Eat this Fly Better

No one would argue against the statement that insufficient sleep impairs a pilot’s ability to focus and react to stressful situations. So if poor dietary choices cause many of the same symptoms—fatigue, anxiety, and inability to make a decision—why doesn’t it receive the same level of attention?

Energy Management Basics
At one time or another, we’ve all experienced the extremes of over or under eating. The food coma at Thanksgiving after that second helping, or the light-headedness and fatigue of skipping a lunch. But what many people in the aviation field don’t realize is that their daily dietary decisions—what they eat and when—has a direct impact on their performance, and ultimately their ability to maintain focus or make intelligent decisions in stressful situations.

No one would argue against the statement that insufficient sleep impairs a pilot’s ability to focus and react to stressful situations. So if poor dietary choices cause many of the same symptoms—fatigue, anxiety, and inability to make a decision—why doesn’t it receive the same level of attention?

Our “three square meals” do much more than fill our bellies. Food intake plays a vital role in optimal cognitive functioning, contributing to ambient and focused attention, memory formation and retrieval, and the speed with which our brain can process newly acquired and stored information. While many might watch what they eat so their uniform doesn’t fit them like the skin on a summer sausage, in the cockpit it’s less about what’s under the belt and more about what’s under the hat.

A great deal of research on this subject—how our diet impacts physical and mental performance—has been done by Dr. Barry Sears, Ph.D. and it is delivered to the public in his book, Enter The Zone. If the book’s well-researched findings and practical guidance had to be distilled down to one quote from Dr. Sears, it would be:

“Food is the most powerful drug you will ever encounter. Learning what it can do and how to control it is a passport to a level of mental and physical performance you may have thought you were never capable of achieving.” In other words, blatant disregard for what goes in your pie hole isn’t a prudent course of action for professional aviators.

Negative Effects of Low Blood Sugar
Here’s blood sugar 101 for those of you who slept through your high school biology class. Every day your digestive system changes food you eat into glucose and transports it into your blood. Then insulin secreted by your pancreas moves the glucose from the blood to individual cells. Finally, the cells burn the glucose to make energy. This process occurs in your body around the clock. If your body gets low on glucose you can experience unpredictable degraded physical and mental performance, regardless of your health or fitness level, and it can happen within minutes of entering the hypoglycemic state. =

The mental and physical effects of low blood sugar can sneak up on us. Early signs of performance impairment due to low blood sugar include anxiety, apathy, impaired judgment, and inability to make a decision.

These symptoms may indicate you are entering an error-prone state that will get worse unless you do something about it. If you feel any of these symptoms, evaluate your recent food intake and fuel up before you lose your ability to recognize the connection!

If this hypoglycemic condition isn’t corrected, it gets worse in a hurry. Symptoms of advanced low blood sugar include headache, fatigue, and even impaired vision. These symptoms signal serious mental and physical performance impairment and demand immediate attention.

Excessive Food and Fat Intake
There is also danger at the other end of the spectrum from hypoglycemia. What many of us eat just before we slip the surly bonds of earth can significantly degrade performance.

Supersizing that number 8 value meal also means you’re supersizing your fat intake. High fat content in your bloodstream occurs approximately ½ to 2 hours after eating a fat-filled meal and reduces its oxygen carrying capacity by up to 20%. Low oxygen impairs brain processes for perception, decision making, and psychomotor activities—all essential for peak performance in the high risk, error intolerant world of aviation.

Here’s the good news, you don’t have to wait for excessive fat and cholesterol to kill you in old age. They’re capable of doing it on today’s flight!

Eat This!
If this article resonates with you, and you’re desperate to detox your poisoned digestive tract and welcome the first performance enhancing meal of the rest of your life, you’ll want to consider these key points about eating to win:

• Eat a high nutrient breakfast and enjoy better physical and mental performance
• Try some caffeine and sugar if necessary to boost short term performance
• Take in some protein and complex carbohydrate snacks at 2-4 hour intervals if full meals aren’t an option (FYI, the fact that your donut has jelly inside and sprinkles on top doesn’t make it “complex”)
• Eat a light lunch if you plan to do some afternoon flying—about 500 calories of protein and complex carbohydrates to combat the afternoon circadian trough
• Eat a balanced evening meal, taking care to avoid heavy fat intake if you’ve got a night mission planned
• Take a daily multivitamin to ensure key nutrients are available
• Stay hydrated! Dehydration is the number one cause of daytime fatigue

Eat right and stay fit. You will live longer and perform better.

Here are some additional sources of research on nutrition and hydration:

Haas, Robert M.D. (2004).
Eat to Win For the 21st Century.
New York: New American Library.

Hogervorst, E., Riedel, W.,Jeukendrup, A., & Jolles, J. (1996).
Cognitive performance after strenuousphysical exercise.
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 83: 479-488.

Maughan, R. J. and J. Griffin (2003).
Caffeine ingestion and fluid balance:a review.
Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 16: 411-420.

Sears, Barry M.D., & Lawren, William (1995).
Enter the Zone.
New York: HarperCollinsPubishers.

Note: Convergent Performance’s Pilot Reliability Certification includes the “full meal deal” of nutrition information, tools, and techniques you need to supersize your performance.