Nutritional and medical considerations in dancers.

The traditional requirement for dancers to be lean coupled with the fact that dance is a nonendurance form of exercise makes it necessary for dancers, particularly females, to follow diets of relatively low caloric content. Food faddism and irrational use of nutritional supplements are common among dancers, who have little information about nutrition. Further investigation of the general medical and nutritional problems of dancers is needed, and the information from these studies should be incorporated into the curriculum of serious dancers.