As part of our series on healthy eating on and off campus, the Healthy Turtle offers this in-depth story on student eating habits--which, according to the experts, are in serious need of improvement. Because of the article's length, it will run over the next few days, so check back each day for the continuing story.
To catch up on the stories that we've done about healthy eating, click the "Healthy Eating" tag along the right sidebar. Enjoy:
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It’s 11 a.m., and the large metal barricades in front of Taco Bell are rising, their “clack-clack-clack” reminiscent of a roller coaster climbing to the top of the first drop. For University of Maryland students gathered in the Stamp Student Union, this sound can only mean one thing—lunch time.
As students joke with friends and pore over textbooks in the food court, they consume heaping amounts of cheese steaks, Chick-fil-A sandwiches and greasy slices of pizza. Kossi Adantor, a 22-year-old civil engineering student, went with a full Styrofoam tray of Chinese food for his lunch—a usual choice, he says.
He doesn’t know how many calories or how much sodium are in his meal, nor does he know the total amount of food he eats during the day.
“I’m just not worried about it right now,” Adantor said.
He should be worried. According to dieticians, government data and the students themselves, the diets of college students are in dire need of improvement, from how much they put on their plates to the food choices they make. While students do offer some explanation of why they eat the way they do, experts worry that they are setting themselves up for a rough road ahead.
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Jane Jakubczak sits in a small office inside the Center for Health and Wellbeing at the Eppley Recreation Center. For the past 10 years, this registered dietician and coordinator of nutrition services at the University Health Center has counseled students on how they eat. She is struck by the severely low level of nutrition in many students’ diets—particularly the lack of fruits and vegetables.
While a portion of students are interested in nutrition, Jakubczak says, “More often, people aren’t even thinking about fruits and vegetables.”
For the students who come in looking to improve their diets, she and her staff work them through a diet analysis, which documents everything they eat for two days. They then compare the analysis to the recommended amounts of each food group that the student should be eating, including the USDA-recommended 6 ounces of grains and about 5 cups of fruits and vegetables per day. More often than not, the students find that they’re not getting enough of anything.
“People are surprised that they’re falling short of all recommendations,” Jakubczak, noting that students sometimes have absolutely no dairy, no fruit and no vegetables in their diet. Rather, she finds that students are filling their stomachs with nutritiously empty foods—energy drinks and coffee as well as various fast foods.
Maryland students are not alone in leaving the greens off the plate. According to the National College Health Assessment, which is considered to be a leading barometer of collegiate health, 95 percent of students nationwide do not get the recommended number of fruits and vegetables per day. Two-thirds of students consume less than two servings each day.
Dr. Nancy Brenowitz-Katz, a professor and the director of Maryland’s dietetics program, is alarmed by these numbers and the general diets of students, as they tend to be far too high in saturated fats and sodium. She says, though, that she is most concerned with the fact that students are eating many more calories than needed on a daily basis.
“The issue is not each little thing you eat but how does it all add up,” Brenowitz-Katz says. She adds, “Calories are the biggest thing.”
To illustrate her point, Brenowitz-Katz compares a 2,000 calorie diet—considered the average by most in the dietetic and health community—to having $2,000 in a bank account. If someone has $2,000 to spend on bills and expenses during a month, and he wants to live in an apartment that costs $1,000, that person must realize that he/she cannot spend too much on other things or else risk running out of money.
In the same way, Brenowitz-Katz says that eating the über-popular Chipotle burrito—a hefty brick of meat, cheese, salsa and sour cream that lands at approximately 1,000 calories, according to the restaurant’s nutritional information—can be part of a healthy diet if other adjustments are made.
“[A burrito] isn’t inherently unhealthy,” Brenowitz-Katz says. It becomes unhealthy, she notes, when someone eats a burrito for lunch, another for dinner and snacks throughout the day, thereby sending their calorie count skyrocketing into the stratosphere.
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In the next installment, students share some ideas on why they eat the way they do.
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