Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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Five Questions With … Sports Nutritionist Erika Whitman Erika Whitman was one of college sports’ first full-time team dietitians when she was hired by Notre Dame six years ago to help the school’s varsity athletes get all of the nutrition they needed. Along with supervising the football team’s daily training table meal and traveling with them to away games, she and one other staff member currently work with all 26 of Notre Dame’s teams composed of more than 700 student-athletes. She spoke with Blue & Gold Illustrated this week about the challenges of keeping a team healthy on the road and some of the new trends in her industry. Blue & Gold Illustrated: Did you have to do anything different for the team’s trip to Dublin? Whitman: “Food is the one thing that we can’t put on our plane and fly over there. We’ve had pretty much everything that we can shipped there. So when it comes to any of our products that we use at half time, like Gatorade or anything like that, it’s been shipped directly to Ireland. … “It’s just to try to keep things consistent for them around game time. We give them the same travel menu that we give any other hotel. While we know this food is a little bit different there we try to keep it as consistent as possible.” Blue & Gold Illustrated: Do you give each hotel that the team uses on the road a specific menu for meals? Whitman: “We’ve gotten very specific over the years with little things. Like if we put trail mix on our menu for a nighttime snack, we realized we have to clarify what we want in that trail mix. “They become very routine, and they want the same things each night before, and believe me, they’ll let me know if something is missing.” Blue & Gold Illustrated: Each offseason there are always a few players who lose or gain large amounts of weight. How do you do that in a healthy way? Whitman: “It depends. Maybe they were a person that was only eating once or twice a day. That’s going to be a significant change for them because we’ll increase that to five or six times a day. Maybe they were somebody that was eating five times a day but now we just need to add some bulk to it. “It could be little things like adding olive oil or an extra glass of chocolate milk at the end of each meal.” Blue & Gold Illustrated: What are some of the new trendy foods in healthy eating? Whitman: “One of the things that I’ve definitely noticed this year, and I don’t know if it’s just from the Subway commercials, but our avocados are flying off our line. It’s been a popular one.” Blue & Gold Illustrated: Any other recent trends? Whitman: “We test for Vitamin D levels. If their Vitamin D levels are not where we see them as being sufficient we supplement them. “It’s a hormone that affects the body in a lot of different ways. What we’re really looking at is making sure that immunity is strong, and Vitamin D impacts the immunity. “We want to make sure they’ve got maximum muscle development, and it’s a hormone involved in the process of muscle development. Bone health is the other critical component.” — Dan Murphy