Science Corner 63 | Expert Interview: Emily Smith - The Dietitian Behind a Pro Soccer Club
A conversation with Emily Smith, RD, head of nutrition for Major League Soccer's Portland Timbers, with experience spanning NCAA athletics, NFL performance nutrition, and elite athlete fueling at the professional level.
The World Cup arrives this summer with 48 nations, billions of viewers, and an exhausting flood of content about the players we watch. The goals, the stats, the transfer fees. What you almost never hear about is the person standing near the tunnel before kickoff, watching how much a player is sweating and quietly doing math about sodium.
Emily Smith is a registered dietitian and the head of nutrition for Major League Soccer's Portland Timbers. She has worked across elite athletic environments, from NCAA athletics at Texas Christian to the Baltimore Ravens. I sat down with her recently to ask the questions I've always wanted to ask: what does nutrition actually look like inside a professional soccer club? And how different is it from what the rest of us do?
The answer surprised me. Not because it was exotic. Because it wasn't.
Emily said in our conversation: "Athletes are people first." It sounds obvious. But once said, you can't unhear it.
The table with pumps
When Emily joined the Timbers, she identified a problem almost immediately. Players weren't taking their supplements consistently, and it wasn't about motivation. They didn't like swallowing pills.
Her solution was practical and a little brilliant. She set up a dedicated nutrition table in the facility, stocked with creatine, electrolytes, beetroot powder, and pre-workout. And she replaced capsules with a liquid pump system. Players walk up, press the pump into a cup or their water bottle, and move on. No capsules, no counting pills, no friction.
"I found with our team specifically that we were running into a lot of problems where nobody could swallow pills," she told me. So she fixed it. Simple as that.
The table also serves as a daily education touchpoint. There are visual guides on the wall. Emily makes a point of being present during breakfast, not hovering, but visible. "Do you want to take a collagen shot together this morning?" she'll ask a player. Do as I do. It works.
Supplements can't fix a broken foundation
This is the thing Emily kept coming back to, and I want to give it the space it deserves because it cuts against how a lot of people think about supplementation.
If a player is skipping meals, not recovering well, running on fumes, throwing more supplements at the problem won't help. "Supplements cannot fix something that is broken," she said. "They need something to stand on."
Her process always starts with food. If a player has low energy midday, she is not reaching for a stimulant supplement first. She is asking whether that person ate enough breakfast. She is suggesting an extra banana before practice. She is looking at whether the foundation is solid before she considers what to add on top of it.
It is a reminder that applies well beyond professional sports. The most sophisticated supplement protocol in the world underperforms if sleep is poor, meals are inconsistent, and stress is unmanaged. The unsexy stuff matters most.
One person. A lot of mouths.
It is worth pausing on the scale of what Emily is doing. She is the only dietitian for an entire professional soccer club. Every player, every staff member, every travel day, every game day, every individual preference and allergy and biomarker concern, runs through her.
Most of us struggle to stay consistent with our own nutrition. Emily is responsible for the consistent nutrition of dozens of people, across a season, while traveling, while managing a kitchen team, while building individualized protocols. And she does it, as far as I can tell, largely by making it feel easy and low-pressure for the people around her.
That is not a small thing.
There is a version of this job that is rigid and clinical. Emily's version is a collagen shot and a dance party at the breakfast line. The outcome is the same. The experience is completely different.
Blood draws, DEXA scans, and what's under the hood
Emily does use biomarker data. Players get blood draws and DEXA scans, which measure fat mass, lean mass, and bone density. But she was refreshingly clear about how she actually uses this information.
She described it as looking under the hood of a car. A doctor might glance at a cholesterol panel and say everything looks fine. Emily is reading the same numbers with a different question: is this player fueling properly to support the demands of professional soccer?
A slightly elevated LDL, in her experience, might not be a metabolic issue. It might mean the player is skipping meals and the body is burning fat to compensate. The fix is not a medication or a supplement. It is more food, and specifically more carbohydrates.
In Portland specifically, she watches vitamin D levels closely. The Pacific Northwest is not generous with sunlight, and vitamin D affects both mood and muscle recovery. If food sources are not enough, she supplements. But only after food has had the chance to do its job.
Game day: home vs. away
This was one of my favorite parts of the conversation. On home game days, Emily does not see the players until around 5 PM. She has to trust that they are executing what they have been taught. She makes sure there is fresh cut fruit available when they arrive. She is thinking about pre-fueling for 90 minutes of high-intensity work, not overloading anyone's gut before kickoff.
