Review of ‘Body composition, weight control and nutrition in dancers’

‘Body composition, weight control and nutrition in dancers’ is a research piece by Paul Pacy, Magita Khalouha and Yiannis Koutedakis which was written for and published in ‘Dance Research; The Journal of the Society for Dance Research Winter 1996, Vol. XIV Issue 2’. The research in this piece was carried out in order to see what dancers’ know about nutrition, how they know what they know about nutrition and what their body composition is compared to non-athletes. This research mainly uses contemporary dancers as participants.

In 1996 when this article was published there had not been much attention paid to the nutrition of contemporary dancers either in research or within the art itself. The team state that it was because of this lack of guidance DanceUK commissioned their Healthier Dancer Programme, of which this research is a part. I have reviewed piece from DanceUK already about the types of foods dancers should be eating and why.

The team sent out a questionnaire to dance professionals and dance students, the questions asked were about training, injury, health characteristics and nutrition. The team received 658 responses. 76% of respondents were female, 24% were male. 50.2% were students, 49.8% were professionals. 78% engaged in Contemporary dancing, 55% engaged in Ballet dancing and 27% engaged in Jazz dancing. The age ranged from 16-44 years old with 60% falling into the 16-24 category.

35% admitted to smoking and 68% said they drank 1-14 units of alcohol per week. 56% had sustained an injury.

19% said that they had tracked down specific nutritional information on nutrition. Of these 54% went to their G.P, 71% saw a dietician, 79% got their information from magazines and 37% got their information from the television. The team wondered if this low number shows that dancers do not think that their nutrition is important. However, the next part of the questionnaire was about nutritional supplementation. The results showed that 69% of all participants took some form of supplement. The team believe this shows that dancers are making a conscious effort with nutrition however; they do not know where to gain advice about it from.

The team comment on the fact that extensive research has been done into ballet dancers’ body fat percentage. This research proves that dancers have low amounts which can lead to thinning bones due to low levels of oestrogen which helps build up bone density. However, the research piece I reviewed on this topic indicated that the dancers used in their study had healthy bones even though their BMIs and body fat percentages were low. Yet in that research piece the authors did state that there has been research that contradicts their findings. Going back to the current piece, the team allude to research that proves low levels of oestrogen in ballet dancers is to do with a reduced calorie intake. The problem is that at this time research into other kinds of dancers had not been carried out so how can somebody advise them they do not know what need to be suggested. DanceUK’s Healthier Dancer Programme began to collect relevant information on non-ballet dancers.

The team carried out further research into the body composition of contemporary dancers. They used matched female, professional contemporary dancers, matched female, student contemporary dancers, matched non-athletic controls and matched male contemporary dancers. The researchers used a number of techniques to gage the participants’ body fat percentage.

The results showed that women had considerably more body fat than their male equivalents no matter what technique was used to obtain the result. The researchers were not surprised by this outcome. However, each technique did not give the same percentage. Despite this, the research showed that contemporary dancers had considerably higher body fat percentage than ballet dancers whose is around 16-17%. The team used available literature which examines ballet dancers to build their conclusion. Male contemporary dancers also have higher body fat percentage than male ballet dancers. Male ballet dancers’ body fat percentage is around 5-9%. On average the female contemporary dancers had lower fat percentage than their non-athletic counterparts.

This research is relevant to my inquiry because it looks into body composition and nutrition in contemporary dancers, instead of ballet dancers which has been the majority of the focus of the pieces I have reviewed so far. I am not a contemporary dancer and neither are the most of the dancers I work with. However, there is less pressure on contemporary dancers to be as extremely thin as ballet dancers. I think this applies also to the jazz dancers and show girl cabaret dancers I tend to work with. I believe, from personal experience, there is still intense pressure to look a certain way. I chose this topic for my inquiry in the first place in order to find out whether others feel the same. Therefore, the fact that other dancers besides ballet dancers were used in this research make the findings more relevant to what I am researching.

The results show that dancers do not get enough help and information on the topic of nutrition. This is relevant to my inquiry because I am keen to find out whether dancers know how to eat properly for their health and performance. I have questions in both my questionnaire and interview on this subject. It interests me to know whether dancers have lessons on nutrition and, if so, are they helpful? This research was published in 1996 so it would be expected that education on this topic would have improved in 15 years particularly with help from organisations like DanceUK.

The age of this research means that the state of affairs may have changed since it was published and methods used might be out of date. Therefore, it leaves the research less relevant to dance today and thus, less relevant to my inquiry.

This research was commissioned by DanceUK as part of the start of their Healthier Dancer Programme and it was included in ‘Dance Research; The Journal of the Society for Dance Research’ which gives the research a lot of credibility. It was designed to be read by other academics in the same field was used to help educate dancers on how to improve their nutrition.

This piece has also given credibility to the DanceUK piece I have previously reviewed. Before I was questioning how helpful it would be to dancers because nutrition is such a personal thing. However, if the information provided by DanceUK is based on findings like this I can see that there is a lot of factual evidence behind the advice they are giving.