Nutrition, Vision, and Cognition in Sport: E-Sport Gaming Athletes

OBJECTIVES: Esports, a competitive athletic activity in which high levels of attention and cognitive performance are required, is growing across the globe. Improving Esport athlete performance, namely cognitive endurance and resilience may lie in nutritional strategies. Dairy products have been hypothesized to improve cognitive performance due to their high-quality proteins and associated bioactive peptides, lipids, electrolyte composition, vitamin D, and gut microbiota modulations with fermented dairy products. Rather than individual nutrients, dairy's balanced food matrix may contribute to improved cognition though investigations of dairy's link to Esports and cognitive performance is lacking. The Nutrition, Vision, and Cognition in Sport Studies investigate nutritional and behavioral factors that can influence cognition in 3-dimensional multiple objects tracking test (3DMOT) via NeuroTracker X software. It was hypothesized that Esport Athletes would not consume recommended dairy servings and dairy consumption would be positively associated with cognitive performance, focus and stamina as well as gaming rank/status. METHODS: Professional, elite, and experienced male and female gamers (16–36-years old) completed 10 food records and completed 20 NeuroTracker X sessions over a period of 8 days. Participants were instructed to maintain their normal eating patterns throughout the duration of the study. Physical activity and sleep data were recorded via activity trackers. Preliminary surveys were also completed regarding sleep, activity, depression risk/index, and gaming rank and status. RESULTS: The average amount of dairy servings consumed per day was 0.41 servings (cup equivalents). This is below the recommended 3 cups per day. Average NeuroTracker Score for participants was 1.62. Of our 57 participants, 51% play video games daily and 33% play these games for 4 hours or less per day. 60% of participants are considered professional gamers as they play for an Esports team. The average age of the participants is 23. The correlation between dairy intake with NeuroTracker performance was not significant (p > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Esport athletes did not consume the recommended number of dairy servings, however this did not appear to impair their NeuroTracker performance. FUNDING SOURCES: This work is funded by Dairy MAX.