Away games are different. She sees players at breakfast and at the pre-match meal. She has more visibility into what they are actually eating. But travel introduces its own complications. Did she pack enough collagen? Did she remember that one supplement a specific player really relies on?
"I've forgotten things," she said, with genuine warmth. "But I'd say I prefer home games."
During the match itself, her attention goes almost entirely to hydration. She watches players sweat. She thinks about heat and humidity, especially when the team travels to places like Texas, which is a very different climate than Portland. The post-match priority is straightforward: refuel and rehydrate.
Her preferred recovery drink? Chocolate milk. She said she "dies on the hill" of chocolate milk as the best recovery beverage. The carbohydrate-to-protein ratio, the palatability, the accessibility. It checks the boxes. I respect the conviction.
Third-party testing and the supplements she actually trusts
Players bring Emily bottles all the time. Something their wife found. Something a friend recommended. Something bought on Amazon. She has a dedicated area in her office she calls the "die here" zone, where supplements go that are not suitable for a professional athlete.
When she evaluates a supplement, she is looking at a specific set of markers before anything else:
Third-party certification: NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Sport on the label. Both verify testing for banned substances. If it is not there, the conversation is over.
Ingredient readability: If she cannot recognize the ingredient list, she does not trust it. Clean inputs are a baseline signal of quality.
Protein source: For products like protein powder, she wants to know the type. Whey, casein, egg, plant-based. Each has different applications, and the source matters for both efficacy and individual tolerance.
Additives and carbohydrate quality: What sweeteners are being used? What carbohydrate sources? A maltodextrin versus sweet potato or brown rice tells her something about how the manufacturer is thinking about the product.
She works with youth players at the Timbers academy on this same framework, teaching them to scan a label before they or their parents buy anything. The certification is not optional at any level.
What she can't live without, and what she wishes you'd think about more
I always ask this question. Emily's answer was magnesium, taken at night as part of a deliberate wind-down routine. Skin care, reading, magnesium. She described it as feeling the stress of the day melt away. Given that she is a one-person nutrition department responsible for a professional soccer club, I believe her completely.
When I asked what she wishes more people were talking about, her answer had nothing to do with a trending supplement or an emerging ingredient. It was fiber. Not a powder, not a pill. Just fiber, the kind found in oats, berries, nuts, legumes, and cruciferous vegetables that most of us are chronically under-eating.
Her case for it was straightforward: fiber slows digestion, supports healthy gut bacteria, helps regulate blood sugar, and keeps you fuller longer. The gut-brain connection alone makes it worth paying attention to. It is unglamorous and deeply important, and the supplement world has largely ignored it. For athletes specifically, she added one practical note: keep fiber intake low in the hours before competition. The gut does not need that kind of stress at kickoff.
Professional sports are a spectacle built on the backs of people like Emily, who are quietly making sure a goalkeeper ate enough brain-supporting foods before a match, or that a midfielder will not cramp in the 85th minute because they got on a plane without enough electrolytes. None of this makes the broadcast. All of it matters to performance.
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Personal note from Jordan
What stayed with me most after talking to Emily was not any specific protocol. It was the scope of what she holds.
I spend a lot of time thinking about my own nutrition. My stack, my timing, my bloodwork. That is already a meaningful cognitive load for one person. Emily wakes up every morning responsible for that same level of care, multiplied across an entire professional sports roster. And she does it without a co-dietitian, without a backup, in a job where a cramping midfielder or an underfueled goalkeeper has visible, public consequences.
I played collegiate soccer (cheers fellow goalkeepers). And I can tell you with confidence that nobody was watching my LDL panel through a fueling lens, or thinking about whether I had eaten enough carbohydrates before a match, or setting up a pump station so I would actually take my vitamins consistently. We had a dining hall and good intentions. That was about it.
What could have been different if someone like Emily had been in our facility? I think about that from time to time. The recovery days that dragged longer than they needed to. The afternoon practices I sleepwalked through. The answer probably was not a fancy supplement. It was someone paying close attention, building systems that made good nutrition feel effortless, and caring enough to take a collagen shot alongside you at breakfast just to show you it was worth doing.
That kind of operational generosity, caring that much about that many people's health at once, is worth saying out loud.