Qualitative Expert Interview: Exploring the Steps in Developing Meal Plan for Athletes

Objective: Expert system had been build in nutrition field with the aim to plan a nutritious and appetizing menu based on nutrient needs of particular population, individualized preference, food availability and current medical health. Knowledge acquisition is an important process in the development of expert system to extract domain knowledge. Sports dietitians/nutritionists known as an expert in the nutrition-related for athletes overall performance and well-being. Therefore, understanding the process of meal planning from sports dietitians/nutritionist will help in the initial process of athletes meal plan expert system. Thus, this study aims to explore the steps in planning a meal for athletes practice by sports dietitians/nutritionist.

Methodology: A purposive sampling method was applied to recruit sports dietitians/nutritionists as an expert. Five semi-structured interviews were held. A recorded interview was transcribed to produce written text and entered in ATLAS.ti 8. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify the important themes mention by experts. Multiple coding and validity checks were performed to further strengthen the methodology.

Results and Discussion: Following themes or steps were identified to plan a menu which are obtain and collect relevant data, analyzed and interpret the collected data, determine nutrition prescription, formulate goal and determine action, implement action and recommendation and monitoring. The research finding indicates, the steps that sports dietitians/nutritionists apply in meal planning is following the framework of Nutrition Care Process. The components in each step were based on the guideline for sports nutrition practice such as periodization plan, training time and their pre-, during and post-exercise meals.

Conclusion: High skill of critical thinking and evidence-based practice were applied in the development of meal planning for athletes. Thus, it is important to understand the steps that had been practiced by the sports dietitians/nutritionists to represent the knowledge of the expert.