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Optimizing Performance and Health through Sport Nutrition: A Behavioural Approach

Edited by:

Meghan Bentley, PhD, SENR, Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom


Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 15 January 2026 
 

Performance Nutrition is calling for submissions to our Collection on Optimizing Performance and Health through Sport Nutrition: A Behavioural Approach.


Image credit: © fcafotodigital

New Content ItemThis Collection supports and amplifies research related to  SDG 3: Good Health & Well-Being and SDG 4: Quality Education.

Meet the Guest Editors

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Meghan Bentley, PhD, SENR, Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom

Meghan is a Research Fellow in the Carnegie School of Sport at Leeds Beckett University (LBU), UK. Alongside her academic role, Meghan is a registered Sport and Exercise Nutritionists who worked for the UK Sports Institute for over 8 years. She completed her undergraduate at Sheffield Hallam University and master’s at LBU. Meghan then went on to complete her PhD in partnership with LBU and the UK Sports Institute. Her primary research area draws on behavioural science to understand the dietary behaviours of athletes to inform evidence-based and theoretically informed nutritional interventions, and in turn, advance the professional practice of sports and exercise nutritionists. Meghan has worked with British Cycling, Sport Wales, and the Football Association (FA) to support practitioners to integrate behavioural science approaches to review, inform, and develop nutritional services in high-performance sport. In addition, Meghan and team have designed and delivered a behavioural science training and education day for the British Dietitian Association (BDA) to enhance the understanding and application of behavioural science in sport nutrition practice. Underpinned by a behavioural approach, Meghan has also completed projects outside of sport nutrition (i.e., focused on sporting integrity and welfare within high-performance sport).
 

About the Collection

Historically, sport nutrition research has focused on generating the evidence-base that underpins what nutritional guidelines are provided to athletes (and practitioners). However, practitioners face challenges when implementing such guidelines and there is an absence of evidence in relation to the how. Therefore, questions which seek to advance our understanding of how practitioners implement nutritional recommendations to increase and sustain the systematic update of guidelines into practice, are increasingly being asked. For example, 1) how do athletes experience nutritional adherence in sport? and 2) how do practitioners design and deliver a sport nutrition service which enables athletes’ and sport professionals’ (e.g., S&C coaches, physiologists, physiotherapists, lifestyle advisors, psychologists, coaches, and doctors) behaviours?

It is well established that the application of behavioural science to address complex behavioural problems enables the design and implementation of evidence-based interventions that are targeted and tailored to needs of the group that they intend to serve. Empirical attention to human behaviour in sport nutrition is now gaining traction with the recognition that athletes’ dietary behaviour is influenced by a complex interaction of individual, social, and environmental factors. Therefore, multifaceted sport nutrition programmes are being called for to promote dietary behaviour change. 

This collection will present contemporary research on behaviour change in sport nutrition from a behavioural science perspective. We wish to deepen our theoretical understanding of the behavioural science approach in sport nutrition and examine the application of the approach to develop sport nutrition professional practice. With a focus on the behavioural science approach within sports nutrition, we aim to, 1) advance our understanding of behaviour change in sport nutrition; 2) be a catalyst for further research in the area; and 3) provide evidence and theory-informed recommendations for sport nutrition practitioners, researchers, and intervention designers alike.
 

  1. Soccer is a dynamic sport that involves high-intensity running, changes of direction, jumping and contact. Therefore, a proper warm-up duration is of great importance to optimize players'performance and minimi...

    Authors: Osman Yilmaz, Furkan Ozturk and Ladislav Batalik
    Citation: BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation 2025 17:74
    Content type: Research Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of original research articles and review papers. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal. 

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. Please, select the appropriate Collection title “Optimizing Performance and Health through Sport Nutrition: A Behavioural Approach" under the “Details” tab during the submission stage.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.