Performance Menu

Dear Performance Nutrition Leaders,

This week: menus as performance decisions, the latest news, and Maurten's new palate reset.

The Menu Is a Performance Decision

Most practitioners treat the menu as a catering job.

Food on a spreadsheet. Sent to the hotel. Fingers crossed it arrives looking like the plan.

Dr James Morehen used to do the same thing. Early in his career at the Vikings, the menu was a Word document and a hope.

As his career progressed through England Football, Bristol Bears, and now England Rugby, his thinking changed completely. Speaking inside the Performance Nutrition Network this week, he put it plainly.

"The menu really isn't a catering decision. It's a performance decision."

Every meal is doing one of four jobs. Adapt, fuel, recover, perform. The menu has to mirror the training week, not just taste good. High carbohydrate on heavy training days and before competition. Lower on rest and lighter days. Buchheit et al. (2022) found this was the most consistently applied principle across elite clubs in Europe.

But here is the part most practitioners miss. Designing the menu alone is the wrong starting point.

"The biggest shift in my career was stopping trying to figure it out alone and starting to work with the chefs."

Chefs know which flavours fit together. They know how to build a recipe from a brief. They know how to make a dish players actually want to eat. The job of the practitioner is not to write recipes. It is to give the chef enough context to cook with performance intent.

That means briefing the why, not just the what. A chef who understands the nutritional purpose of a meal will protect it under pressure.

It also means speaking their language. Hotel chefs do not need to know what Bircher is. They need pictures of how the room should look and how every dish should be plated.

Ask what they love cooking and build that into the menu. That is where the magic lives.

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Maurten has released Additions — single-serve sachets added to a prepared bottle of Drink Mix 320 or 160. Four flavours: Apple, Cola, Orange, and Menthol.

The product is positioned as a palate reset.

According to Maurten, repeated consumption of the same carbohydrate fuel can lead to flavour fatigue — a desensitised sense of taste, a sickly or nauseous sensation, and a drop in motivation to stick to the planned fuelling protocol. The result, they point out, is reduced fuelling.

The menthol option sits alongside an existing body of research, though one that has historically separated two different uses of menthol — mouth rinsing (swill and spit) versus ingestion (swill and swallow).

The product as described can be used either way.

Menthol stimulates TRPM8 cold receptors via the trigeminal nerve, producing a localised cooling sensation in the mouth, nose, and upper airway without altering core temperature.

For mouth rinsing, Gavel and colleagues (2024) ran the most recent systematic review and meta-analysis. They concluded menthol mouth rinsing does not generally improve performance across exercise modalities, though it is unlikely to harm performance and may have a small positive effect during endurance exercise.

For ingestion, Bach and colleagues (2025) ran a separate review covering six studies and 78 athletes. The effect on performance was inconclusive — anywhere from a small detrimental effect to a medium positive effect.

The product carries Informed Sport certification and Maurten state it's compatible with their Hydrogel Technology.

Explore Maurten Additions →