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Review question / Objective: The Effect of β-alanine Supplementation on Athletic Performance in Female Athletes: a Systematic Review of Randomized Control Trials. Condition being studied: β-alanine is an endogenously produced non-proteinogenic amino acid that can also be obtained through the consumption of foods such as meat. The ergogenic effect of β-alanine supplementation is linked to the levels of carnosine (a cytoplasmatic dipeptide to which β-alanine is a precursor). It has become one of the most common sports nutrition ergogenic aids, with typical doses at about 4 to 6 g per day that are ideal to elevate muscle carnosine concentrations by up 80%. This elevation happens regardless of high or low baseline levels (common in vegetarians, women and in older subjects) and chronic supplementation (and the associated increase of muscle carnosine levels) is known to be of particular interest in improving high-intensity exercise performance by enhancing intracellular H+ buffering, reducing muscle acidosis. It has been mostly proposed as beneficial in exercises between 60 seconds and 4 minutes, but some positive effects have been noted in other sport-related outcomes. The fact that women tend to have less muscle carnosine content then man, in addition to other characteristics of the female athlete, highlights the importance of understanding if the outcomes and magnitude of the effects already found and stablished in male athletes are, in fact, equivalent in the female athlete.

This article belongs to the Special Issue Nutrition-Based Interventions for Neuropsychiatric Diseases in Children. Background: Nutritional status assessment (NSA) can be challenging in children with cerebral palsy (CP). There are high omission rates in national surveillance reports of weight and height information. Alternative methods are used to assess nutritional status that may be unknown to the healthcare professionals (HCP) who report these children. Caregivers experience challenges when dealing with feeding problems (FP) common in CP. Our aim was to assess the difficulties in NSA which are causing this underreport and to create solutions for registers and caregivers. Methods: An online questionnaire was created for registers. Three meetings with HCP and caregivers were held to discuss problems and solutions regarding NSA and intervention. Results: HCP mentioned difficulty in NSA due to a lack of time, collaboration with others, equipment, and childrens' motor impairment. Caregivers experienced difficulty in preparing nutritious meals with adapted textures. The creation of educational tools and other strategies were suggested. A toolkit for HCP was created with the weight and height assessment methods described and other for caregivers to deal with common FP. Conclusions: There are several difficulties experienced by HCP that might be overcome with educational tools, such as a toolkit. This will facilitate nutritional assessment and intervention and hopefully reduce underreporting. This study was part of the MSc thesis in clinical nutrition of one of the authors (C.P.), which was supervised by other authors (supervisor A.C.M and co-supervisor R.B.), from Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon and Lisbon School of Health Technology, Lisbon, Portugal. The H&TRC author gratefully acknowledges the FCT/MCTES national support through UIDB/05608/2020 and UIDP/05608/2020. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

© The Author(s). 2020 Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data., Background: Preventing childhood obesity is a public health challenge of the twenty-first century and it must be a priority. Governments play a major role in creating and supporting a healthy school environment and should prioritise actions to improve children’s health. Sintra Grows Healthy aims to promote healthy lifestyles to prevent childhood obesity and improve children’s health-related quality of life and social and emotional skills, through the development of a school evidence-based and sustainable model. Methods: This protocol describes a quasi-experimental design and community-based participatory research. The participants included in the study are the school community of Portuguese public primary schools from the municipality of Sintra. Data will be collected on demographic and socio-economic characterization, nutritional status, eating habits and behaviours, physical activity, sedentary behaviours and sleep, health-related quality of life, and social and emotional skills. Discussion: There is evidence to support interventions in school settings as strategies for obesity prevention. Upto-date homogeneous and community-based interventions for preventing childhood obesity are lacking, therefore Sintra Grows Healthy intends to fill this gap. Furthermore, Sintra Grows Healthy aims to contribute with relevant scientific findings that will allow the development of better strategies for policymakers and society to manage this major public health problem., This research is funded by the Municipality of Sintra and co-funded by Gulbenkian Academies for Knowledge, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The Sintra Grows Healthy is promoted by the Municipality of Sintra. The Gulbenkian Academies for Knowledge, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, supports the Municipality of Sintra assigning a subsidy in order to promote social and emotional skills but played no role in the study design. The Municipality of Sintra provides financial support to Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon,for this institution to undertake the technical and scientific leadership, including the study design validation, development and dissemination of Sintra Grows Healthy, in its various actions

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between whey protein supplementation, body composition, and muscle strength in resistance-trained individuals. Forty-nine healthy males, aged 18 to 35 years and were engaged in resistance training for at least 1 year, were assigned into 2 groups according to whey protein intake (whey – n = 26, age: 30.7 ± 7.4 years, body mass: 75.8 ± 9.0 kg; without whey: n = 23, age: 31.0 ± 7.4 years, body mass: 77.9 ± 9.3 kg). Using a cross-sectional design, a morning assessment of body fat mass (FM) (by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) and strength (using 1-repetition maximum for bench press and back squat) was performed. Nutritional assessment was performed by 3-day food records. Regarding nutritional habits, differences between total energy intake (kcal) and estimated energy requirements (kcal) were observed. Results, from raw data or controlling for energy intake, estimated energy requirements, or achieved percentage of energy requirements, showed that whey protein supplementation was inversely correlated with whole-body FM (R = –0.367 (p = 0.010); R = –0.317 (p = 0.049); R = –0.380 (p = 0.011); R = –0.321 (p = 0.047), respectively), trunk FM (R = –0.396 (p = 0.005), R = –0.367 (p = 0.022), R = –0.423 (p = 0.004), R = –0.369 (p = 0.021), respectively) and android FM (R = –0.381 (p = 0.007), R = –0.332 (p = 0.039), R = –0.383 (p = 0.010), R = –0.336 (p = 0.036), respectively). No correlations were found between muscle strength outcomes and whey protein supplementation. The present data suggest that whey protein ingestion has a positive association with whole-body and regional (trunk and android) FM.

It is crucial to ensure an adequate nutritional support for young soccer players under high physical stress situations, including match days and high training load days. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the dietary intake of young male soccer players from a Portuguese first league soccer club, both on match day and on the highest training load day of the week. All players recorded their ingestion at these moments for 3 consecutive weeks, by completing a food diary and making a photographic record. On match day, the intake of carbohydrates (5.2 ± 0.6 g.kg -1 . d -1 ), proteins (2.1 ± 0.2 g.kg -1 . d -1 ), and fats (1.0 ± 0.2 g.kg -1 . d -1 ) represented 55.1 ± 5.0 %, 22.3 ± 1.52 %, and 23.9 ± 5.1%, respectively, of the average daily energy intake. Regarding the highest training load day, the intake of carbohydrates (5.2 ± 0.9 g.kg -1 . d -1 ), proteins (2.0 ± 0.3 g.kg -1 . d -1 ), and fats (1.0 ± 0.3 g.kg -1 . d -1 ) represented 54.8 ± 5.3 %, 21.8 ± 1.8 %, and 24.6 ± 4.6 %, respectively. There were no statistically significant differences between intakes during match day and on the highest training load day, for all the variables analyzed, except for percentage of fat intake (Energy intake p = 0.873; Protein p = 0.335; Carbohydrates p = 0.814; Fat p=0,000). The results obtained are in line with previous research and reveal that energy and carbohydrate intake are below the recommendations for this population