Episode 199: What ChatGPT Doesn’t Know About Your Gymnast’s Nutrition

But while it can be useful, it definitely has limitations and it, it truly cannot replace, you know, working one-on-one with a healthcare provider.

And the really scary thing about ChatGPT is that like there's not a whole lot of checks and balances, and so like you can upload, you know, imaging or labs or tell it what you eat in a day and it will spit out information to you in terms of what to do that sounds really legitimate, right? And so I think it's, it's the curse of knowledge, right? Like you don't know what you don't know, and that can be absolutely catastrophic when it comes to trying to support your gymnast because you might be following instructions or guidance that is not actually appropriate for them.

And so I'm not dumb.

I know that parents are using these tools and trying to generate generic meal plans more than ever for their gymnast.

But these tools don't understand how much your gymnast needs, especially because of this one issue, and that is your gymnast growth, their puberty progression, their injury history, training load, and their recovery patterns.

And the reason I know that it can't do this is because we tried.

Like I tried to teach ChatGPT to analyze growth charts and patterns because that would've cut down significantly on our workload, and it could not.

And so oftentimes, you know, when we're in an initial consult, a big chunk of the time we spend in preparation for that is looking at a gymnast growth chart and matching that up with what has happened in their life.

And often in that initial consult, I have so many questions for the gymnast and parent when I'm looking at that growth chart and when we start to see things that maybe look a little bit wonky, it's like, "Oh, okay.

I'm noticing this happened when she was eight years old.

Like what happened? Where were we? What level were we? How, how much were we training? You know, what was happening from a health and injury perspective?" And those are just things that ChatGPT just doesn't seem to be able to really synthesize.

And so I feel like if you're trying to use these tools to replace working with a sports dietician to save money, you're probably gonna do more harm than good.

And so I really encourage you to not ask ChatGPT to make you a meal plan.

And I don't say that just to bring myself business.

That's not why I'm saying that.

I truly am nervous about what that will do for your gymnast, and I think if anything, it will give you a false sense of security.

And we see this all the time, like we get gymnasts in our practice who work with other dieticians that don't understand gymnasts, or they join some sort of like sports nutrition membership that's like 30 to $50 a month and promises them a customized meal plan.

But when they actually get in there, you know, the customized meal plan just uses a quick calculator and spits out how many calories they need, and then they throw a recipe book at you, and they're like, you know, "Pick a breakfast, pick a lunch, pick a dinner, you know, this many calorie snacks," and it's just not...

It's not accurate because it doesn't take into consideration the fact that most of the gymnasts we work with are having to work back from under-fueling.

And so these kinda automated generic meal plans, they can't tell whether your gymnast is actually getting enough to grow and develop, repair, recover, and adapt to their training.

And we get a lot of people who apply to our program, and because of what's available on the internet, because of, of AI, they have recognized that their gymnast is under-fueled, which is awesome, and they've started to make changes, but it's not enough, or it's not the right things, or it's not the right approach, or they ask ChatGPT what labs their gymnast should have done, and then they ask their pediatrician to order the labs, but they're either not a complete set of labs or they're not interpreted correctly, which then is, is pointless.

And so that's kind of a sidebar, like that's why when parents ask us before they start our program, they're like, "Hey, I have a pediatrician appointment coming up, like what labs do you recommend? You know, I'll go ahead and get 'em done." I'm like, "Hey, I totally hear you that that would be convenient, but let's wait until we have our initial consult because while there is a standard set of labs that we'd like on most of our gymnasts, there are always individual variations to that and things in the gymnast's nutrition history, health history, performance history, injury history that might prompt us to ask for other things." And so the bottom line is I just don't wanna have to send your kid twice to get labs done because most of the gymnasts we work with, they don't, they don't want labs.