An adequate dietary intake is particularly important in young athletes as any deficiency or excess may not only affect performance but also disturb growth. We have been supporting a youth soccer team (player's age;13-15 years) by providing information on adequate dietary intake for growing youth soccer players. However, no data were available concerning the effectiveness of continuous nutritional support for young athletes. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of continuing nutritional support for 3 years. For this purpose, we undertook a preliminary semi-quantitative analysis of diet content among team players receiving nutritional supports for 3 years. In practice, adequacy of dietary intake was scored according to how many items from a "Japanese-style diet" were included in breakfast and supper. Eleven items from "Japanese-style diet" were selected for this evaluation. Adequacy was semi-quantitatively compared between the first and third years. Forty-three out of 75 youth players were chosen for semi-quantitative analysis of diet content based on the accuracy of their food intake record, and were divided into three groups on the basis of changes in score for adequacy of dietary intake. The first group (n=9)showed an increased score in the 3rd year compared with the 1st year, the second group (n=24)showed only a slight change and the third group (n=10)showed a decrease in score in the 3rd year, indicating that the nutritional support did not work efficiently for this group. These preliminary results show that continuous nutritional support did not work effectively for all young athletes in this team when adequacy of dietary intake was assessed according to the number of "Japanese-style diet" items; however, the present results further suggest that this "Japanese-style diet" based assessment may help to increase the effectiveness of continuous nutritional support for young athletes. Studies are in progress to improve this "Japanese-style diet" based assessment including item selection and scoring system.

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identifier:KJ00007044609