Dr Susan Kleiner, PhD, a clinical sports nutrition consultant who will be a participant in the Sports & Active Nutrition Summit in San Diego in mid February, said she has seen massive changes from the time when she was a young academic trying to make a name for herself by studying competitive bodybuilders. Back then, before the beginning of the International Society of Sports Nutrition which she helped found, almost all of the science was done by men on men. Those results were then applied to women, with sometimes questionable scientific rationale, Kleiner said.
Long time coming
But that picture finally started to change for the better, she said.
“I can see over the horizon and times are changing,” Kleiner told NutraIngredients-USA. “Overall there is a glimmer of hope that we are starting to accumulate more data on women.”
Kleiner said there is a valid reason for the focus having been placed so squarely on men in the past. While there was likely some gender bias in that decision (men are more reliable, less ‘moody,’ etc.), there was a functional reason, too. There’s no denying that including women in a study, or studying only women, is more complicated, difficult and expensive than just studying men.
“That bias continues because it really is a bit more complicated to do studies on women. You can’t, for instance, be studying women on pharmaceutical birth control because then you are altering the natural hormonal balance,” Kleiner said.
“Then you are depending on each individual woman’s natural cycle. You have to arrange your data collection based on those cycles, which can make it more expensive,” she added.