Dietary Behavior of School-Aged Young Athletes

Abstract

Introduction: The dietary behavior of school-aged athletes is a critical area of study because nutrition considerably influences their overall performance, growth, and well-being. These young athletes, who participate in organized sports, have specific nutritional needs that differ from those of their non-athletic peers. Objective: This study aims to analyze and characterize the eating habits of students engaged only in activities provided by the Physical Education curriculum compared to those who also participate in extracurricular activities (both federated and non-federated) by examining their food preferences to understand the possible influences of these activities on eating and to identify patterns that may affect their health, well-being, and performance. Methods: The study group consisted of a total of Portuguese 252 secondary school students, aged between 15 and 19, attending the 10th, 11th and 12th grades. A questionnaire was used that resulted from combining already validated instruments, namely the translated version of the KIDMED index (Coelho et al., 2022) and the FNLIT (Doustmohammadian et al., 2018). Descriptive and inferential analyses of the data were carried out using version 29 of the IBM