DR. CREFF'S 1-2-3 SPORTS DIET

It's as easy as 1-2-3, say Dr. Creff (former nutritionist for the French Olympic teams) and co-author Robert Wernick (The Drinking Man's Diet). The diet may be a snap, but the text, Wernick's adaptation of Creff's 1963 French textbook, is a bit of a muddle. The Creff program is an cat-your-greens ""building diet"" for athletes based on a simple formula: eat anything you want as long as you maintain the proportions of one coefficient of protein to two of fat to three (or four) of carbohydrate. This much is adequately explained, but elsewhere the text rambles and repeats, making the diet sound more complicated than it actually is (judicious editing and section headings would have helped). Separate chapters treat the effects of meats, fruits, vegetables, etc., on an athlete's body and performance; the dietary requirements of many individual sports; and what to eat before, during, and after competition. This advice and the training menus will be of some use to the trainerless athlete. One final reservation: since the information in the book is more than a decade old, one wonders to what extent Creff's findings jibe with subsequent research.