A blog to help you optimize your full-body and life performance

NBA season is underway and that means players need to be in tip top shape. But, it's not only the athletes who have work to do; just like the game itself, keeping NBA players healthy is a team effort. Coaches, trainers, physicians and dietitians all work together to ensure that players are primed for performance throughout the season, and often use tools like InsideTracker to help them do so.

Just ask Tara Boening, a sports dietitian for the Houston Rockets who has tested a number of the team's athletes with InsideTracker. She says she uses InsideTracker as a tool to offer rock solid proof to players whether what they're consuming or doing is working for them...or not. "It's a concrete way to provide information to us on how we can improve their diet, how we can improve their training plans, their sleep, their recovery on paper, because your blood doesn't lie," Tara says. "It's a good tool for us to use... in order to help them perform better – which is our ultimate goal for them."

We love talking about the science here at InsideTracker… and we’re glad to see that our readers do too! Many of you provided some really great feedback to our last blog on the science behind the paleo diet. Here’s some more science-talk for your reading pleasure.

The Paleo diet is the latest craze in the world of nutrition and fitness. Supporters often describe this diet as a lifestyle, which is centered on eating similar foods and food groups to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and what they survived on during the Paleolithic era. Dieticians and other health professionals have criticized the movement for its denouncement of two key components of the MyPlate guide: grains and dairy. Like other diets, the caveman lifestyle has been described as overly restrictive and difficult to adhere to. 

Few would disagree that the evolution of the human diet has indeed been harmful for today’s society. The rise of processed, calorically dense, low-nutrient foods has spurred an epidemic of obesity and chronic disease. Could the solution to our woes simply be to return to the diet of our hunting and gathering ancestors?

Are you shopping around for the best diet to suit your unique nutrient and physical needs? There’s so much information available that it can be overwhelming to choose which eating regimen is best for you. If you’re having difficulty figuring out what you should be eating to optimize your health and physical performance, the InsideTracker blood analysis can provide you with some important information about nutrients that your body needs.