{"id":206720,"date":"2023-11-14T06:02:15","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T11:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=206720"},"modified":"2023-11-14T06:02:15","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T11:02:15","slug":"on-the-field-with-sports-nutritionist-jennifer-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2023\/11\/on-the-field-with-sports-nutritionist-jennifer-fields\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Field with Sports Nutritionist Jennifer Fields"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jennifer Fields, a new assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences<\/a>, has brought her expertise in sports nutrition and enthusiasm to advance her research with UConn\u2019s student athletes to the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources.<\/a><\/p>\n

For Fields, the adage \u201cyou can\u2019t out-train a bad diet\u201d is the key to her research which combines nutritional sciences and kinesiology.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can do whatever you want in the gym, and you can work hard, and athletes can be performing on the field and training for hours,\u201d Fields says. \u201cBut if you\u2019re not eating properly to support your training demands, you\u2019re going to end up getting hurt, your performance is going to decline, and you\u2019ll experience a lot of negative side effects because of your diet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fields\u2019 passion for nutrition began with her father\u2019s weight loss journey when Fields was in college. His experience inspired Fields to learn more about nutrition to support him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really stems from my desire to help people and help athletes be healthy so they can achieve their goals on and off the field and more than just performance, really achieving optimal health too,\u201d Fields says.<\/p>\n

One area of Fields\u2019 research is low energy availability, a condition where athletes do not have enough nutritional fuel to power their performance and support their overall health. This is particularly common in female athletes and athletes who compete in \u201caesthetic\u201d sports like dancing or gymnastics, where there is an emphasis on low body weight. But Fields notes, with the abundant amount of incorrect nutritional information available, it extends to athletes across all sports.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely present in male athletes, especially in those aesthetic sports,\u201d Fields says. \u201cBut we tend to care more about females because the negative health consequences that result in females tends to be more dangerous and irreversible than when present in males.\u201d<\/p>\n

For women, who are understudied in this field, low energy availability has a significant effect on estrogen levels, which impact the rest of their bodies\u2019 functioning, particularly bone health.<\/p>\n

Fields works to determine the prevalence of low energy availability in various sports and then designs interventions to help athletes increase the quality and quantity of their diets.<\/p>\n

Fields has a personal connection to this work. She was a three-sport varsity athlete growing up, and played competitive soccer for many years. When Fields was in graduate school learning how to conduct DEXA scans, which measure bone density, she discovered she had osteopenia at age 24.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was one of those athletes who thought I needed to starve myself and cut carbs from my diet,\u201d Fields says. \u201cBecause of the habits I had developed in high school and my college years, that\u2019s now shaping me for a future of osteoporosis. And those reductions in bone density can be permanent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fields now studies bone density and formation in endurance athletes. These athletes are regularly performing at high intensities for such high volumes that their bodies cannot maintain normal bone formation. This places them at a higher risk of injury and early onset osteoporosis and osteopenia.<\/p>\n

Fields looks at bone density alongside biomarkers of bone turnover to determine how these athletes are forming and breaking down bone. She then considers what dietary interventions could improve athletes\u2019 bone health during the playing season.<\/p>\n

Fields also investigates the impact of nutrition on body composition and strength or power; the impact of workloads on nutritional biomarkers; and nutritional interventions to address these impacts.<\/p>\n

In a study she conducted with female basketball players, Fields found that a significant portion of them had Vitamin D deficiencies. Since basketball is an indoor sport, these athletes absorb less Vitamin D naturally. Fields saw similar results in women\u2019s volleyball and track and field.<\/p>\n

In the dietary intervention that followed, the only group that showed improvement was the group taking 10,000 IUs of Vitamin D daily. Most Vitamin D supplements you can buy off the shelf contain 1,000 IUs at most.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn reality, it takes a lot more than that to reverse some of the negative changes that we see,\u201d Fields says.<\/p>\n

Over the years Fields has worked with men\u2019s and women\u2019s soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, women\u2019s field hockey, women\u2019s basketball, women\u2019s track and field, and football players.<\/p>\n

Fields has studied \u201cload monitoring\u201d \u2013 a measure of the kind of strain their bodies undergo while playing \u2013 in many of these populations and found some interesting differences across sports. For example, soccer players have a higher load volume, meaning they cover a greater distance while playing, but their intensity (like bouts of sprinting) is lower, whereas lacrosse and field hockey players have higher intensity and lower volume.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t just lump sports together,\u201d Fields says. \u201cWe need to be looking at what they\u2019re doing out on the field from an energy expenditure, a volume, and an intensity standpoint because that\u2019s going to drive our nutritional recommendations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now at UConn, Fields is building connections with UConn Athletics. She is also interested in expanding into non-varsity athlete populations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always say if you exercise, you\u2019re an athlete,\u201d Fields says. \u201cNot just varsity, D-1 athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n

This work relates to CAHNR\u2019s Strategic Vision area focused on\u00a0<\/em>Enhancing Health and Well-Being Locally, Nationally, and Globally.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Follow\u00a0<\/em>UConn CAHNR<\/em><\/a>\u00a0on social media<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI always say if you exercise, you\u2019re an athlete.” Jennifer Fields helps athletes of every variety use nutrition to maximize performance and health<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":206721,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2224,2301,2076],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2140],"class_list":["post-206720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cahnr","category-nutritional-sciences","category-research"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 20:52:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206722,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206720\/revisions\/206722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/206721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206720"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=206720"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=206720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}