Do men and women need different sports nutrition products?

do men and women need different sports nutrition products?

The initial answer would be no: if a person wants to build lean muscle mass, increase power or shed body fat, they need to follow a structured training programme—regardless of whether they possess a Y chromosome. Gender has no bearing on needing to stay hydrated, support training or recover and while dosage might need to be adjusted to take bodyweight or composition into account, ultimately, everyone needs protein, carbohydrates, etc.

So, do men and women need different nutrition? The actual answer is yes: there’s a huge discrepancy in the amount of research into male and female sports nutrition and just because the data we have now says men and women need the same thing, this doesn’t mean it’s accurate. There is a kernel of truth in that when women exercise at high-intensity, their muscle physiology is like a man’s, and the nutritional demands for that muscle is very similar. However, when women train at moderate to low intensity, their needs are different and change over a monthly cycle.

When it comes to research on injury and performance—the real ‘meat’ of creating a winning strategy—females comprise only 2 percent and 3 percent of the research subjects respectively. For sports nutrition research studies in general, there is a lack of data on how many subjects are female—while the numbers are undoubtedly growing, until very recently, virtually all sports nutrition recommendations for women were based on data collected on men. Even now, most recommendations still depend on male-focused data. Why does this matter? Because women are not small men or men with hormone issues! Women and girls have unique anatomy and physiology, and transferring sports nutrition and training recommendations based on males to females is equally as inappropriate and ineffective—and perhaps even dangerous—as the application of male-centric pharmaceutical research results to females.

Photo by Seth Macey on Unsplash

The void in data on the needs of female athletes has allowed weight-loss marketers to swoop down with information masquerading as sports nutrition for women. Most of this misinformation involves ‘cutting calories’, ‘slashing carbs’, and ‘getting thin’. Such recommendations often lead to poor sports performance and can cause dire health consequences—namely, increased risk for injury and illness, deficiencies in energy and key nutrients such as iron and calcium, and fatigue. Many women athletes shoot for 0 percent body fat, eat zero dietary fat, and avoid carbs. These ‘fat-phobia’ and ‘carb-phobia’ phenomena are due in large part to the emphasis on thinness that is so prevalent today and a reliance on information that comes out of the diet world.

Fortunately, within the halls of science and academia is the beginning of a call for change: institutional review boards are beginning to highlight a requirement for female—as well as male—subjects in study designs; journal editors and reviewers are starting to call foul when studies neglect to include females. Although there are currently a handful of scientists focusing their research on the needs of the female athlete, the majority of these scientists are men. Their contributions are wonderful; they should be applauded for fostering lab environments in which female students are being mentored to take their place among the community of fully-fledged faculty members and primary investigators. But we also need more female scientists to be role models to enlarge the ranks of female investigators in the fields of sports science and nutrition. By nature, scientists typically study what they find to be personally interesting, and therefore female scientists will more likely have the desire and drive to study female athletes.

With more female-centric data, we will have more female-centric recommendations, and more female-centric products and guidelines. Athletes want what works. Women and girls know what is out there for them today hardly works, and in more than a few cases, can actually hurt their health and performance.

Female athletes want to be the most they can be, not the least. They want to be stronger, faster and more powerful—all to support their goals of winning. If accomplishing those goals leads to the outcomes that also include being leaner and sexier, that’s okay—but skinny and sexy are not the athletic goals they are seeking.

As in science, we need women in decision-making roles in product ownership, research and development, manufacturing, marketing and sales—with a personal interest in athletics and sport—to create the change women desire.

Some content excerpted from Kleiner, SM and Greenwood-Robinson, M. The New Power Eating, Human Kinetics, In Press

Dr Susan Kleiner is director of Science and Communication at Vitargo, Inc.,  and owner of High Performance Nutrition LLC.