Sport Nutrition Knowledge among Athletes and Recreational People

Introduction: Knowing the principles of proper nutrition is extremely important for everyone, especially for athletes, but also for recreational people. Objective: The aim of the research was to examine and compare the level of knowledge about nutrition and supplementation among athletes and recreational sports players. Participants and methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted on athletes from Montenegro (N = 249, 71.5% men and 28.5% women) and recreationists from Bosnia and Herzegovina (N = 156, 57.7% men and 42.3% women). A specially structured questionnaire was used to assess knowledge about nutrition and supplementation from the perspective of sports performance. Results: Supplementation is used by 60.6% of athletes and 67.3% of recreationists. Athletes use vitamins the most (75.3%), while recreationists use proteins the most, alone (30.8%) or in combination with vitamins (21.2%) and creatine (12.2%). The fact that the majority of recreationists make decisions about supplementation independently (67.9%) is worrying, while among athletes, decisions about the need for supplementation are made independently 32.7% of the time and according to the trainer's recommendation 28.6% of the time. A low level of knowledge about nutrition and supplementation was found in both groups of respondents, but athletes showed somewhat better knowledge compared to recreational players; athletes had an average of 77.2% correct answers and recreational athletes had an average of 67.7%. The fact that most athletes (30.9%) are not informed about nutrition at all and that 28.1% receive information from fitness trainers is worrying. On the other hand, recreational users primarily look for information about nutrition on the Internet (56.4%). Conclusion: The results show a devastating level of knowledge about the influence of nutrition on sports performance, especially around certain aspects (e.g., protein sources in the diet). Despite this, a majority of people independently decide to use supplements.