Eating healthy goes beyond athletic fields

College football players are fast, strong and big, and they eat big too. But every effort is made to ensure that they eat healthy.

Virginia Tech’s football team has been nationally ranked for most of the past decade. While hard work, skill and good coaching have contributed to the team’s success, so has good nutrition.

Tech was one of the first universities to hire a full-time nutritionist and dietician for its sports programs. Ironically, one of the goals many players have is to lose weight, not gain it.

“You can have a lot of weight on you,” said Amy Freel, director of sports nutrition at Virginia Tech, “If it’s a lot of unhealthier, fat weight, you can’t move very quickly off the ball. You can’t be fast, you can’t be quick, and you can’t jump as high. Those skills aren’t going to be helping you out on the football field if you can’t do that.”

Freel said the department tailors a player’s diet plan to his individual position and needs. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrition guidelines call for adults to consume 2,000 calories a day or less, sometimes a lineman can eat as much as 8,000 calories a day. But he’s burning those calories off, playing and training.

It’s important for athletes to learn lifelong nutritional skills. “I spend a lot of time educating them on what are appropriate choices,” Freel said. “We want them to know what are the choices to make before practice, what are the choices to make after practice, what are the choices to make for breakfast, what are the choices to make on not-so-busy days, what are the choices to make on very hectic days. We encourage them to seek out fresh, local food products, especially fruits and vegetables, either in their local grocery store or at a local farmers’ market.”

Freel tells her players that it’s possible to eat almost unlimited quantities of fruit and vegetables and not gain weight, so that’s the best thing to substitute for the extra protein, fats and sugars so many people consume every day.

“Not only are we trying to show them how to eat right when they are in college and playing football,” she said, “but it is what they should do later on in life as well.”