The Kansas City Chiefs’ lead dietitian explains how she sneaks nutrients into players’ junk food, from fried chicken to pizza

• Leslie Bonci has been the chief dietician for the Kansas City Chiefs since 2015.
• Kansas City has been a consistent Super Bowl contender and won a championship since joining.
• One of his methods is to design a menu that has junk food, but with sneaky nutritional value.

The Kansas City Chiefs they can go to their third straight Super Bowl if they beat the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC championship game this weekend. As one of the most successful teams in the NFL in the last decade, Kansas City has made the playoffs seven years in a row.

In each of those last seven years, the Chiefs’ dietary plan has been carefully selected by the chief dietitian Leslie Bonci.

Bonci is a 32-year veteran NFL dietician. He spent the first 25 years of his career as a dietician with the Pittsburgh Steelers, before joining the Chiefs in 2015.

One of Bonci’s key responsibilities is working with the Chiefs’ player catering and designing meals for the team’s dining room. His goal is to make as many players as possible choose to eat internal food with their teammates, while still giving them Nutrition tailored to your physical demands like soccer players.

“Having worked with the Steelers, one of their strength coaches focused on cutting out foods that the players liked, and that’s not going to work. Do you know why? Because they’re going to go somewhere else, they’re going to go to Five Guys, or they’re going to Whataburger,” Bonci told Insider.

Bonci said his method is give players the choice Eat foods like pizza, hamburgers, fried chicken, and pasta, but modify them slightly to load them with essential nutrients and cut out unhealthy fats and sugars. Making healthy versions of foods that everyone loves, Bonci said, also encourages players to eat together, regardless of their personal approach to diet, which is good for team chemistry and morale.

“All of those things are available for men to do as they please. Some have a very sophisticated palette and some eat like a two year oldBonci said. “Okay, we can settle in.”

Bonci’s little tweaks to junk foods that make them a bit healthier for players.

Bonci has a go-to technique for adding nutritional value to players’ favorite foods that aren’t always the healthiest.

Fried chicken: For one, Fried chicken and other fried foods are not fried but air fried. Air-frying chicken instead of frying it reduces the amount of sodium, cholesterol, and trans fat.

Pizza: For team pizzas, Bonci makes a thin whole wheat pizza Cortex that contains mashed beans. Adding beans to regular baked goods is one of their common tricks to feed players more protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. You’ll also put in more lean chicken and vegetables as toppings to add protein and vitamins.

Pasta: For the pasta dishes, Bonci will design a mix of vegetable based noodles, bean-based noodlesand whole grain noodles to mix with pasta sauce. The variety of noodles ensures that players get fewer refined carbohydratesand more fiber and protein compared to regular pasta.

Fries: For stir-fried rice dishes, Bonci will use Integral rice with only a small amount of oil, but more spices, herbs and organic vinegars to give it more flavor.

Sweet: Bonci does dessert available to players, but makes sure it’s harder to get to the dining room.

“If I want dessert, I have to go through a maze and find it,” Bonci said. “It’s there, but it’s not front and center, and that’s absolutely for a reason. You fill yourself up with all the other stuff, and then if you have space and you want something, you go and get it, but it’s not necessarily the priority. .”

“Interestingly, it’s not usually the players who go for dessert, it’s the coaching staff,” he added.