An athletes' dietary strategy that does not follow the principles of clinical sports nutrition fails to meet metabolic needs during physical activity and hinders the recovery process, which reduces exercise performance, compromises health and reduces athletes' performance. The participants of the study were professional handball players from the men's club Trimo Trebnje and the women's club RK Krim Mercator. We assessed diet adequacy and individual dietary intake by analysing a 3-day diet diary and conducted an online survey on dietary habits and supplement consumption via the 1KA app. The diet diaries were entered into the Open Platform for Clinical Nutrition (OPKP) computer application and the results were compared with clinical sports nutrition recommendations. Two body composition measurements were performed using bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), and a second measurement was performed three months after the first, post-dietary intervention. We found that the nutritional strategy of both teams differed from the recommendations of the sports diet in terms of energy intake and macronutrient intake, and that both teams were unaware of the role of dietary supplements. We only performed a dietary intervention in the male team, where we observed an improvement in body composition, whereas we could not perform a dietary intervention in the female team due to constraints and thus could neither confirm nor refute the hypothesis of an effect of counselling on body composition. As inadequate nutritional strategy reduces athletes' training and competition performance and compromises athletes' health, the results of this study suggest the need to integrate clinically oriented nutritional assessment and to educate athletes about the importance of sports nutrition in the training process.
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