Active Voice: A New Tool for Understanding Athlete Eating Behaviors — the Athlete Food Choice Questionnaire

Food and beverage intake can play a vital role in an athlete's physiological adaption to exercise, competitive potential and overall health. While athletes are aware of the impact diet can have on performance, they may make poor food choices. The disparity between an athlete's level of nutrition knowledge and the quality of their diet suggests that other factors are a barrier to optimal intake. We developed and validated the Athlete Food Choice Questionnaire (AFCQ) to help researchers and practitioners understand the multiple factors influencing food choices of athletes. The AFCQ contains 32 questions representing the following nine factors: nutritional attributes of the food, emotional influences, food and health awareness, influence of others, usual eating practices, weight control, food values and beliefs, sensory appeal and performance. Accompanying the AFCQ are 13 optional, single-item factors that we have suggested can be included for investigating simple constructs such as hunger, convenience and gut discomfort. We have suggested the AFCQ can be used alongside a suite of tools that investigate dietary intake and eating behaviors of athletes. Combining information on food choice together with diet quality and nutrition knowledge can give greater context to an athlete's dietary intake. Factors such as sensory appeal, religion, emotions, convenience and social influences may take priority over performance and health. Additionally, the tool can be used to investigate how these factors vary across training phases and competition seasons, or during recovery from injury.