I've done a great job making my kids think McDonald's is a horrible choice for good nutrition.
Every time I mention eating there (jokingly), they make faces like they are grossed out and appalled at how I could even suggest such a thing.
They may need to read this post. It's a sports nutrition story about how Usian Bolt officially became the fastest man on earth, fueled with McDonald's chicken nuggets.
The stage is the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where the Jamaican track team's coaches advised the team not to eat outside the Olympic Village.
Bolt could not find anything he liked inside the Village. He feared the Olympic Village food options would upset his stomach and hurt his chance of winning the gold.
Bolt wrote in his book Faster than Lightening that after days of struggling to find anything familiar he could eat, he said, "Forget this; I'm getting some chicken nuggets." That day he had 40 chicken nuggets, 20 for lunch and 20 for dinner.
From this point on, he only ate salad drenched in thousand Island dressing and lots of nuggets. He wrote, "I devoured around 100 nuggets every 24 hours. I was there for ten days, which meant that by the time the Games ended, I must have eaten around 1,000 chunks of chicken."
With this interesting diet, Bolt went on to win three gold medals.
Author Christie Ashwanden wrote in her book, Good to Go, "With 880 calories and 54 grams of fat, 48 grams of protein and 52 grams of carbs, twenty chicken nuggets where the protein and carb equivalent of more than two scoops of whey protein and 24 ounces of Gatorade, with a lot of fat calories piled on. (The nuggets also contained about ten times as much sodium as two sports drinks would provide.)"
Bolt didn't win three gold medals because of his diet. He won because he's the fastest man to ever live.
But the point of this story is that not all nutrition situations will be perfect for an athlete, especially young athletes.
I've been to enough AAU basketball games to know that the best options are usually chicken fingers, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs at the concession stand.
If you have time to prepare your nutrition, it's always better to choose the better options, whole foods, fruits, nuts, vegetables, lots of water, and healthy meals. But if you don't, it's not the end of the world.
In a pinch, stick with something familiar. Aschwanden continued, "Those chicken nuggets were adequate, if not ideal, fuel to power Bolt through his nine heats, and help him recover his energy between them. Feeling satiated end not worrying about gastrointestinal issues are surely worth a lot to an athlete preparing for his most important events of the season."