The Unhealthy Diet of College Students
People eat food every day without thinking twice about it, because it is a necessity for us to live. How often do you think about what is in the foods that you eat? How many calories does it have? Are there any vitamins and minerals in it? Is it high in fat? For most of us and especially college students who live a busy life on the go, the answer to that question is probably no. Since becoming a recent graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania Academy of Culinary Arts, I have been more interested in food and what people are eating. Also since more young Americans are becoming obese I want to find out what they are eating and where. Going to college and seeing how students have poor eating habits I want to find out why they are eating this way. Is it because they are away from home for the first time? Or is it because that is the only food that is available for them? I also want to find out if students would eat healthier if it was provided for them? My hypothesis is that students eat unhealthy because it is more convenient for them. There is usually no time to cook a homemade meal and most college students are always in a hurry so it is easier to pick up takeout. Also most college students don’t know how to cook. I also believe that most college students don’t care if the food is unhealthy for them, as long as it tastes good. Hopefully, in the following pages I will uncover the wide world of college eating.
The research methods that I used for this paper were surveys, interviews and observations. I performed a survey on ten college students in which I asked various yes and no questions and ones with various multiple-choice answers. Do you have a meal ...
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...omething to go. I found out that college student’s want foods that are quick, taste good, and cheap. The limitation to my research was that I only passed out ten surveys all at the cafeteria. Perhaps if I did more or passed them out at a different location I might have gotten different results. I also only interviewed two people, and a larger sample might have changed my results. Also only observing my roommates shopping might have limited me to what I always eat, other college students might buy healthier foods when they shop. Take a minute now and think about what you eat in an average day and see if you fall into the categories of eating unhealthy with the majority of college students. Next time you buy something to eat take a second and look what’s in it and think to yourself. Should I be eating this? Or is there something healthier that I could be eating?
The current epidemic of obesity is caused largely by an environment that promotes excessive food intake and discourages physical activity (French, 2001). I expect to observe in this study that once a person is presented with a choice between a sweet unhealthy or healthier snack will they will choose the unhealthy snack over the healthier choice 80% of the time.
...College students are the next generation of food consumers just starting to purchase and prepare their own food, setting purchasing habits that will follow them into their lives as they start their own careers. These habits will shape what food is in demand, and therefore what food is produced. Not only do college students hold financial power over the future economy, but they must make the decision of whether to become the next unhealthy generation, that will also indoctrinate their children to accept the level of food quality that is currently labeled as junk food as a standard level quality of food.
To follow Berry’s advice at the dinner table, shopping is one of the most important steps. Berry says that “people what they want—or what they have been persuaded to want—within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged (Berry 37).” That is because most shoppers are in a rush and don’t have time to analyze the product. Also, some people don’t have enough money in their pockets, so they just choose a random product without thinking that healthy food choices keep you healthy. When people don’t consider food choices, they end up having illnesses. “They mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality
In conclusion the moral of this story is simple- colleges should take more responsibility and initiative when it comes to the food choices and the health of their students. The college needs to offer better food choices in their dining areas. The hours of operation should be between normal eating hours so the option to eat at an unusual or indecent hour is obsolete, and proportions should be strictly regulated and enforced. While most would argue that it is the students fault for gaining weight, I believe the facts presented are obvious in pointing you in the other direction. The school has all of the power and needs to address this issue accordingly before the epidemic becomes bigger than what we can handle.
One factor of the freshman 15 is the student’s living environment. Students living on campus in residence halls are more prone to weight gain than students living at home with their parents or off campus (Provencher et al., 2009). This is due to the availability of food on campus at various universities that studies were held. While students living at home with their parents often have home cooked meals, often dining halls in college campuses serve food with an all-you-can eat buffet style, where students are free to eat as much as they like. Students living away from ...
