Episode 59A - What’s the environmental impact of sports nutrition? | Dr Alba Reguant-Closa

Fueling Endurance - Nutrition for Runners, Cyclists & Triathletes

We’ve answered almost 60 common questions about sports nutrition to date on this podcast, but one thing we don’t often consider is the environmental implications of our advice. Are we inadvertently contributing to climate change and destruction of the very environments we love to train and race in? Can we be good athletes and good global citizens, or are we facing an uncomfortable conflict of values?

We're joined by Dr Alba Reguant-Closa (Agroscope, in Zurich, Switzerland), one of the only sports dietitians in the world who is actively working in this area. We’ll unpack and simplify the complex relationship between food and the environment, discover which food choices have the biggest environmental impact, look at the impact of sports-specific nutrition strategies on the environment, and finish with the 3 things athletes should do from a nutrition perspective if they care about reducing their environmental impact.

Alba's research publications on this topic:

• Meyer & Reguant-Closa (2017). "Eat as If You Could Save the Planet and Win!" Sustainability Integration into Nutrition for Exercise and Sport. Nutrients; 9(4):412. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu9040412

• Reguant-Closa et al. (2020). The Environmental Impact of the Athlete's Plate Nutrition Education Tool. Nutrients;12(8):2484. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12082484

• Meyer, Reguant-Closa & Nemecek (2020). Sustainable Diets for Athletes. Curr Nutr Rep.; 9(3):147-162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13668-020-00318-0