During a recent business trip abroad, and knowing that I would be awake at odd hours, I took a few books with me to fill in the gaps. Turns out that one of them, I would have been devouring at odd hours anyway! The Naked Olympics, by Tony Perrottet, tracks the original Olympics day by day in all its minutiae. It’s both impeccably researched and incredibly lively, and a book that I highly recommend.

Being someone who personally loves both training and eating, I was particularly drawn in by the description of what the competitors ate. The debates he references parallel the type of heated discussion that crops up nowadays as you scroll down through the comments on any nutrition-related post.

With the author’s permission, here are a few paragraphs from the book:

From earliest antiquity, what a top athlete should consume was considered as important as his exercise regime, and Hippothales’ trainer [i.e. that of a typical composite athlete] would have come up with a detailed meal plan.

According to nostalgic tradition, the first Olympians shared the simple, balanced diet of the average Greek, supping on thick vegetable soup, bread, cheese, olives, fruit, and honeyed cakes. All that changed when a certain Dromeus of Stymphalos won two footraces at Olympia in 480 B.C. on an all-meat diet. High-protein meals became all the rage–a source of resentment for ordinary Greeks, who could not afford expensive meat. Wrestlers and boxers began to gorge on beef, pork, and lamb, becoming (as playwright Euripides put it) “the slaves of their jaws and the victims of their bellies.”

Fad diets proliferated. Learned dietitians would debate which fish were healthier, those from the swamps or deep-sea fish? Were fish that ate seaweed better for you, or fish that ate algae? Some advocated pork–provided the pigs had been fed on cornel berries or acorns. Swine raised by the sea were injurious to health; those brought up by rivers were even worse “because they may have fed on crabs.” (Savvy coaches did not just pay attention to what was on the plate, advising their charges to avoid intelligent conversation at mealtimes, as it would spoil their digestion and give them headaches; they also weighed in on the style of after-dinner belching.) Ideas for extreme diets came from all quarters. Charmis of Sparta, an Olympic sprinting champion in 688 B.C., espoused eating nothing but dried figs. Xenophon advised athletes to avoid all bread, the first nonyeast diet in history. The Pythagoreans forbade their athletes to touch beans–but Galen recommended a high-bean diet for gladiators, provided the beans were properly boiled to avoid flatulence. Hippocrates considered cheese to be a “wicked food,” despite the fact that it supposedly the staple of superhuman Homeric heroes. In the end, much like today’s diet fads, Greek dietary recommendations were so contradictory as to be meaningless.

 

So there you have it. Truly, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

Please stay in touch with your own thoughts on the matter, or if you would like any input on your own training or nutrition.