For Diana Nguyen, NC State’s director of sports nutrition, long work days are just part of the gig.
“It’s roughly 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. most days,” Nguyen said. “Some days it’s later; sports nutrition is generally a non-traditional job. We work weekends, we work holidays, there is no offseason — but we love what we do.”
As the director of sports nutrition, Nguyen oversees the nutrition department across all of NC State Athletics. Nguyen doesn’t work alone, however. Collectively with Amanda Poppleton, the assistant director of sports nutrition, and 18 student helpers, the team sets out to educate and inform NC State’s student-athletes on how to best take care of their bodies.
Nguyen’s office is located in the Murphy Center at Carter-Finley Stadium, mainly because she spends a lot of her time with the football program. It’s not all football, though, as Nguyen also works with NC State baseball, wrestling, men’s and women’s tennis and men’s and women’s golf. Poppleton, in turn, directly handles all other NC State sports.
It may be easy to think of nutrition as simply choosing healthy food options, but Nguyen’s job isn’t just about food. Instead, sports nutrition is a combination of many different aspects of the student-athlete experience. Nguyen works closely with both the strength and conditioning department and the sports medicine department, where together they all collaborate to make sure NC State’s student-athletes are in peak positions to perform their best in their respective sports.
“Nutrition is so much more than just food,” Nguyen said, “It’s the medical side of it, working with sports medicine, it’s the body size side of it, it’s the building of muscle, it’s the reduction of fat if the sport calls for it.”
Day in and day out, in season or offseason, Nguyen is all over the place. She and her staff have consultations with teams, set up hydrating stations during practices, get recovery snacks and shakes ready for athletes for after practice or games, and “plate coach” athletes before meals to ensure everyone is making the right choices to prepare their bodies for whatever their next goal may be.
One big part of Nguyen’s job is catering to each specific need of NC State athletes. She recognizes that a wrestler is going to have different nutritional needs than a golfer and helps each athlete as specifically as she can.
Student-athletes will come to Nguyen and give her their goals for the future. From someone needing to gain 10 pounds by August, lose five pounds in the next couple of months and everything in between, Nguyen and her staff are always striving to help the athletes reach those goals by making the correct nutrition choices.
“We teach food for sports,” Nguyen said. “We don’t give them a blanket meal plan — ‘here you go, good luck’ — it’s adapting nutrition education for the sport that it’s for.”
A major aspect of Nguyen’s job as the director of sports nutrition is working with the chefs who actually prepare the meals for the student-athletes.
“In my role with Case and Murphy dining, I work very closely with the chefs to design the menus,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen continued that many chefs have very little nutrition education and stressed the importance of having a strong relationship with them.
“In our dining halls, we’re feeding people that are 330 pounds and feeding people that are 105 pounds,” Nguyen said. “Very, very broad goals in very, very broad sports, so I want to make sure that the menus that we provide offer something for every single person in there.”
The nutrition team devised a certain “stoplight” plan to address this issue at the dining locations. The plan uses three different colors — green, yellow and red — to categorize certain types of foods.
Green stands for “Wolfpack Fit,” and includes items like vegetables, fruits and lean proteins like fish and chicken. These items are usually always a good choice for all athletes to have on their plates because they help promote athleticism.
Nguyen calls the yellow-labeled food “Rebuild, Refuel.” This group contains items like medium fat meats such as pork, spaghetti in lean meat sauce, rice, breads and pasta. Carbohydrates are king in this group, and Nguyen recognizes that these foods are essential for energy and recovery.
Finally, the red-labeled items are known as “Weight Support.” These include pizza, fried chicken, rib-eye steak, doughnuts and pastries. These foods are pro-inflammatory foods that aren’t good before a competition, but are helpful in the weight-gaining process.
“We want to teach athletes a balance in life,” Nguyen said. “That there’s room for different things and that there’s nothing that they can’t have, but it’s more about timing and portion.”
While her job may be exhausting at times, Nguyen said that she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
“We’re here to take care of the athletes,” Nguyen said. “Bottomline, that’s our No. 1 goal: make sure they’re taken care of, teach them lessons that they can learn here, but also take that into the real world when they’re on their own in some other profession.”
Nguyen takes pride in the real-world application her teaching has on the athletes of NC State, calling it the most rewarding part of her job.
“Impacting somebody’s life, and knowing that you taught them something that is going to last them forever, it’s priceless to me,” Nguyen said.
The importance of nutrition, whether it be preparing for weight-lifting, a competition or to recover from an injury, sometimes goes unnoticed. With Nguyen at the reigns at NC State, rest assured that all Wolfpack student-athletes are making the best possible decisions in order to reach their full potentials, whether it be on the field, the court or the course.
