ABSTRACT
Sports nutrition practices have existed for numerous centuries. For instance, Pythagoras of Samos (580-500 B.C.) recognised the need for nutritional adequacy to support the demands of rigorous training and implemented diets with a high-meat content for his athletes [1]. In the modern era, the field of sports nutrition blossomed in the early twentieth century largely due to the joint efforts of scientists and practitioners in elucidating the importance of various nutrients on adaptations to physical training. The advent of modern sports nutrition was marked by studies of carbohydrate and fat metabolism conducted by Swedish scientists in the 1930s. The field of evolved in the 1960s when the emphasis of athletic performance became centred on skeletal muscle glycogen utilisation. In the 1970s the sports nutrition field continued to grow when numerous university laboratories across the world began studying trained endurance athletes, and further expanded in the 1980s when exercise physiologists and nutritionists began collaborating on research projects [2].
