCAA Sport Science Institute — nutrition, hydration and sleep
NCAA
The NCAA's central hub for fuelling, hydration and sleep guidance, built with medical organisations for use by athletic departments. Its framing is that a good plan comes down to three questions — how much, what quality and what timing — which is the same structure any club or school should use when building a nutrition programme. If you're an athletic director trying to justify a nutrition initiative to a budget committee, this is the citation.
- Position statement
The joint position statement underpinning modern sports nutrition
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada & American College of Sports Medicine
This is the foundational consensus document three major bodies co-signed on nutrition and athletic performance. It sets out guidance on the type, amount and timing of food, fluid and supplement intake across training and competition scenarios — and closes by directing athletes to a registered dietitian for anything personalised. That last point is the boundary line, and it's the right one: population-level guidance and individual clinical care are different things.
- Consensus statement
The IOC's 2023 consensus on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs)
International Olympic Committee
REDs describes what happens when an athlete's intake doesn't cover what training burns, and the consequences run well past performance. The 2023 update highlights the emerging role of inadequate carbohydrate intake, the overlap between REDs and overtraining syndrome, and a better understanding of the syndrome in male athletes. The overtraining overlap is the part clubs should sit with — a young athlete who looks like they're simply tired may be underfuelled.
- Free course
NFHS Sports Nutrition — free course for coaches and athletic directors
National Federation of State High School Associations
A free, self-paced course covering what athletes should eat before competition and how to refuel afterwards. It's built for the audience that actually reaches kids daily — coaches, administrators and parents across roughly 18,500 high schools — and it explicitly addresses influencing eating habits outside the school building. If you run a club or academy, this is the lowest-friction way to get an entire coaching staff to a shared baseline.
- Industry report
Aspen Institute Project Play — State of Play 2025
Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program
The annual benchmark report on youth sports participation, cost and access in the United States. The 2025 edition reports participation recovering to 55.4% of youth aged 6–17, alongside a 46% rise in the cost of youth sports since 2019 and persistent access gaps by household income. Any club director building the case for a new programme — nutrition or otherwise — should be arguing against this cost backdrop rather than around it.
- Peer-reviewed research
Nutrition for children and adolescents who practise sport: a narrative review
Nutrients, 2024 — open access
A peer-reviewed review covering nutritional needs from recreational through elite youth participation, including supplements and disordered eating risk. It flags the micronutrients that matter specifically because children are still growing — calcium and vitamin D for bone development, and iron, where competitive adolescent female athletes carry elevated deficiency risk. Freely accessible, which makes it easy to hand to a coach or parent who wants the primary source rather than a summary of it.
- Peer-reviewed research
What an elite academy learned about its own players' nutrition knowledge
Nutrients — HNK Hajduk Academy case study
A study of young elite footballers that measured nutrition knowledge against actual match-day intake and on-field output. Energy and carbohydrate intake on match day predicted distance covered per minute, and the authors conclude that academies need structured nutrition education built in rather than bolted on. Their sharper point is that knowledge alone didn't close the gap — athletes needed practical support to apply it, which is exactly the argument for tooling over education alone.
Put the guidance to work
AthlEAT turns this kind of guidance into meals timed around your athlete's real schedule.