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Sports Food As A Functional Food

Hello again.

I hope everything will be better in this year for all of you. I guess that most of you aimed to gain a regular exercise habit and a more healthy diet for it. In this page and the next page, I am going to explain the history of sports food and some aspects of sports food that we should focus on.

For today, I will give information about the history of sports foods.

Sports foods can be defined as the foods people consume in order to reach their special goals for increasing their body performances. This goal can be to gain weight, to increase muscle mass, fat burning or to lose weight. Mostly, sports are done for multiple purposes but the main aim is increasing muscle mass. You can observe this in the fitness centers, especially fulled by young men :)

In the sports world, a large group of athletes is men but the increased women population could not be underestimated. Today, over 2 billion people are doing sports regularly. Football, basketball, volleyball, running and table tennis are top five.

Roman Poet Juvernal at A.D. 1. century said "Mens sana in corpore sano" that is, "you need a healthy body to have a healthy mind". This phrase is now more popular than ever. With the popularisation of wellness, people began to remember the importance of being physically and spiritually healthy. At this point, the importance of nutrition appeared. Healthy foods have evolved according to the needs of athletes with the development of food technology and science.

Thomas Hicks, the gold medalist in the Olympics in 1904, was so exhausted that he could not get his medal at the end of the race as a result of misfeeding during the race. This led scientists to work on athletes' food. It is accepted that the first specialized studies started in Sweden in the 1930s. In general, Scandinavian scientists continued this work on carbohydrate and fat in the 1960s. Focusing on glycogen storage, scientists tried to learn how athletes would properly fill up their glycogen stores. In the 1970s, a university in the United States carried the work forward by making the long-distance athletes and cyclists work out in the laboratory at the same time for research purposes. Nowadays, the research on sports foods has become a specialized area for clarifying the functions of amino acids. Doctors, food engineers, athletes are looking for ways to be healthy and strong.

Of course, these researchs are because of the great demand in the market. In 2016, the sports food market was 28 billion $ and is expected to reach $ 45 billion in 2022 according to the economists. These numbers must not surprise you. Even in Turkey sports food market is 55 million $ currently.

That's all for now. See you in the next post for details.

2500 years ago Hippocrates said;

Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food.

Value Hippocrates words and take care of yourself <3

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