When I arrived here at college I was extremely disappointed with the selection of food here in the cafeteria. I frequently found myself eating only hamburgers and pizza over and over again, simply because I did not like the other choices. About four months into the school year I had do go to the doctor for a virus and when the nurse weighed me I was a little surprised by what I saw. I had gained a little over ten pounds, close enough to what some refer to as the “Freshman 15.” It is a common fear among college students that they are going to gain fifteen pounds during the course of adjusting to college life. However experts have stated that the idea of the so called “Freshman 15,” is not that accurate. Every college student is obviously not going to gain fifteen pounds. However I believe that it is possible and it is a problem for many college students. College life completely changes eating habits among college students. Most students do not make the right choices about eating and exercising. College students across the country are severely unhealthy in their behaviors, and for some students the “Freshman 15” may be a reality.
With an unlimited meal plan and buffet-style meals, do we students know how big our portions should be? If we are accustomed to being served super-sized portions, we might not realize when we are serving ourselves over-sized portions in our dining halls. In fact, researchers have found that increased portion size is an even greater problem in cafeteria settings like ours, noting a positive association between larger food receptacles and increased consumption(2). A correlational study at Cornell found significant weight gain in freshmen during the first twelve weeks of school and identified that both the “all-you-can-eat” dining hall style and student snacking on “junk-food” were key variables explaining a positive linear relationship with weight gai...
The pilot study I conducted at Highpoint Shopping Centre allowed me to observe how food choices were made amongst different people. There are many factors that influence food choices. Therefore I conducted this observation to develop into food choices. Some factors involved gender differences, this effected the food choice and the process of eating, how the effect of age plays part in choosing food, along with which cultures foods were eaten most; Chinese, Turkish, or Italian. I also observed whether culture had an effect on food choices? What these people were wearing? How long it took for them to decide on what they were going to eat? Does the time of the day and the days of the week have an effect on the selection and amount of food eaten? And how the food is eaten? Children and how their food selection is analysed?
Christie, Kathy. “Stateline: Even Students Are What They Eat.” The Phi Delta Kappan 84.5 (2003): 341-342. PDF file.
In order to find out how many students make use of their current meal plan, my group went out and surveyed forty students (twenty-three freshmen, six second-years, six third-years, and five fourth-years) currently attending the University of Florida in a face-to-face question format. A majority of the students who were involved in this study were freshmen, as they are the demographic that is the most encouraged to purchase a meal plan for convenience as well as social reasons. The students were asked a set of five questions as follows:
The articles, published after 1996, contain varied methods of research attainment, but share similarities such as being a self-survey, having a small sample size, and being
Through life we have many different stages to where we are either settling down for a nice home cooked meal or we are constantly on the go, running around our hectic lives, eating very unhealthy foods. Especially in our college years, students are always on the go running to and from class grabbing a burger and fries from a campus restaurant or eating the microwaveable foods like ramen. Many people try to eat healthy, but always succumb to the stereotype that eating healthy is expensive and takes too much time. This is a common misconception because there are ways in which anyone can eat healthy and on a budget as long as they eat proper portions, eat the right kind of foods, and excessive.
My younger cousin, for one, refuses to eat anything green, unless it’s a cucumber. As we progress more and more into our culture of industrialized eating, we need to consider what we are risking in the long run. There’s actually many different things that not only college students, but the entire population, can do to help reduce our risks in the long run. For one, it would be to stop eating so frequently at these fast-food restaurants. I know many of my peers, who I went to high school with, would often go to McDonald’s for breakfast before school started.
However, over the past couple of years, college chefs have been working to change that. While a lot of students have committed to eating the healthier foods and trying to stay healthy, the vast majority live on pizza and taco bells or any other cheap fast food chain that is open until the late hours of the night. College is a fast paced environment and fast food caters to college students. In this fast-paced environment, students more often than not neglect their health and personal hygiene and the consequences range from obesity to deadly eating disorders. The "Freshmen fifteen" is one of the most dreaded rights of passage into college.
Previously to taking this class, I had never given much thought to my eating habits. I always thought of the way I chose to eat as one of those things I didn’t need to concern myself with too heavily now because I’m a young broke college student. The way I eat is pretty similar to the way most of my friends eat and when you live away from home, that seems like the norm for people in college. However, after applying what I’ve learned in this class to my life, I’ve realized that the dietary choices I make now affect not only my current health, but my future health as well. So overall, I would say that my eating habits are pretty bad, but I’m working on making them better.