Nutrition - who to follow - what to believe!

By Coach (and qualified Nutritionist) Scotty Farrell
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My journey into the deep worm hole that is nutrition started way back when I first got into triathlon. I was mid twenties, I’d never really worried about what went in my body and never really cared to be honest. I’m just lucky I was raised by a wonderful mum in an era where meat and ten veg was the order of the day, erry day. So I enter into the world of triathlon and start reading articles in magazines about recovery and performance blah blah. And I’m sure like everyone else I started smashing protein powder like it was Milo (we all did it) after every session, even a 20 min recovery jog, cranking carbonara every other night and chugging chocolate milk (cause Crowie said it’s good) as well!

Fast forward ten years to now, a million google searches, a three year nutrition degree, a lot of trial and error and hundreds of books later, you can safely say I have gained enough knowledge and made enough mistakes to know a little about nutrition. And you know that saying… “the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know” well that rings true too (kinda) ;-)

One of the key skills I have developed over the years is the ability to decipher fact from fiction, filter the good scientific research from the bad and more importantly in our ever evolving world of online social media instant information, who to follow and truly trust in regards to nutrition information. 

So, for your benefit, I have comprised a list of well educated, researched and trustworthy people and businesses for you to follow. The who’s who of online and who’s Podcast to listen to to receive quality, common sense information about nutrition and performance. I figured nobody has time to endure the depths of Google Scholar, Pub Med and every nutrition journal article out there to form your own conclusions, so let’s trust me and follow these experts below who have already done it for us. If you follow someone you think is awesome, trustworthy, speaks a common language etc, then please paste a link in the comments. 

Here’s my list: happy ready ;-) See you in ten years hehe

1. Thinking Nutrition: Professor Tim Crowe. This man knows nutrition inside and out and relays often complex information back to us in plain, easy to understand English. His blogs and FB feed are riddled with loads of useful information for day to day life and quite often there’s some performance orientated goodness in there too. http://www.thinkingnutrition.com.au/
2. Sigma Nutrition: Danny Lennon. This guy is purely sports performance orientated and at the cutting edge of performance. Most of the guys he interviews are industry professionals in nutrition science so things can be quite sciencey and detailed but the crux of it is Danny is so well researched himself and no stone is left unturned. He has a Blog and social media pages, but his calling is his Podcast ‘Sigma Nutrition’ where he interviews all the big guns. He’s not focussed purely on endurance sports, but if you’re looking for some in depth, university level listening, he’s a gun. http://sigmanutrition.com/
3. Fitter Radio: Coach Bevan McKinnon and Nutritionist Mikki Williden PhD bring you a very popular Triathlon related podcast called Fitter Radio http://www.fitter.co.nz/fitter-radio.htm . Aside from the interviews with industry professionals. They both field a wealth of experience and knowledge. Mikki’s nutrition segments on the Podcast are generally related to endurance performance and her Blog at https://mikkiwilliden.com/ is a great source of information and resources. A must follow.
4. Precision Nutrition: An awesome website with a tonne of super useful information including a bunch of really cool infographics http://www.precisionnutrition.com/blog/infographics. And their FB page is full of awesome tid bits too. https://www.facebook.com/insidePN 
5. Asker Jeukendrup: https://twitter.com/Jeukendrup Is an absolute guru in the sports nutrition field and has the beauty of completing numerous Ironman events including 6x Kona appearances :-) He is well worth a follow and shares a tonne of new research too. His work on discovering the carbohydrate ratios of glucose to fructose in order to perform well in endurance events was a game changer, amongst other things. Best to follow him on Twitter as lots of experts share their stuff on there.

I’ll leave you with that for now. If you’re ever not sure about an articles credentials, flick it through to me, I’m happy to critic and steer you in the right direction or say thanks and claim your link.

Happy searching team!
Coach SF