Nutritional Status of Female Athletes with Subclinical Eating Disorders
Section snippets
Subject Selection and Classification
Female athletes between the ages of 18 and 36 years were recruited from a variety of endurance and aesthetic sports, including distance running, swimming, cycling, basketball, bodybuilding, tennis, and triathlons. For this study, an athlete was defined as one who currently or previously competed in a sport and currently trained a minimum of 6 hours/week. Approximately 84% of the athletes were currently competing at the local or national level.
Subjects were initially screened for subclinical
Results
The subjects represented 9 different sports. Thirty-six of the subjects (75%) participated in endurance sports (eg, running, triathlons, cycling, swimming, basketball, tennis) and 12 (25%) participated in more aesthetic sports (eg, dancing and bodybuilding). No significant differences between the groups were found for any of the demographic or anthropometric variables examined (see Table 1).
Discussion
The primary purpose of this study was to compare the energy and nutritional status of female athletes with subclinical eating disorders with that of control athletes and standard norms. Our results indicated that female athletes with subclinical eating disorders had intakes of energy, protein, carbohydrate, and certain micronutrients that were below recommended levels and in many cases were significantly lower than intakes of control athletes. Nonetheless, the low dietary intakes of the
Applications
Although none of the athletes with subclinical eating disorders demonstrated frank nutritional deficiencies, many had inadequate intakes of energy, carbohydrate, protein, calcium, zinc, iron, and magnesium. At the present time, the long-term effects of such low nutrient intakes combined with high levels of physical activity are unknown. However, research does suggest that the potential health consequences could be numerous and may include chronic fatigue, compromised immune function, poor or
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