One classic joke goes like this:

“You look so fit. What’s your secret?”
“I only eat foods that are healthy – The natural! The organic!”
“Like what?”
“Clouds! Stars! Rainbows!”

Take heart, everyone. Eating well need not be quite that extreme. Nutritionists can help – particularly those like new UNLV director of performance nutrition, Kennedy Springer, who at age 27 is a cancer survivor.

“Not that nutrition caused my cancer or anything, but it just helped me realize that I would love being proactive in helping people establish a healthy lifestyle to help prevent some of these things,” says Springer, who is five years in remission and began her new position in June, specializing in sports nutrition. She works with all 17 Rebel varsity sports, with an emphasis on the department's Olympic sport programs. 

A Utah native, Springer came to Las Vegas from the University of Louisville, where she served as sports dietitian for the Cardinals since May 2021. A registered dietitian since 2020, Springer is a member of the Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitian Association (CPSDA) and Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

“Sports have always been a huge part of my life, whether I was playing them or coaching them,” says Springer, a former volleyball player and coach at Utah State University Eastern in Price, Utah. She earned her bachelor's degree in human nutrition from Southern Utah University in 2017 and her master's degree in nutrition and integrative physiology from the University of Utah in 2020. After serving an internship with the Intermountain Healthcare TOSH Sport Science Department in Murray, Utah, she was the Gatorade Sports Nutrition Immersion Fellow at the University of Washington from August 2020 to April 2021.

“I work one on one with the athletes,” she says of her new UNLV responsibilities. “It involves food service, the clinical side and the medical side of nutrition. I do a lot of team nutrition education.”

We asked Springer to provide all of us with some on-the-fly nutrition education:

What’s the best nutrition advice for athletes?

Consistency. Do one thing really well, then let's build on that thing. It’s not specific nutrition advice because it's going to be so different for everyone. But it’s what you're doing 80 percent of the time, not what you're doing 20 percent of the time.

What’s the worst nutrition advice for athletes?

Anything that is diet culture. Our society is huge on this right now, whether it's coming from social media, friends, family, whatever it is. It’s the intermittent fasting. Or you shouldn't eat after five o’clock. Or it’s this food is bad and that’s good.

College athletes are on TikTok, scrolling it, and anyone can say they’re a nutritionist. Someone on a TV commercial says they lost 100 pounds in four months. Anything that restricts anything that is part of the diet culture is going to be the worst nutrition advice.

So is the most valuable nutrition advice a customized plan for each person?

Right. There's basic principles, obviously. Fruits and vegetables are going to have lots of vitamins and minerals, but for athletes, it is so individualized. Even within a team, they have different demands, they're using different energy systems, they have different goals. We pull little snippets of general nutrition education, but then we individualize it to the athlete.

What about power bars, power drinks, vitamin supplements?

Supplements are not regulated. There's no FDA approval. You and I could go make a supplement tomorrow and make millions of dollars. And collegiate athletes, they're getting drug tested. And, so when we think about these supplements, we don't want them to be contaminated with anything that's going to pop up on a drug test that's going to mess with their eligibility. Any product that my athlete is going to take has to be sport-certified to verify what's on the label is actually what they're getting in the product.

That said, if nutrition isn't in place, supplements aren't going to help you. Power bars aren't going to help you. The other things aren't going to help you if we don't have a solid nutrition baseline. But in a lot of sports settings, we usually have protein recovery drinks or bars.

What is a nutrition baseline?

I’d start with nutrition principles. Are we eating three meals a day or are we skipping meals? 

At those meals, are we getting a variety of foods? Do we have a source of protein? Do we have carbohydrates? Are we getting a variety of fruits and vegetables? Do we have healthy fats in there? If you're only eating protein or you're only eating carbohydrates, you're missing a lot of different nutrients. We don't need to supplement all these things. We can just eat a balanced diet with a variety of food groups and we can get those things. And then hydration, especially here in Vegas, our baseline hydration is half of our body weight in ounces. And we work with vegetarian athletes. We think of plant-based sources of protein. 

Is there a difference in the kind of advice you give athletes depending on what sport they play?

Absolutely. A plan for a volleyball player would probably be significantly different than for a baseball player or a basketball player. When I talk with an athlete, I ask, what does their training look like? Are they a sprinter? Are they a distance runner? Are they the quarterback? Are they a guard? Because they're going to be burning different calories. They're going to be using different energy systems and just have different energy needs. And then I like to know their goals. One athlete might come in and be the exact same position as another athlete. But maybe their goals are, "I want to put on a pound of muscle" and the other person's goal is, "No, I just need to be able to move on the floor."

With the hectic schedules of college athletes, is it difficult to maintain a steady and healthy meal plan?

It's really easy to skip a meal if you're practicing through lunchtime, or breakfast if you have to wake up super early. Your brain uses a ton of calories to do schoolwork. And the second you skip a meal, you're not getting enough for what your needs are. And you also have to think of the age of a college athlete, like the things that demand energy in our body. Growing is going to be a huge one. They're still young, they're still maturing, they're still growing. Their bodies aren't fully developed. 

Advice on snacking?

I think that snacking is huge. A lot of our snacks are just carbohydrates. So it's a bag of chips, it's a quick, chewy granola bar, it's some fruit snacks, all of that. My best advice is to pair it with a protein source, such as a cheese stick or some beef jerky or some lunch meat, some Greek yogurt, any dairy product. They're a little bit harder to come by than the easy, convenient carbohydrates. But you can think, "Can we buy a protein bar at the store that has closer to 10 grams of protein rather than one or two grams of protein?” Or easy grab-and-go snacks could be like carrots and hummus or apples and peanut butter or an orange and jerky.

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?

Every meal is important but breakfast is going to be one of the most important. Just like the word itself, you're breaking your fast. You just slept all night. Even though you're not out there running miles during the night, your body is still functioning and still using energy, especially as an athlete. Sleep is when the body recovers the most. So it's actually using a lot of nutrients during the night to help them recover and rebuild. When they wake up in the morning, their body is depleted. So we've got to replenish our body of the nutrients it just used up over the night.

Because students are on the go all the time, how do you prepare a good meal really quickly?

Buy items that are convenient. Fresh vegetables. A bunch of fresh proteins. Buy a chicken that's already cooked, and you can just pull from it. Buy a salad kit that you just have to mix up. Buy a frozen bag of vegetables that aren't going to go bad in your fridge. They can be in the freezer, and you can throw them in the microwave for five minutes. Those are really easy, convenient options.

Should fast food be avoided?

We can make nutrition healthy at McDonald's. It depends on what you order. Can we swap out instead of getting fries? We can get a fruit cup or salad on the side, and a grilled chicken instead of always getting the double bacon burger, with patties and bacon on there? Can we add tomatoes and lettuce to our sandwich? We just need to make strategic choices of getting in those different nutrients, those different food groups.